Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Monday, July 6, 2015
Battle Lines for Religious Liberty and Same-Sex Marriage Set
Kelly Shackelford's [debate](http://video.foxnews.com/v/4338849014001/impact-of-same-sex-marriage-ruling-on-religious-freedom/?#sp=show-clips) with Evan Wolfson on Fox News Sunday highlights the battle lines for religious liberty in America now that the Supreme Court has grossly overstepped its authority by declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right. The issue is whether religious liberty extends to how you earn your living, get an education and run a business. For years to come, the fight for many Christians will be on whether their right to the free exercise of religion includes the right to earn a paycheck without violating their conscience. Televised debates need to focus on the fierce debate over whether your religious-belief rights carry over into your daily life. The Constitution does not force Christians to choose between being able to put food on the table versus being faithful to their cherished beliefs.
'Declaration of Independence' Preserves the Patriots' Faces
It is *the* classic American history painting, instantly familiar to millions as the image of that fateful moment in 1776 when history turned on its hinge, and a nation conceived in liberty was born. For nearly two centuries, it has hung in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, an icon of the American founding by an artist who lived through the Revolution and personally met most of the men depicted in his painting. And yet John Trumbull's *Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776* captures a scene that never occurred. In the famous picture, the five men appointed to prepare a declaration of independence from Great Britain — John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania — are shown presenting their draft to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. But it was actually on June 28 that the committee's original draft was reported to the Congress (and only Jefferson, who chaired the drafting committee, would have submitted the document to the presiding officer). The vote in favor of independence came on July 2, after which Congress spent the better part of three days debating and amending the declaration's words. On the morning of July 4, the delegates agreed to a final text and sent it off to be printed.
Understanding Islam
For a long time after 9/11, a great many non-Muslims felt compelled to read the Koran to better understand the enemy. Even back then, I knew that was a waste of time. If you want to know the heart of a person, you don't need to read a book or even figure out how he thinks, you just need to know how he behaves. That was the reason that I have never bothered trying to distinguish good Muslims from bad ones. Although I knew that only a relatively small percentage of them would blow up a school bus or kill someone because they had drawn a depiction of Muhammad, I also knew that a majority of them in the Middle East celebrated the destruction of the Twin Towers and the murder of 3,000 Americans.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Simple Solutions to the Worst Problems in ObamaCare
Now that the Supreme Court has declined to gut President Obama's health reform, it's time for Republicans in Congress to re-think how they have been responding to the law. They should begin by asking three questions: 1. What are the worst features of ObamaCare? 2. How are these features harming ordinary American families? 3. How can we get rid of them? As I explain in a new book, A Better Choice: Healthcare Solutions for America and in a recent article in Health Affairs, there are major problems that aren't going away unless Congress acts. Here are two of them.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
How Judges Corrode the Rule of Law
During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2005, then-Judge John Roberts emphasized his strong belief in judicial modesty. "Judges are like umpires," Roberts famously said. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." If confirmed as chief justice, he promised, "I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat." But it was no impartial umpire who authored last week's 6-3 opinion in King v. Burwell, the Obamacare subsidy case. Far from applying the rules as enacted in the Affordable Care Act, the chief justice discounted those rules as the product of "inartful drafting," passed by Congress without sufficient "care and deliberation." The lawmakers' substandard work product, he argued, freed the Supreme Court to disregard the statute's plain language, construing it to mean the opposite of what it says.
No, We Don't Need a Gas Tax Hike
It's summertime and that means millions of Americans will soon be cramming in the minivan for family vacation. But Congress may soon be raising the cost of those trips by increasing the federal gas tax. Why? The highway trust fund that finances our national highway system is running out of money. The 18.4 cents a gallon federal gas tax will raise about $34 billion this year, but that isn't enough revenue to cover all the spending Congress wants to do. The lobbyists in Washington — including mayors, road builders, transit operators and civil engineers — are demanding higher taxes as the only way to fix potholes and keep traffic flowing. I refer to this crowd as "the gas-tax guzzlers."
I Hate John Roberts
I realize there are those who say you shouldn't hate anyone, at least not unless they rise to the evil level of Hitler, Stalin or Osama bin Laden. I beg to differ. I don't tell people who they should or shouldn't hate, and I don't want them telling me. In a way, I despise Chief Justice Roberts even more than I despise Barack Obama. That's because Obama laid his cards on the table when he was first running for the presidency. As an Illinois state legislator, he had voted to allow babies who survived abortions to be murdered. Then in 2012, he hid all his personal documents in the Obama family crypt. What's more, he said he would destroy the coal and oil industries and send our energy costs soaring. For good measure, he said that the greatest shortcoming of the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights movement was that they didn't call for the redistribution of wealth.
Friday, July 3, 2015
'We the People'
"We the People." We've heard that phrase so often it's easy to overlook its significance. But as we mark our nation's birthday, we should take a moment to ask ourselves: What is the role of the people? Our nation is unique because of its universal founding principles. At the heart of these principles is the belief that people are free by nature and possess inherent rights. The use each one of us makes of these rights will naturally be different, and the outcomes of those choices will naturally differ, too. But the choice remains ours. Freedom is thus inextricably bound up with living our lives as we see fit. This is self-government in the truest sense of the term. We the people need not slavishly defer to experts. We can be trusted to govern ourselves.
You May Kiss the Brides!
Gay activists weren't the only ones celebrating after last Friday's marriage ruling. Polygamists popped the cork on a little champagne of their own, as they wait their turn for nationwide acceptance under the court's elastic definition of marriage. Like us, they knew that once the courts redefined marriage, Americans would have a legal foundation for almost any arrangement between consenting adults — a fact that polygamists are already testing. Just four days after the Supreme Court's decision, a Montana man drove up to the Yellowstone County Courthouse and applied for a marriage license for multiple wives. When the office turned him down, he said, what about marriage equality? "We just want to add legal legitimacy to an already happy, strong, loving family," Nathan Collier told reporters. "All we want is legal legitimacy... We just want to give our marriage and our family the legitimacy that it deserves."
So Much for the Free-Speech Left
To look at virtually anything produced by Hollywood is to register confirmation that the libertine left cherishes clogging our popular culture with vulgarities. The messaging in movies, television and particularly music is punctuated deliberately and unnecessarily with all manner of language designed to offend. But when it comes to perfectly decent speech — spoken innocently with no bad intention — those same liberals need smelling salts. Welcome to the wacky world of "micro-aggressions," where conversation becomes a minefield of political correctness. It's all the rage on campuses. Both the University of California and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point have circulated lists of "microaggressions" to faculty for allegedly instructional purposes. The list of unacceptable words and phrases just gets longer and longer. And funnier.
Don't Give Up on America
As I've said, I was very alarmed, though not particularly surprised, by the two Supreme Court decisions last week in which the court's majority blithely bastardized the English language, the Constitution, the rule of law and the very idea of truth in order to further advance the progressive agenda in this nation. But what troubles me more than the court's betrayal of its duty to safeguard the Constitution and the rule of law is the apparent complacency among the public about these decisions and the radical shifts we are witnessing in our culture. Why do some seem resigned to the transformation of our society? Why have they surrendered? Do they strongly believe in anything anymore? Do they not understand the implications for the future of this nation — if not for themselves, for their children?
Vigilance Is Patriotic
My fellow Americans: If you see something, say something — even if it means CAIR will threaten to sue you. Multiple federal agencies and the Department of Defense are on high alert for a possible Islamic terrorist attack on U.S. soil this Independence Day weekend. They've increased security at military bases and sent bulletins to law enforcement officials across the country. The heightened stance comes in the wake of a bloodthirsty ISIS call to arms for Ramadan; multiple jihad outbreaks in Kuwait, France and Tunisia; and the arrest of at least 30 terror plotters in our country radicalized by ISIS over the past year. "Those who seek to harm this nation and our friends take no holiday," Defense Secretary Ashton Carter warned at a Pentagon press briefing Wednesday with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.
Pundit's Death Marks End of an Era for Democrats
Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think Tank" that aimed at high-minded conversation above the din. (I produced the show for several years.)
The Worst Agreement in U.S. Diplomatic History
The devil is not in the details. It's in the entire conception of the Iran deal, animated by President Obama's fantastical belief that he, uniquely, could achieve detente with a fanatical Islamist regime whose foundational purpose is to cleanse the Middle East of the poisonous corruption of American power and influence. In pursuit of his desire to make the Islamic Republic into an accepted, normalized "successful regional power," Obama decided to take over the nuclear negotiations. At the time, Tehran was reeling — the rial plunging, inflation skyrocketing, the economy contracting — under a regime of international sanctions painstakingly constructed over a decade.
Patriotism, Optimism and Good-Natured Debate
The Fourth of July is a time to remember Americans who have contributed much to their country, and this Fourth weekend is a good time to remember two such Americans who died in recent weeks — and whom I'd had the good fortune to know and joust with intellectually since the 1970s — Allen Weinstein and Ben Wattenberg. Both were sons of Jewish immigrants, born in the 1930s and raised in the Bronx, which then had the highest Jewish percentage of any American county and also large Irish, Italian and black communities. The Bronx was one of the heartlands of American liberalism — the big argument in 1948 was whether to support Harry Truman or the anti-anti-Soviet, Henry Wallace — and Weinstein and Wattenberg as young adults were proud liberal Democrats. But while both remained liberals in many respects, they were willing to challenge leftist orthodoxy.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
What Do We Do Now?
Conservatives are reeling after two outrageous decisions last week by the Supreme Court. In one case they reinterpreted Obamacare so that "established by the state" magically meant "or the federal government." In another, they redefined marriage — even though nothing in our Constitution gives the court the authority to do that. What do we do now? The Obamacare case is the simpler of the two when it comes to next steps. While the court refused to enforce the plain meaning of the text, Congress can still vote to repeal Obamacare and replace it with patient-focused, market-based healthcare reforms that will truly serve all Americans. Obamacare remains unworkable, unaffordable and unpopular. Congress must act to repeal it.
Congress' ObamaCare 'Small Business' Fraud
Activists demand answers to lawmakers' falsification of documents for ObamaCare perks.
Some GOP Candidates Becoming Unhinged
In 1824, in retirement 37 years after serving as the Constitutional Convention's prime mover, James Madison, 73, noted that the 1787 "language of our Constitution is already undergoing interpretations unknown to its founders." He knew that the purport of the text would evolve "with the changeable meaning of the words composing it." Now, 147 years since ratification of the 14th Amendment, its guarantees of "equal protection of the laws" and "due process of law" mean that states, which hitherto controlled marriage law, must recognize same-sex marriages. Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the court said: "The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty *as we learn its meaning*." (Emphasis added.)
It's a Progressive Disease
Do you feel like America has gone crazy? The Supreme Court's outrageous decisions in the Obamacare and same-sex marriage cases, in which the Court simply ignored the plain meanings of words and the Constitution, and thumbed its nose at the most basic facts of life, are only the latest examples of our nation turning its back on truth and common sense. Under the influence of "progressive" fanatics, we're suffering from a progressive pathology that's tearing our nation apart. In their quest to redefine "normal," they are tearing up America's morality by the roots. They're forcing America to abandon God's standards of right and wrong, and in consequence our society is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality.