Columnist.
Conservatives usually are not fans of arbitrary, heavy-handed, anti-competitive, counterproductive regulations. But as a case the Supreme Court will hear Wednesday shows, they make an exception for abortion. That's because these regulations, ostensibly aimed at making abortion safer, are actually aimed at making abortion rare. While suppressing economic activity is an unwanted side effect of the regulations conservatives tend to criticize, it is the whole point of the Texas law they are defending.
The first time I looked at the website for Either, "the world's largest game of 'Would You Rather' questions," this was the dilemma at the top of the page: "Would you rather be stabbed in the stomach 10 times or shot in both kneecaps?" That is pretty much how I feel about the increasingly plausible prospect that Americans voting for their next president this fall will be asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. For sheer entertainment value, Trump is the obvious choice. Consider his solution to the "drug epidemic," which he presents in a 43-second campaign video.
This week, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz warned that Antonin Scalia's death leaves us "one justice away from the Second Amendment being written out of the Constitution altogether." Although I share the Texas senator's concern about the fate of the right to keep and bear arms if a Democrat nominates Scalia's replacement, the short-term consequences may be less dramatic than Cruz implies. Writing for the five-justice majority in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision in which the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense, Scalia said that right was violated by a law that banned handguns and required owners of long guns to disable them with trigger locks or keep them unloaded and disassembled. But he strongly implied that nearly every other existing gun control law would pass constitutional muster.
During the last Republican presidential debate in which he participated, Rand Paul condemned the National Security Agency's mass collection of Americans' telephone records, cautioned against reckless intervention in Syria's civil war, and declared that a "true fiscal conservative" must "look at all spending" for savings, meaning the military budget is not sacrosanct. The Kentucky senator also called for criminal justice reform, touted body cameras as a way "to protect both officers and citizens," and bemoaned the racially disproportionate impact of the war on drugs.
Ted Cruz, who won the Republican caucus in Iowa on Monday, says he has always opposed legalizing the 11 million people who live in the U.S. without the government's permission. Donald Trump, who finished second in Iowa, has promised to deport them all, while Marco Rubio, who was a point behind Trump, has renounced the "path to citizenship" he used to support and wants to double the size of the U.S. Border Patrol, even as net migration from Mexico has dropped below zero. On the face of it, the Republican Party is not in a very pro-immigrant mood. Yet the positions staked out by Cruz and Trump are unpopular even among Republicans and could prove fatal to a party that needs support from Hispanic voters to win.
The "report card" from America's Renewable Future, a biofuel industry group, is not complicated. If you are a presidential candidate participating in Monday's Iowa caucuses and you support "the commonsense, bipartisan Renewable Fuel Standard," you get a "good rating," symbolized by a fuel gauge pointing to "full." Otherwise, you get a "bad rating," symbolized by a fuel gauge pointing to "empty." Despite its simplicity, this single-item checklist is a useful test of character — one that all but two candidates fail. That's because they pass muster with ARF by supporting the Renewable Fuel Standard, a 2005 congressional mandate that forces Americans to buy gasoline mixed with corn-based ethanol. That policy epitomizes the crony capitalism that both major parties decry.
During last week's Republican presidential debate, Ted Cruz said it's "really quite clear" he is eligible to run for president even though he was born in Canada, because his mother was a U.S. citizen. His rival Donald Trump insisted "there is a serious question" as to whether Cruz qualifies as "a natural born citizen," one of the constitutional requirements for the presidency.
A lack of background checks for gun buyers plainly had nothing to do with the mass shootings that have grabbed headlines in the last few years. The weapons used in those crimes were purchased legally from federally licensed firearms dealers, which means the buyers passed background checks. During last week's CNN "townhall" on "Guns in America," President Obama nevertheless continued to tout background checks as a way to prevent mass shootings, which is one of the reasons it is hard to trust him when he talks about common-sense gun safety. At the same time, Obama hinted at a different, more sophisticated rationale for expanding the federal background check requirement, based on the debatable assumption that new regulations can stop ordinary criminals from obtaining guns.
The new gun controls that President Obama announced on Tuesday include a "clarification" of who is "engaged in the business of selling firearms," the upshot of which is that more gun buyers will be subject to background checks. Obama describes expanding the background check requirement (which Congress has declined to do) as a "commonsense gun safety reform" aimed at "keeping guns out of the wrong hands."
On Monday, when he announced that a grand jury had declined to indict two Cleveland police officers in the 2014 shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said enhanced video of the incident showed the boy was drawing what looked like a gun from his waistband. Although the object was actually an Airsoft pellet pistol, McGinty said, Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed Tamir within two seconds of arriving at the scene, had no way of knowing that.
In a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit last August, Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale argued that a rap song featuring allegations of sexual harassment against two high school coaches represented a threat to civilization itself. As Barksdale explained it, coaches are teachers, teachers are essential to education, and "without education, there can be little, if any, civilization."
Two days after the massacre in San Bernardino, Marco Rubio said something that most gun control supporters probably thought was outrageous. The Florida senator, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, told CBS News "none of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years" would have been prevented by the gun laws proposed in response to them.
There is not much the government can do about the sort of terrorist threat that President Obama described in his speech on Sunday. It will always be difficult to stop self-radicalized jihadists, operating under no one's instructions, from carrying out attacks on soft targets too scattered and numerous to secure. The only viable alternative, self-help, is one that Obama seems ideologically incapable of considering. His proposals for new restrictions on firearms move in the opposite direction, based on the assumption that the problem is too many guns in too many hands.
After Officer Timothy Loehmann fatally shot a 12-year-old boy named Tamir Rice at a Cleveland park in November 2014, police sources fed two exculpating details to the press: Tamir had disregarded Loehmann's command to raise his hands, and had instead brandished an Airsoft pellet gun that looked just like a real pistol. Two days later, surveillance camera footage showed neither of those claims was true.
The recent attacks in Paris have inspired various half-baked proposals to prevent terrorism in the United States. Here are four of the dumbest.
During a talk radio debate last week, Tulsa's district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, warned that civil forfeiture reform would invite "some of the most violent people in the history of this planet" to set up shop in Oklahoma, making decapitated bodies "hung from bridges" a familiar sight in the Sooner State. Last month, Steve Jones, an assistant district attorney, told Tennessee legislators "criminals will thank you" for making it harder to confiscate people's property.
After public school officials in Canon City, Colorado, discovered at least 100 students had been using their cellphones to swap nude photos of themselves, the Associated Press reported that "it could take a month to sort the offenders from the victims." Part of the challenge is that Colorado, like many states, makes no such distinction: If you are under 18 and take a sexually suggestive picture of yourself, you are both victim and offender.
FBI Director James Comey says cops are reluctant to do their jobs because they worry that their actions will be captured on camera. Judging from the official response to the shooting of Zachary Hammond, they have little to fear. Speaking at the University of Chicago Law School last month, Comey said police officers "in today's YouTube world" are afraid to get out of their cars, lest they face camera-wielding bystanders intent on recording them. He warned that good policing could "drift away from us in the age of viral videos" as cops refrain from confronting suspicious characters.
Testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi last Thursday, Hillary Clinton bristled when Peter Roskam, a Republican congressman from Illinois, described the consequences of overthrowing Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. "After your plan, things in Libya today are a disaster," Roskam said.
