‘I believe freedom and prosperity are uniquely threatened at this point in our history,” says Terence P. Jeffrey, author of the new book Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life. He sat down with NRO’s Kathryn Lopez to discuss his new book. Be warned: There are a lot of f-words beyond the title, from fetus to freedom to foreign policy.


KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Isn’t it a bit much -- not to mention uncharitable! -- to call liberals “freaks”?

TERENCE P. JEFFREY: And here I was worried they might take it as a compliment.


LOPEZ: Not to be difficult, but are they really planning to ruin my life?

#ad#JEFFREY: If you are an eight-month-old fetus, they plan to preserve the “right” of someone to kill you. If you are eight-year-old second-grader, they plan to preserve the “right” of your public-school teacher to instruct you that same-sex marriage is a good thing. If you are 68-year-old grandmother or grandfather getting ready to retire after decades of working hard and living within your means, they are planning to tax your savings in a last-ditch attempt to save an unsustainable welfare state that needed to find $200,000 in additional revenue for every man, woman, and child in the United States before Obamacare became a factor. Were they to succeed in their plans, they would not only ruin the lives of Americans today but the lives of future generations.


LOPEZ: Are there Republican “freaks”?

JEFFREY: Yes.


LOPEZ: Speaking of which, how terrible a transportation secretary has former congressman Ray LaHood been?

JEFFREY: LaHood, a Republican, may be the most under-appreciated “Control Freak” in the Obama administration. In the book, I explain how and why he is pushing an agenda designed, as he once put it, “to coerce people out of their cars.”


LOPEZ: How did you get your list down to seven?

JEFFREY: I had to decide the most important things I could write about in the time that I had to write. In this case, the governing question was: Where are liberals pushing for government control of our lives? I picked four basic rights that Control Freaks are attacking (property, speech, life, and conscience), two elements of the welfare state they are using to reduce middle-class Americans to government dependency (Social Security and government-controlled health care), and one freedom that goes to the heart of the American experience and is crucial to the survival of our other freedoms: the freedom of movement.

I am sure that thoughtful people can and will point out other ways the Control Freaks want government to run our lives.

#page#LOPEZ: How about another list of seven -- seven action items a reader/voter can take away from your book?

JEFFREY: Read the Declaration of Independence. Read the Constitution. Read what the Founding Fathers said about the Constitution and the Declaration. Encourage young people to study America’s history and cherish our heritage of freedom.

Demand that your congressmen and senators demonstrate the constitutionality of any legislation they support by citing the specific language in the Constitution that authorizes the federal government to do such a thing.

#ad#Stay informed through the conservative media, whose freedom of speech the Control Freaks would like to limit. Frequently visit websites such as National Review Online, CNSNews.com (which I edit), Human Events, and The American Spectator, and listen to radio hosts such as Bill Bennett, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin, as well as those in your local market who respect America’s founding principles and values.

And finally, of course, buy copies of Control Freaks for your family and friends.


LOPEZ: What was item number eight? What ended up on the cutting-room floor?

JEFFREY: Education. I left it out not because it lacked merit, but because I decided to consider it a component of the attempt by liberals to control our consciences, the seventh item in the book. I argue that the ultimate strategic aim of the Left is to use the education system to control the hearts and minds of the next generation. They want to indoctrinate your children in their beliefs, and they are using government to do it.


LOPEZ: Is putting Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court just another liberal strategy to ruin my life?

JEFFREY: Yes. Kagan is a committed Control Freak. On the Supreme Court, she will be a consistent opponent of originalist and, therefore, limited-government interpretations of the Constitution. As I explain in the book, she has already argued as solicitor general that government prohibitions on political speech can be justified. She also worked with unseemly zeal as an associate counsel in the Clinton White House to keep partial-birth abortion legal, meaning she has no respect for the most fundamental right of all.


LOPEZ: Who is John Holdren, and why is he important?

JEFFREY: Holdren is important because long before he became President Obama’s top adviser on science and technology, he was a founding father of the environmental movement -- at one point, he joined Paul and Anne Ehrlich in calling for a campaign “to de-develop the United States.” He also joined with the Ehrlichs to say: “Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.” These prescriptions were logical conclusions of a worldview that sees both a growing population and increasing per capita wealth as threats to the planet.


LOPEZ: Are liberals anti-science?

JEFFREY: The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, but ultimately, liberals are not inclined to allow objective truth to stand in the way of their designs.

#page#LOPEZ: Why is a book published in 1910 important to you, Mark Levin, and the Social Security Administration?

JEFFREY: In Liberty and Tyranny, Mark Levin notes that Columbia University economist Henry Rogers Seager, in his 1910 book Social Insurance: A Program for Social Reform, laid out an argument for an American welfare state anchored in a social-security program. As Mark pointed out, the contemporary Social Security Administration is so taken with Seager’s statist views that it has posted his book on its website. Seager was the consummate Control Freak, someone who wanted to eradicate the pioneering spirit from American life, and he pushed not only for a welfare state, but also for eugenics -- literally advocating the sterilization of people he believed unworthy of breeding. Seager exemplifies how modern liberals parted ways with both the constitutional and the moral traditions of our nation.


#ad#LOPEZ: Is the conscience front the most insidious? Or is the speech front?

JEFFREY: Yes, conscience is the most insidious. Liberals today don’t just believe they can force you to pay for the killing of someone else’s unborn child (and brazenly tell you they are not doing it), they also believe they have a right to teach your five-year-old kindergartner that same-sex unions are a good thing -- without ever telling you they are doing it. There is a reason why liberal politicians like President Obama don’t like school choice, even if they send their own children to very expensive private schools. They see the public-school classroom as a moral battlefield where they can wage a 13-year insurgency to capture the soul of your child.


LOPEZ: So conscience is the one of the seven most important to you?

JEFFREY: Yes. Individual and national well-being depend on allegiance to moral order.


LOPEZ: Is there one of the seven that’s hardest to get people to believe?

JEFFREY: I think right-minded people will nod in recognition when they read all seven. Liberals would prefer they didn’t.


LOPEZ: Does the health-care fight provide a monumental opportunity for the Right?

JEFFREY: It provides a monumental threat and a monumental opportunity. The threat is that once Obamacare is fully in place, there may be no turning back from socialism. The opportunity is that a broad group of Americans -- exemplified by the tea-party movement -- has awoken to the threat. In their awakening, they have turned back to the history and principles of America’s founding, exactly the guides we need to lead us back to the land of the free.


LOPEZ: How is it “fiction” to say that the Obama administration is protecting taxpayers from paying for abortions? Democrats for Life seem to disagree.

JEFFREY: Tax dollars can pay the salaries of the abortionist, his nurse, and his secretary. They can pay for the construction, heating, and cleaning of the room where the abortionist kills the baby. They can pay for the surgical instruments he uses to do the killing. But the actual compensation for the killing itself must come from a segregated fund into which federally subsidized insurance customers must, by federal law, deposit a fee if their plan covers abortion.


LOPEZ: How can a candidate this election year take your book and run with it?

JEFFREY: He can’t. He has to pay for it first -- with his own money.

#page#LOPEZ: How can Control Freaks inform a Republican agenda for a new Congress, one in which they might control one or both houses?

JEFFREY: In the book, I contrast what the liberals are trying to do against two constants: the principles of limited government found in the Constitution and the God-given natural law enshrined in the Declaration. Any federal elected official who seeks to conscientiously govern according to these two things cannot go too far wrong. For starters, such a leader would necessarily pursue an agenda both fiscally and socially conservative. Such a leader would take seriously his or her duty to protect all of our rights -- from our property rights to our free-speech rights, to our right to life, to our right to be free from government coercion aimed at forcing us to act against our consciences.

#ad#I believe that the coming crisis of the welfare state, alluded to earlier, is the greatest problem Congress will face in the next decade. Liberals will to try to use it to drive America deeper into socialism. Elected officials who understand the Constitution and want to maintain individual liberty in this country will seek to repeal Obamacare and promote policies -- such as Rep. Paul Ryan’s Social Security reform, which is based on personal retirement accounts -- to push America back toward its heritage of personal responsibility and self-reliance.


LOPEZ: How do foreign policy and the war we’re in fit into your vision of the Left?

JEFFREY: The Obama administration acts as if it is possible for the government to construct an international regime that can control the global climate, but not a federal agency that can control our southern border. At the same time, it is more interested in protecting what it perceives to be the rights of terrorists than the real and inalienable rights of Americans.

It wants to engage in activities not authorized by the Constitution while ignoring fundamental duties that are.

The Constitution created a federal government designed to deal primarily with external affairs, most especially the defense of the nation against foreign enemies. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the prudential judgments made in initiating the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or with their subsequent conduct, it is indisputable that Congress expressly authorized both using its power under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11. Had President Bush invaded Afghanistan or Iraq without congressional authorization, it would have been a serious usurpation of Congress’s constitutional authority. But he did not.

Those charged with the constitutional authority to conduct the foreign policy of the United States ought to take every practical step that is both constitutionally and morally permissible to advance the security, liberty, and prosperity of the American people. If voters do not like the decisions they make, they can throw them out of power. But the Left, driven by its desire to do such things as control global climate, would erode U.S. sovereignty by giving authority over these matters to international institutions beyond the control of Americans voters.


LOPEZ: In your acknowledgements, you mention a cause and a vocation you love. What are they exactly?

JEFFREY: The cause I love is the preservation of the constitutional and moral values that made America the greatest nation in history. To me, that is the conservative cause. The vocation I love is journalism.


LOPEZ: When did you know you weren’t liberal?

JEFFREY: At the age of reason.


LOPEZ: What was the main catalyst for this book? Was there a moment that convinced you it had to be written?

JEFFREY: I had two wonderful parents who made great sacrifices to give their children every opportunity to take advantage of the blessings of a free society. Their generation gave our generation a free and prosperous society. I believe we owe the next generation no less. However, I believe freedom and prosperity are uniquely threatened at this point in our history by liberals in political power who have turned their backs on the constitutional and moral foundations of our republic.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

It looked like we had dodged a bullet. With an election looming, Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) decided that a provision requiring a minimum of 15 percent renewable-energy generation nationwide by 2020 was too controversial to include in the so-called energy bill he introduced this week. Sen. Sam Brownback (R., Kans.), in an effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, announced that he would introduce such a measure, known as a renewable-electricity standard (RES), as an amendment to Reid’s bill. A top-down renewable-energy mandate might aid Kansas’s wind industry, but it’s definitely bad for America. There are many reasons to oppose this measure. Here are five of them:

It’s a budget-buster. A renewable-electricity standard would guarantee tremendous demand for renewable energy on top of very generous taxpayer subsidies. According to our back-of-the-envelope calculation, a 15 percent RES would cost taxpayers almost $13 billion a year. That’s a lot of money to pay for the privilege of being forced to use energy from expensive and unreliable sources.

It compromises the grid. From an engineer’s perspective, renewable energy is a nightmare that threatens the integrity of the electric grid. At any given moment, the total power going into the system must equal the power leaving it. If this balance were to be upset, the consequences for the grid would be catastrophic. This delicate balance would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain with the introduction of large amounts of intermittent renewable energy -- after all, the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. According to a new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation on the challenge presented by adding green energy to the grid, “not all the potential effects on the reliability of the bulk power system are known.” Therefore, an RES would increase the risks of brownouts and power outages.

It’s unfair. Twenty-four states have already passed an RES, but that is not an argument in favor of a federal RES. The RES states tend to have a much higher potential for renewable energy, less-energy-intensive manufacturing, or both. In those that do have considerable manufacturing, the effect of adopting an RES has been to raise electricity prices and push manufacturing into states or countries with lower electricity prices. A federal RES would cripple states with low electricity prices and proportionately lower renewable-energy potential, such as those in the industrial heartland. It would force them to raise electricity prices to a level that would pressure their industries to move overseas to countries with cheaper energy rates and no renewable portfolio standards.

It results in more pollution. The point of an RES is to increase green-energy production; yet ironically, such a mandate would also increase pollution. In order to accommodate intermittent renewable energy and still keep the lights on, it is necessary to have ever-ready backup power that can quickly ramp either up or down to ensure that the total power going into the grid matches the power that is leaving it. This technique is known as “cycling.” In practice, this backup power is provided by natural gas and coal. Unfortunately, such conventional generating technologies are at their least efficient -- and therefore at their most polluting -- during those periods when power is ramped up and down. In a recent study of RES effects in Texas and Colorado, Bentek Energy LLC found that this dynamic led to an increase in sulfur-dioxide, nitrous-oxide, and carbon-dioxide emissions.

It’s bad economics. There’s a reason the federal government has to force utilities to use more green energy: In most places, the use of such energy just doesn’t make sense, even when it is subsidized by generous taxpayer handouts. To date, utilities have relied almost exclusively on wind power to meet RES requirements. According to the Energy Information Administration’s projection of electricity costs, in 2016 wind will be nearly 50 percent more expensive than coal and nearly 80 percent more expensive than natural gas. Thermal solar is projected to be 150 percent more expensive than coal, and 200 percent more expensive than gas. Expensive energy is the last thing our sputtering economy needs.

Even the Senate leadership realizes that Americans are averse to anything that raises energy prices, especially in the current economic environment. For Senator Brownback to propose this awful idea now shows a woeful lack of judgment. His colleagues should help him climb down from this mountain. It’s much harder to dodge a bullet when you’ve put the gun to your own head.

-- William Yeatman is an energy-policy analyst, and Iain Murray a vice president, at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

 

Before my spirited exchange with my esteemed friend Amity Shlaes about the New Deal reaches the point of diminishing returns, it should be possible to agree on some points that may be applicable to current economic questions.

I think we agree that Obamanomics has not succeeded, beyond a tentative stabilization, easily shaken by lack of public confidence in the regime and the absence of any serious deficit-reduction plan. We seem also to agree that unfocused fiscal profligacy on the scale of the $800 billion stimulus bill has not led to significant reductions in unemployment, that more of the same will not succeed any better, and that the ability of the federal government to keep hurling money out of the airplane on that scale has probably passed anyway.

Where we agree in interpreting the economic experience of the Thirties is that U.S. unemployment on Inauguration Day 1933 was between 25 and 33 percent; that it was between 12 and 16 percent in late 1934, and between 9.8 and 14.2 percent just before the 1940 election; and that unemployment was effectively eliminated in the U.S. before America’s entry into World War II in December 1941.

#ad#Beyond this, we seem to part company, as on that record, I do not see how Amity could write, as she did last week on NRO, that “Roosevelt did fail to end the Depression.” She applies the criterion of “getting back to where we were before.” When Roosevelt died in office in April 1945, after more than 12 years as president, U.S. GDP had more than doubled from 1933, and was half the economic product of the entire war-ravaged world.

Amity acknowledges that within a year of taking office, Roosevelt could claim that more than 60 percent of the unemployed were “gainfully employed,” albeit about 60 percent of the reduction was in the giant New Deal workfare infrastructure and conservation programs. Yet she describes this as an “Obamaesque argument.” I don’t think so, as these were real jobs, and after $1.4 trillion of deficit spending, President Obama is reduced to implausible arguments about saving jobs that would otherwise have been lost, rather than creating new ones.

Where I hope we do agree is that this administration -- to engage the unemployed until the private sector could absorb them — should have emulated Roosevelt’s workfare programs at much less cost and to much greater benefit to the nation than the Santa’s bag of toys of the stimulus bill. There is going to be an extended process, as the economy reorients itself from consumption (especially of foreign oil and luxury goods) to more saving and investment, manufacturing and extractive industry. It was naïve to imagine that the overladen Christmas tree of stimulus could achieve much of what was needed.

#page#
Now, since the firehose of unaimed spending is running dry, the best alternatives are New Deal workfare, coupled with income-tax reductions and increases in taxes on gasoline, luxury-goods sales, and financial transactions, but apart from a few words from Paul Volcker, there is no sign of this.

Three points of disagreement seem to remain: Amity declares, as do most historians, that only the official numbers of employed can be counted, but I think the New Deal’s workfare participants were just as much employed people as the military conscripts and defense-production hires of other advanced countries in the Thirties, who are traditionally considered to be employed, while the New Deal relief workers are not. I do not accept, and neither should any other historian, unemployment figures that treat fully employed relief workers, in far more useful work than the cogs of bloated pre-war defense preparedness, as statistical unemployment.

#ad#Second, on the matter of the possible precedent of 1937–38, I don’t believe that it furnishes any guidance at all for the current conditions. In 1937, Roosevelt rolled back his public-works programs and shrank the deficit at the request of the hard-money elements of his administration and the Congress. Economic conditions began to deteriorate and he restored the upward trajectory of the business and employment cycle with another massive levee of workfare. This has nothing to do with the current administration’s argument for doubling down on its rather unimpressive pursuit of stimulus, which is a bogus concept, as it immobilizes as much stimulus through borrowing as it creates, and is only secondarily productive of jobs. Roosevelt’s 1937–38 pause followed and preceded huge reductions in unemployment.

Third and finally, we seem to part company over the extreme distress that Roosevelt found on entering office. When the proverbial one-third of a nation had no visible means of support and the banking system had collapsed, there was little empirical evidence of how best to deal with a severe economic depression, and no time for sequential experimentation. I must call Amity on her claim that Roosevelt was viscerally anti-business. He did object to what he considered an unacceptably uneven prosperity in the Twenties, and excessive and imprudent borrowing in the financial markets coming into the crash. He also resented what he considered business ingratitude for his rescue of the capitalist system with only modest concessions to the forces of egalitarianism.

It was naughty of Amity to claim that Roosevelt said, of the business community, on Oct. 31, 1936, at Madison Square Garden, in one of his most famous political addresses: “I welcome their hatred.” He had already appreciatively referred in that address to “the vast majority of law-abiding businessmen.” Those whose opprobrium he professed to welcome were the confected bogeymen of business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, and war profiteering.” He thus channeled the anger and frustration of the time into a harmless cul-de-sac of fictitious enemies.

I withdraw previous claims that Amity Shlaes is a member of the Roosevelt assassination squads that compulsively attack FDR at any opportunity, no matter how obscure. But I think she made a mistake in assimilating his economic policies to Hoover’s in her otherwise excellent book about the Great Depression, shortchanges FDR for the economic progress he made in each of his full terms, and imputes unjustly base motivations to him (though he was far from a political saint). As a result, Amity is being used as a stalking horse by ahistorical kooks who swaddle themselves in her well-earned reputation as a rigorous historian and commentator, to assault the imperishable Roosevelt piñata.

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Well, that was fast.

Just a few weeks ago, the Gulf oil spill was a turning point for America. It was precisely the providential prodding Americans needed to wean ourselves from the diabolic goo that runs our cars, heats our homes, and forms the plastic that makes the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip possible. While President Obama seemed to dither, the anointed consciences of American life combusted with frustration and rage. New York Times columnist Frank Rich fretted that if the spill continued much longer, not only might this calamity be worse than Katrina (and that’s saying something, given that, according to Rich’s theology, Katrina was an eschatological catastrophe on par with the Biblical flood), and not only might it “wreck the ecology of a region,” it could also -- shudder -- “capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency.”

#ad#That was on May 30th. A couple weeks later, Obama proclaimed from the Oval Office:

We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America's innovation and seize control of our own destiny.

But now it increasingly appears that “the worst environmental disaster in American history” wasn’t all that bad. Yes, the loss of human life was tragic, and the loss of animal life was regrettable -- but it also wasn’t that dramatic. Some birds were oiled and died, always a sad sight. But according to Time, the number of birds killed is -- so far -- less than 1 percent of the avian casualties of the Exxon Valdez. And to date, only three oiled mammal carcasses have been recovered. Three.

“The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” federal contractor and geochemist Jacqueline Michel told Time. Ivor van Heerden, another scientist working on the spill, says “there’s just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good -- I think they lied about the size of the spill -- but we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.” He adds: “There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it.”

It turns out that Obama was right when he said that the Gulf Coast is “resilient” -- a comment that ignited outrage from environmentalists and backpedaling from the White House. And so was Rush Limbaugh, who said the catastrophe talk was overblown. That, too, ignited outrage from environmentalists, but unlike Obama, Limbaugh didn’t care.

According to Frank Rich, the “principal mission of the Obama presidency” is to prove (in Lincoln and Obama’s words) that “the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.” And on that score Obama has been wildly successful.

The greatest damage from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (and yes, even with the hyper-deflation, it’s still a disaster) has been from the federal government. The drilling ban imposed by the administration, against the counsel of the sort of “sound science” Obama usually sanctifies, has been devastating to the region, costing thousands of jobs and untold millions in lost revenues and taxes. That’s definitely something the people couldn’t have done better for themselves. 

Meanwhile, if Obama is serious about driving America forward to a green economy “even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there,” he will take the Gulf region’s devastation on the road, destroying good jobs across the country (the oil and gas industry pays twice the national average) and replacing them with bad ones. He will replace cheap energy with expensive energy. (During the campaign, he promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket.”) He will place bets on unproven technologies while discarding proven ones. In short, he will nationalize a disastrous disaster policy.

Fortunately, his energy plan has died in Congress without a vote, because even members of his own party recognized it as an economic and political suicide pact. A majority of voters never bought into the idea that the Gulf spill was yet another crisis for Obama to exploit rather than fix. If we can put a man on the moon, people said, plug the leak. Even 65 percent of Democrats oppose the ban, according to a Bloomberg poll.

It seems that the American people can make up their own minds better than government can. A point that should be driven home come November.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Obama administration’s hilarious commerce-clause argument against Arizona’s immigration law was too much even for U.S. District Judge Susan “Rubber Stamp” Bolton. The Justice Department had maintained that the Arizona statute’s ban on smuggling illegal aliens while committing another crime -- a provision targeting drug dealers -- violates the Constitution’s assignment of the regulation of interstate commerce to the federal government. The federal interest in the unimpeded transport of drug runners and scouts across state lines, one must infer from the department’s brief, trumps a state’s interest in keeping drug dealing away from its residents.

Displaying a judicial acumen otherwise lacking in her opinion, Judge Bolton noted that the United States had not “provided a satisfactory explanation for how [the anti-smuggling section], which creates parallel state statutory provisions for conduct already prohibited by federal law, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.” Moreover, noted the judge, one must weigh the burden on “interstate commerce” against the putative local benefits from its regulation.

#ad#Such commonsense reasoning and fidelity to the law is what we expect of a federal judge. Had Judge Bolton merely maintained such virtues throughout the rest of her opinion -- weighing the alleged costs of the Arizona law against its alleged benefits, demanding evidence of those alleged costs, noticing that the most disputed sections of the state statute merely parallel federal law -- she would have reached a different result. Instead, her opinion is notable for its superficial and conclusory reasoning, both in its application of the extremely demanding standard for granting a preliminary injunction, and in her substantive analysis of SB 1070’s alleged constitutional infirmities.

You’d hardly know from reading U.S. v. Arizona that there was a single illegal alien in the country. Judge Bolton’s ruling, like the Justice Department’s brief, is couched exclusively in terms of how SB 1070 will affect legal aliens. But her reasoning in finding that SB 1070 would impermissibly burden legal immigrants, and would thus allegedly conflict with federal immigration law and policy, would make it impossible to ever enforce immigration law. It is her reasoning, not SB 1070, that conflicts with clear congressional mandates.

The Arizona statute officially affirms the power of a local police officer or sheriff’s deputy to inquire into someone’s immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally, and if doing so is practicable. Under SB 1070, such an inquiry may occur only during a lawful stop to investigate a non-immigration offense.

Local police and deputies had the authority to make such inquiries before SB 1070, not just in Arizona, but nationwide. In 1996, Congress banned so-called sanctuary laws, by which cities and states prohibit their employees from cooperating with federal immigration authorities regarding illegal aliens. It was in the federal interest, Congress declared, that local and federal authorities cooperate in the “apprehension, detention or removal of [illegal] aliens.” As the Senate report accompanying the congressional ban on sanctuary cities declared, “illegal aliens do not have the right to remain in the United States undetected and unapprehended.” To assist the mandated state-federal cooperation on immigration matters, the INS (the precursor to today’s ICE) created an immigration clearinghouse, the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), to provide immigration-status information to local and state law-enforcement officials making just the sort of inquiries that SB 1070 anticipates.

The congressional ban on sanctuary laws was widely ignored, including in several Arizona cities. It was in part to reaffirm the congressional mandate to share and seek immigration information that the Arizona legislature passed SB 1070. But in making inquiries under the federal immigration laws, law-enforcement officials -- whether local or federal -- inevitably run the risk of asking questions of a legal alien or a U.S. citizen. Such a possibility had never been deemed a valid reason to invalidate immigration enforcement, until Judge Bolton’s opinion. When ICE agents investigate a worksite suspected of employing illegal aliens, some of the workers questioned about their status -- or even all of them -- may be legal residents of the U.S. Ditto any other federal immigration-enforcement action, whether in a drug safe house or at the border. The only way to guarantee that legal aliens are never asked to present their immigration papers is to suspend immigration enforcement entirely. (The same possibility of stopping innocent people applies to law enforcement generally; that possibility has also never been held to invalidate the police investigative power.) And if Congress intended to create such a blanket ban on asking legal aliens for proof of legal residency, it could have canceled the 1941 law requiring aliens to carry their certificate of alien registration. Such a requirement makes sense only on the assumption that legal aliens will upon occasion be asked to prove their legal status.

#page#Judge Bolton nevertheless deems the possibility that legal aliens might be asked to establish their status in Arizona under SB 1070 a sufficiently large burden to create an unconstitutional conflict with federal immigration authority. Never mind that without SB 1070, Arizona officers already had the authority to make such inquiries. SB 1070 makes such inquiries more likely, says the judge, and that increased likelihood somehow meets the legal standard for finding that a state law is preempted by federal authority. (A state law unconstitutionally conflicts with federal if either “compliance with both State and federal law is impossible, or#...#the state law stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.”)

As for the existence of the federally operated Law Enforcement Support Center clearinghouse, which presupposes just the sort of local immigration inquiries that the Arizona law contemplates, Judge Bolton asserts that because it is “currently dedicated in part to national security objectives” (emphasis added), the inquiries that would be coming from Arizona under SB 1070 would “divert it from its other responsibilities.” But every non-national-security-related inquiry is a diversion from national-security inquiries, just as national-security inquiries are a diversion from non-national-security inquiries. If Congress wanted LESC to entertain only national-security inquiries, it could so mandate. Until Congress does, however, there is nothing unconstitutional about a local officer sending a non-national-security inquiry to LESC. If the volume of inquiries eventually taxes LESC’s resources, the executive branch should request more funding. LESC was not established with a ceiling on the number of inquiries it is authorized to entertain.

#ad#The ruling’s cursory treatment of the section of SB 1070 that adopts federal immigration-documentation requirements is arguably the low point of the opinion. But a strong case could also be made for the preliminary-injunction analysis. A plaintiff seeking a preliminary injunction must meet a three-pronged test: He must establish that he will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief, that the balance of equities tips in his favor, and that an injunction is in the public interest. A typical case of “irreparable harm” warranting an injunction is the imminent bulldozing of a landmark building, or the administration of the death penalty. In such situations, no amount of monetary compensation could remedy the loss and restore the plaintiff to the status quo ante if the enjoined action were later to be found illegal.

By preliminarily enjoining SB 1070, Judge Bolton is implicitly declaring that even one day of its operation would cause the United States irreparable harm that could not be otherwise remedied. But she is silent as to what that harm may be. If a host of legal aliens ended up being detained unconstitutionally, they could sue for damages -- the conventional remedy for unlawful detention. Judge Bolton’s tour through the “balance of equities” and “public interest” prongs of the preliminary injunction test is equally superficial; she merely announces that allowing a state to enforce a law in violation of the Constitution’s supremacy clause is “neither equitable nor in the public interest.” No mention of Arizona’s interest in the rule of law; no mention of the burden that unimpeded illegal immigration is putting on the state’s schools, hospitals, and jails.

But it gets worse. The federal government asked Judge Bolton to enjoin SB 1070 before the statute even had a chance to operate. Such so-called “facial” challenges to a law are, in the words of the Supreme Court, “the most difficult challenge to mount successfully, since the challenger must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” The federal government didn’t even try to make that showing, nor did the judge require it. Had SB 1070 gone into effect and produced the constitutional Armageddon that its enemies predict -- with legal aliens being stopped pretextually and hauled off to jail for hours or even days at a time, say -- then there might have been an argument for an injunction. But we are being asked to believe that Arizona’s law-enforcement officers are incapable -- “under any possible set of conditions,” in the Supreme Court’s language -- of administering SB 1070 without producing a crisis of constitutional dimension.

In reality, the reason that the law had to be enjoined preemptively was that it would not have produced a widespread trampling of rights. The hysteria around SB 1070 would have been shown to be gratuitous. That hysteria is a smokescreen to distract attention away from the real threat posed by SB 1070: not to the federal government’s constitutional powers, not to legal aliens, but to the de facto amnesty that now prevails in most of the country. The Arizona law was already inducing illegal aliens to leave the state, according to news reports, even before it went into operation, demonstrating that immigration-law enforcement can work simply by creating a deterrent to illegal entry and presence. Illegal aliens are virtually absent from the Justice Department’s brief or from Judge Bolton’s opinion, but their continued violation of American law is the only thing that would have been at odds with SB 1070.

-- Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a co-author of The Immigration Solution.

Come in. Make yourself comfortable. What’s that? You’re a congressional Democrat? You voted to triple the national debt; destroy a health-care system that an overwhelming majority of Americans were happy with in a way that creates a massive and infinitely complex new entitlement; bail out the banks and auto companies; and “stimulate” the economy with an $862 billion boondoggle that hasn’t created a single private-sector job? Your president is suing the state of Arizona for having the effrontery to enforce a law he wishes not to enforce (though he does have the constitutional responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”)? The war in Afghanistan is not going well? The president’s approval ratings are under water? Congress’s approval ratings are running even with Mel Gibson’s? Naturally you’re upset.

#ad#Relax. Here, wipe your tears. The wizards at the Democratic National Committee have the answer. The strategy is one you may remember from past campaigns. They call it the Great Smoke Blower. Jimmy Carter used it against Reagan in 1980. When things are objectively bad and you can’t run on your record, you accuse the Republicans of extremism. Remember? In 1980, inflation was running at 14 percent. Interest rates were about 15 percent. American hostages were paraded on Iranian television. The economy was febrile. What did the Democrats do? They accused Reagan of being a warmonger. They said he would divide North from South, white from black, union from management, Christian from Jew. They said he would plunge the world into nuclear Armageddon. It was a reprise of the anti-Goldwater effort of 1964.

The newest ad from the DNC seeks to link the Republican party with the tea party. Flashing faces on the screen: now Rand Paul, now Paul Ryan, now Sharron Angle, now John Boehner -- all distinctions are blurred. Then they present the “Republican Tea Party Contract on America,” with ten items. These, they expect, will frighten the heck out of John Q. Public:

I. Repeal Health Insurance Reform.
II. Privatize Social Security or Get Rid of It.
III. End Medicare as it Presently Exists.
IV. Extend the Bush Tax Breaks for the Wealthy and Big Oil.
V. Repeal Wall Street Reform.
VI. Protect Those Responsible for the Oil Spill.
VII. Abolish the Department of Education.
VIII. Abolish the Department of Energy.
IX. Abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.
X. Repeal the 17th Amendment (ending the direct election of U.S. Senators).

Clever, right? Hey, why are you still weeping? Oh, I see. Rasmussen found that as recently as June, 58 percent of voters favored repealing the health-care behemoth? So it wouldn’t be scary if Republicans actually ran on that item.

Oh, and your opponent doesn’t favor privatizing Social Security? Not even a little? Hasn’t she ever said something like “We may have to consider changes to the retirement age”? -- because that can be demagogued as wanting to privatize Social Security. Well, you make a good point. The Republicans (to the dismay of philosophical conservatives and libertarians) have been embracing Social Security as Linus did his blanket, for many an election cycle. I guess, while we’re at it, we might as well go ahead and concede that these same domesticated Republicans haven’t exactly been carrying the banner for eliminating the Departments of Energy and Education (far less the EPA!) for a really long time, though some wish they would.

There, there. Don’t fret. What? Your opponent actually is in favor of repealing the “Wall Street reform”? She says it will create 243 new regulations, just for starters, and that the federal government will now have the power to decide whether pretty much every business in America is taking too much risk. If a federal regulator decides you are making bad decisions, he can close down your shop. Besides, it completely sidestepped the biggest reason for the financial meltdown, Fannie and Freddie, because those were Democrats’ sandboxes. Hmmm.

The unemployment rate in your district is 17 percent? Twenty-five percent among the young? The expiration of the Bush tax cuts will raise taxes for small-business owners, and this will make hiring even less likely? According to the Small Business Administration (another agency principled conservatives would happily kiss goodbye), small businesses were responsible for between 60 and 80 percent of net new jobs in the past decade. But now they’re worried. They don’t know how the new financial-reform bill will affect them, and they’ve seen what the Massachusetts health-care reform did to business there, so they’re extremely nervous about the effects of the national health-care reform. They’re getting by, but they’re in no mood to hire.

In fact, they’re in a firing mood. And they’re looking at you. Here, you’re going to need these tissues after all.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

“[The United States and Israel] have decided to attack at least two countries in the region in the next three months.”
-- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, July 26

President Ahmadinejad has a penchant for the somewhat loony, as when last weekend he denounced Paul the Octopus, omniscient predictor of eight consecutive World Cup matches, as a symbol of decadence and purveyor of “Western propaganda and superstition.”

#ad#But for all his clownishness, Ahmadinejad is nonetheless calculating and dangerous. What “two countries” was he talking about? They seem logically to be Lebanon and Syria. Hezbollah in Lebanon has armed itself with 50,000 rockets and made clear that it is in a position to start a war at any time. Fighting on this scale would immediately bring in Syria, which would in turn invite Iranian intervention in defense of its major Arab clients -- and of the first Persian beachhead on the Mediterranean in 1,400 years.

The idea that Israel, let alone the U.S., has the slightest interest in starting a war on Israel’s northern neighbor is crazy. But claims about imminent attacks are serious business in that region. In May 1967, the Soviet Union falsely told its client, Egypt, that Israel was preparing to attack Syria. These rumors set off a train of events -- the mobilization of Arab armies, the southern blockade of Israel, the hasty signing of an inter-Arab military pact -- that led to the Six-Day War.

Ahmadinejad’s claim is not supported by a shred of evidence. So what is he up to?

It is a sign that he is under serious pressure. Passage of weak U.N. sanctions was followed by unilateral sanctions by the United States, Canada, Australia, and the European Union. Already, Reuters reports, Iran is experiencing a sharp drop in gasoline imports as Lloyd’s of London refuses to insure the ships delivering them.

Second, the Arab states are no longer just whispering their desire for the U.S. to militarily take out Iranian nuclear facilities. The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington said so openly at a conference three weeks ago.

Shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, Pat Buchanan charged that “the only two groups” that wanted the U.S. to forcibly liberate Kuwait were “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” That was a stupid charge, contradicted by the fact that George H. W. Bush went to war leading more than 30 nations, including the largest U.S.-led coalition of Arab states ever assembled.

Twenty years later, the libel returns in the form of the scurrilous suggestion that the only ones who want the U.S. to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities are Israel and its American supporters. The UAE ambassador is, as far as is ascertainable, neither Israeli, American, nor Jewish. His publicly expressed desire for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities speaks for the intense Arab fear -- approaching panic -- of Iran’s nuclear program, and the urgent hope that the U.S. will take it out.

Third, and perhaps even more troubling from Tehran’s point of view, are developments in the U.S. Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden suggested last Sunday that over time, in his view, a military strike is looking increasingly favorable compared to the alternatives. Hayden is no Obama insider, but Time reports (“An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table,” July 15) that high administration officials are once again considering the military option. This may reflect a new sense of urgency or merely be a bluff to make Tehran more pliable. But in either case, it suggests that after 18 months of failed engagement, the administration is hardening its line.

The hardening is already having its effect. The Iranian regime is beginning to realize that even President Obama’s patience is limited -- and that Iran may actually face a reckoning for its nuclear defiance.

All this pressure would be enough to rattle a regime already unsteady and shorn of domestic legitimacy. Hence Ahmadinejad’s otherwise inscrutable warning about an Israeli attack on two countries. (Said Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Fox News: “Who is the second one?”) It is a pointed reminder to the world of Iran’s capacity to trigger, through Hezbollah and Syria, a regional conflagration.

This is the kind of brinkmanship you get when leaders of a rogue regime are under growing pressure. The only hope to get them to reverse course is to relentlessly increase their feeling that, if they don’t, the Arab states, Israel, the Europeans, and America will, one way or another, ensure that ruin is visited upon them.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010, the Washington Post Writers Group.

Editor’s note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please write kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246.

Judge Susan Bolton has to get credit for her cheekiness. She took a matter of profound national concern and injected an element of hilarity into it.

As gloriously ridiculous as a classic Monty Python skit, the federal judge’s decision blocking Arizona’s immigration law is an appropriate first volley in the legal war over the law. If our immigration system is to be defined by a judicially sanctioned lawlessness, we might as well dispense with the pretense.

Acting in keeping with federal law, court precedent, and a Department of Justice legal memorandum (not to mention common sense), Arizona said its law-enforcement officers would henceforth check the legal status of suspected illegal immigrants during the course of a lawful stop or arrest. To conclude that the law likely will be struck down for “preempting” federal regulations, Judge Bolton had to engage in complicated judicial gymnastics, which she nailed with all the skill of a Mary Lou Retton in robes.

Taking her cues from the Obama administration’s suit against the law, Judge Bolton worried that too many legal aliens would be caught up in Arizona’s dragnet. Of course, these aliens are already required by federal law to carry proof of their legal status. But let’s put that aside (as Judge Bolton does). She claims that too many legal aliens without ready access to documents proving their lawful entry into the U.S. will be put at risk, including visitors from visa-waiver countries.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that visitors from countries like Norway and Australia are flooding into the border areas of Arizona. And let’s assume they engage in recklessly illegal conduct, daring cops to stop and arrest them. And let’s assume they exhibit all the behaviors associated with illegal immigrants. How could such a visitor escape the dreaded fate awaiting him when an officer asks about his legal status? Perhaps by producing a passport stamped with the duration of his stay, possessed by every visitor from a visa-waiver country?

Judge Bolton piles speculation atop implausible readings of the law. Say a legal alien is arrested and his release is delayed by a check on his status. Let’s put aside (as Judge Bolton does) that on average it takes the staff manning the federal database set up for such checks 70 minutes to get to an inquiry and a mere 11 minutes to answer it. Judge Bolton declares that any delay amounts to exposing legal aliens to “the possibility of inquisitorial practices and police surveillance.”

This is a tautology dressed up with scare words. It’s impossible as a matter of definition to get arrested without experiencing “police surveillance.” As for “inquisitorial practices,” blogger William A. Jacobson notes that “states already routinely run searches for a variety of statuses, including outstanding warrants, child support orders and non-immigration identity checks. Each of these checks potentially could delay release of an innocent person.”

When states want to check on someone’s immigration status, they do it with the aforementioned federal database. As a matter of law, the outfit running it must respond to all inquiries “seeking to verify or ascertain citizenship or immigration status#...#for any purpose authorized by law.” In writing this sweeping requirement, Congress did not make an exception for requests emanating from Arizona.

Too bad, says Judge Bolton. If the state finds too many suspected illegal immigrants, it might overburden the system. Let’s put aside (as Judge Bolton does) that the system already gets 1 million inquiries a year, that it has a theoretical capacity to process 1.5 million and that, as of now, Arizona only makes 80,000 inquiries annually, meaning even a drastic increase could be accommodated. If the federal government fears a surge from Arizona, couldn’t it add some positions to the 153 staffers currently assigned to the database? Think of it as stimulus.

But never mind. With emotions running high over the Arizona law, some comic relief is always welcome. Judge Bolton has provided it.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the world’s worst cleaning lady. How has she fulfilled her vaunted promise to “drain the swamp” and preside over the “most ethical Congress in history”? By shrugging her shoulders, downplaying the gravity of myriad ethics charges against corruptocrat Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel and waiting for the “political chips” to “fall where they may.” Imagine a custodial service that fixed toilet clogs by letting the overflowing waste and polluted waters “fall where they may.”

At a press conference to preempt the bipartisan House ethics panel’s announcement of 13 ethics and federal-regulation charges against Rangel on Thursday afternoon, Pelosi claimed to take “great pride” in her swamp-draining record. Unblinkingly, she cited the House trial against Rangel as proof that the “process” is working. But that beleaguered panel has been pathetically understaffed, has dragged its feet for two years on the Rangel case, and has administered more halfhearted wrist slaps than all the pushover parents on a season of Nanny 911.

#ad#Clinging bitterly to the moral-equivalence card, Pelosi carped about Bush-era GOP corruption. (Cue a chorus of “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!”) Her lips were sealed, however, on the continuing wheeling and dealing behind the scenes between Rangel’s lobbyist-funded lawyers and the ethics panel on a deal to avoid a congressional trial.

A full-blown public trial would thoroughly air his self-dealing, habitual bad-faith failures to report income, multiple House gift-ban and solicitation-ban violations, flouting of franking privilege and letterhead rules, and fundamental “pattern of indifference or disregard for the laws, rules and regulations of the United States and House of Representatives,” as the House ethics statement of violations put it. But, hey, what about that GEORGE W. BUSH, eh, Pelosi?

#page#
Bush-whack all you want. The Rangel stench is overwhelming. Along the way, Rangel has obstructed House investigators, failed to produce documents and refused settlement offers -- prompting House ethics investigative subcommittee member Rep. Jo Bonner (R., Ala.), to reject the Rangel-as-victim narrative. Misfortune didn’t befall Rangel. He chose his path. While bleeding-heart lefties in the media, like the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, mourn entrenched incumbent Rangel’s sudden fall (he “took 36 years to climb to the top, only to lose it all in an instant”), there is nothing sudden about the entitlement sclerosis that took hold of his career.

And there is nothing ethical about the Democratic enablers who have shown their own long pattern of indifference to or disregard for clean, open, transparent government.

#ad#I remind you that in March, Speaker Mop & Glo was minimizing Rangel’s mountain of alleged transgressions by pooh-poohing that “it was a violation of the rules of the House. It was not something that jeopardized our country in any way.” GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, a member of the House ethics investigative subcommittee, begged to differ. “Credibility is what’s at stake here; the very credibility of the House itself,” he said at the hearing announcing the baker’s dozen of ethics charges. Echoing Pelosi’s nonchalance, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters sniffed that “many members” of the House are as habitually sloppy and apathetic toward House ethics rules as Rangel -- her good friend and Congressional Black Caucus ally.

Since Day One, the identity-politics caucus that Rangel helped found has stood by his side and blamed anti-black bias for his troubles. Rangel likened media scrutiny of his shady rent-controlled-apartment deals and tax troubles to a “lynching.” CBC member Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), called it a “witch hunt.” And an unidentified, tinfoil-hatted black House Democrat told Politico: “It looks as if there is somebody out there who understands what the rules [are] and sends names to the ethics committee with the goal of going after the [CBC].”

Never mind that the supposedly bigoted House ethics panel exonerated four CBC members of their participation in corporate-funded tax junkets to the Caribbean. When the polls are down and damning evidence keeps mounting, first yell “BUSH!” Then yell “RACIST!”

As last-minute deal-making between Rangel and the foxes guarding the congressional henhouse continues, more and more Americans are coming to the same conclusions: House soilers can’t be cleaners. Voters, not Washington politicians, are the ultimate ethics committee.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Joe Miller went rogue long before Sarah Palin. Miller, 43, grew up in Kansas, but came to Alaska “by choice” in 1994, after taking a degree from Yale Law School and picking up a Bronze Star in Desert Storm. After a childhood of hunting and fishing, “the can-do attitude, the rough living, the great outdoors -- it had a magnetizing pull,” he says. Yet now, instead of trudging through the woods near his Fairbanks home, rifle in hand, Miller is gunning for a new challenge: the U.S. Senate.

In his way stands Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a seven-year incumbent, who is up in the polls -- by more than 30 points in the latest public survey -- and up at the bank, with millions ready to be shelled out as the August 24 GOP Senate primary approaches. Miller, a former judicial officer with a scruffy beard, shrugs off the poll numbers and the cash gap. “The momentum is on our side,” he says. “Senator Murkowski knows that she is vulnerable.”

#ad#Miller points to Murkowski’s position on repealing Obamacare as a case in point. Soon after the health-care bill passed in March, Murkowski went on local television and said that repeal “is not the answer.” By late June, after being hammered by Miller, Murkowski took to the Senate floor to argue the opposite. Such a flip, Miller says, is typical of the low-key incumbent. “It is kind of humorous to see how she is moving to the right,” he laughs. “Her shift is so radical, you almost have to smile.”

On other fronts -- Miller would like to ax the Department of Education and criticizes global warming as “dubious science” -- he outflanks Murkowski. Indeed, like many conservative insurgents this season, Miller has used a couple of key issues and broad, anti-Washington themes to gain traction. Miller’s stump speech revolves around energy -- he chastises Murkowski for, at one time, being open to a cap-and-trade bill -- and the senator’s support for the 2008 bank bailouts. But it is Murkowski’s political persona, he says, that irks him more than any one vote. “She is a statist,” he sighs. “She has that bureaucratic mindset that sees the central government as the answer to everything.”

If he wins, Miller, along with Senate hopefuls Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada, would form part of a new conservative nucleus in the upper chamber. Like that pair, “I align with Sen. Jim DeMint and Sen. Tom Coburn, both of whom are phenomenal voices for reform,” Miller says.

Getting a chance to do that, of course, will not be easy, with every blogger and operative looking to trip up a tea-partier. Earlier this month, Miller was shaken -- in the national press, at least -- by a viral video showing his supporters toting guns during a parade. Miller appeared on national news programs to defend the clip, reassuring East Coast reporters that in the 49th state, “it is not unusual to walk into Wal-Mart, or to walk into a gas station, and see people carrying guns.”

Since then, Miller has embraced the buzz. A little devil-may-care fun, he reckons, coupled with serious policy positions, is crucial to winning over Alaskans. “This is more of a libertarian state,” Miller explains. “Some folks characterize themselves as tea partiers, others don’t. But the broad themes of the movement are shared almost universally in this state, which is mainly to yank the government back to its constitutional limits.”

One person who has readily identified with Miller’s message is Palin, the high-flying former governor, who endorsed him in June, via a glowing, 735-word essay on Facebook. “Contested primaries are so good for America’s political process,” Palin wrote. “Competition makes everyone work harder, be more efficient, debate clearer, and produce more. So, Alaskans should be thrilled that Joe Miller jumped in the GOP race and is ready, willing, and able to serve us as our next United States Senator.”

#page#
Miller’s and Palin’s paths have aligned before. Two years ago, Miller helped Palin try to oust the state GOP chairman. Though they were unsuccessful, the pair bonded. “He has fought alongside me and others to help clean up the Republican Party here in Alaska by bringing in new leadership, new ideas, and commitment to putting government back on the side of the people, not any political machine,” Palin noted in her endorsement. Palin’s husband, Todd, has also become a Miller ally. The mama-grizzly boost helped put him on the map.

The recent support that has poured in from conservatives nationwide has also been beneficial. The Tea Party Express, a grassroots organizing group that helped catapult Angle to a final-hour primary win, has stepped in to help him organize his far-flung network of volunteers. Others, like RedState’s Erick Erickson, Alaska Right to Life, and talk-radio stars Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, have also been supportive. It all has been instrumental in helping this second-time candidate -- Miller ran unsuccessfully for a state house seat in 2004 -- put a scare into the Murkowski machine.

#ad#In spite of that previous campaign, Miller says politics is a relatively recent pursuit for him. In 1997, just three years after moving to Alaska to work in private practice, Miller was appointed, at age 30, a state magistrate. A few years later, he was appointed to serve on the state district court and, shortly thereafter, to serve as a U.S. magistrate in Fairbanks; he did these jobs simultaneously. He also spent some time working for a private firm, and as an assistant attorney for his local municipality.

But the political bug bit him in 2004, when Miller won a GOP primary before losing the general election to a longtime Democratic incumbent. Since then, “I have been very active,” he says. Not only did he support Palin’s intraparty maneuvering in 2008, but he did so in 2006, too, backing the former Wasilla mayor as she challenged Gov. Frank Murkowski, the senator’s father, in the GOP gubernatorial primary, which Palin won. Then, as now, Lisa Murkowski was criticized as an insider -- a classic example of nepotism -- since her father had tapped her for the Senate after he himself left the chamber to become governor in 2002.

“There is not a lot of affinity out there for the Murkowski name,” Miller says. “Her father lost his reelection bid by a wide margin. Even Lisa’s signage reflects the reality: ‘Murkowski’ is in small letters, while ‘Lisa’ is huge.” While he says that this “election is about Washington,” Miller acknowledges that Murkowski’s loaded political surname will play a part. That said, Palin’s support also comes with strings. A recent poll by Ivan Moore Research found her to be seen favorably by just 41 percent of Alaska voters, with 47 percent seeing her in a negative light. That is, National Journal observes, “a stark change for someone who once enjoyed record levels of approval as governor.”

So is a late-summer upset in the works? Just look at what happened to Sen. Bob Bennett, Miller says, pointing to Utah’s moderate Republican senator, thrown out by conservatives at a party convention earlier this year. “We have the same approach here in Alaska,” he says. “The only way to fix the crisis of leadership is by removing incumbents. I hear that sentiment on the streets as I travel around the state.” Miller says that in early August, when the two meet for a series of debates, he will be ready to tangle.

As he once ventured to Alaska with little more than a job offer and pluck, Miller is itching for a chance to go to the Capitol as someone “who is not a professional politician.” His background, he says, is more than enough. “I’m a combat veteran, went to West Point and law school, and got a master’s degree in economics, which is an important tool these days. Along with common sense, that’s all I need.”

-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

The nuclear-weapons treaty President Obama has negotiated with the Russians may help him make America’s erstwhile Cold War adversary happy, but it won’t help protect us from the rogue nations that threaten the United States today.

If ratified, the New START treaty would force the U.S. to agree to strategic-nuclear-weapons parity with the direct descendant of a nation that threatened our country’s existence for decades. Who would have thought in the year 2010 the United States would be renewing its Cold War–era policy of mutually assured destruction with Russia?

#ad#MAD was a frightening policy that kept two superpowers paralyzed in a nuclear game of chicken. Both countries knew they would be destroyed if they attacked first, and so neither country attacked. But it’s not a one-on-one game anymore. The U.S. faces threats from China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea in addition to Russia, and the treaty will have no effect on the nuclear-arms-building capabilities of these countries. And New START could hamper our ability to improve our missile-defense system -- leaving us unable to destroy more than a handful of missiles at a time and vulnerable to attacks from around the globe.

Additionally, the treaty favors Russia when it comes to tactical nuclear weapons, which are developed for use on the battlefield. Russia’s stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons, which can be affixed to rockets, submarines, and bomber planes, outnumbers the United States’ by a ratio of 10:1. These are not covered by the treaty -- New START covers only strategic, long-range, high-yield nuclear weapons -- leaving Russia able to keep its current advantage and produce more of these weapons at will.

New START also fails on another important front: It doesn’t recognize the fact that Russia and the United States play very different roles in the world. Russia is a threat to many and a protector of none. The United States, on the other hand, is a threat to none and a protector of many. More than 30 nations, many in the former Soviet bloc, depend on the U.S. for their security. The New START treaty does not reflect that obligation. It ignores it.

It’s no secret that the Russians do not want the United States or her allies to be protected by missile defense, and believe that New START forbids further development of missile defense. Last December, in the midst of the treaty’s negotiations, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, “By building such an umbrella over themselves, our partners [the U.S.] could feel themselves fully secure and will do whatever they want, which upsets the balance and the aggressiveness immediately increases in real politics and economics.” After the treaty was signed, the Russians effectively declared victory on the matter. Their government issued a statement that the treaty “can operate and be viable only if the United States refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively.”
 
President Obama insists this is not the case, but he and the Russians can’t have it both ways: New START either permits the United States to expand its missile-defense capability or does not.

The treaty’s negotiating records would provide some much-needed clarity. The Obama administration, however, is refusing to provide them to the Senate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed a request for them during a recent Senate Foreign Relations hearing. She claimed that negotiating records haven’t been provided “going back to, I think, President Washington.”
 
This is not accurate; precedent exists for giving the Senate access to review these records. At the request of Sen. Sam Nunn (D., Ga.), negotiating records were provided to the Senate for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. What is the administration trying to hide? No action should be taken toward ratifying the New START treaty until the White House provides these documents.

The ability to protect ourselves and our allies is not an insignificant matter to be hidden away. It wasn’t long ago that Russia was taking hostile action against our friend Georgia and wielding its energy as a weapon against its neighbors.

#page#Even with those events in recent memory, Foreign Relations chairman Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is ushering the treaty through the Senate, could not fathom why the United States would want the ability to defeat Russian missiles. During the same hearing at which Clinton brushed aside the request for the negotiating records, I asked Kerry, “Is it not desirable for us to have a missile-defense system that renders their threat useless?”
 
He said, “I don’t personally think so, no.”
 
#ad#In his March 1983 “Star Wars” speech, Ronald Reagan called upon members of the scientific community “to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” The goal of New START, by contrast, is to ensure that the U.S. and Russia have an equal capacity to destroy each other.

Of course, the world has changed dramatically since Reagan gave that speech. Today, the United States must be vigilant about attacks that could come from many different points on the globe, not just Russia. Nations like Iran, Syria, and North Korea pose the greatest nuclear threat to the United States. New START dampens our ability to defend against missile attacks and makes America and her allies vulnerable to those rogue nations. It would be a mistake for the Senate to ratify it.

— Jim DeMint is a U.S. senator from South Carolina.

One month ago, the Supreme Court held in McDonald v. City of Chicago that states, not just the federal government, are prevented from violating Americans’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The Supreme Court did not, however, define the full scope of the right, nor the standard of review by which challenged statutes will be judged.

In other words: It ain’t over yet. A number of pending lawsuits across the country will further shape how the Second Amendment will be applied.

#ad#The first lawsuit of note comes from Chicago. As soon as the Supreme Court struck down the city’s handgun ban in McDonald, Mayor Richard Daley worked with the city council to pass a very restrictive gun-control regime to take the ban’s place. The National Rifle Association promptly filed suit, challenging, among other things: a ban on having more than one “assembled and operable” firearm in the home at any time; a rule forbidding gun owners to carry their firearms in their own garages, porches, and places of business; and a policy outlawing gun shops and shooting ranges in the city in spite of the training and range time the city requires for obtaining a permit.

California, which has long been the darling of gun-control groups for its heavy firearm restrictions, is also facing a day in court. Gun-show promoters have been litigating their right to have a show on Alameda County grounds, an action barred by a county ordinance. A three-judge panel decided last April that the Second Amendment applied to California, anticipating the conclusion in McDonald, but found that the ban on gun shows on county property was still constitutional.

The Ninth Circuit voted to re-hear the case en banc (that is, all eleven judges would review the decision of the three-judge panel), but in light of McDonald, that order has been rescinded and the case remanded to the original panel for reconsideration. Rescinding an en banc re-hearing is an unusual turn of events, but nothing follows the norm in this suit. The panel has asked for further briefing from the parties, indicating that it may reverse itself on the constitutionality of the gun-show ban.

Also, the Supreme Court has vacated a decision of the Second Circuit upholding New York’s ban on nunchuks and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of its holding in McDonald. Though the McDonald case focused on firearms, the text of the Second Amendment encompasses “arms” in general, and the Second Circuit will provide some guidance on the constitutional protection of martial-arts weapons.

Just up the Hudson River, Alan Gura, the attorney who carried the day in the Heller and McDonald decisions, filed suit to challenge the discretionary permitting system for handgun carry in Westchester County, N.Y. At issue is whether permit applicants can constitutionally be required to show a “unique, heightened need for self-defense apart from the general public” in order to carry a gun. The Second Amendment allows for no such restriction on the right to bear arms, and by the time a need for self-defense arises -- think, for example, of a woman who’s being stalked -- a potential victim needs to be able to carry a gun right now, not after pulling together paperwork and waiting for government approval.

The New York right-to-carry case joins a similar suit that Gura filed against the District of Columbia in the wake of the Heller decision. California guns activists have an existing lawsuit challenging the concealed-carry policies of Yolo and Sacramento counties that will now be reconsidered in light of the McDonald decision. At least one Wisconsin prosecutor has declared that he will no longer enforce the state’s ban on concealed carry because of the recent Supreme Court action.

Yet another Alan Gura lawsuit is a challenge to North Carolina’s emergency-powers statutes. In essence, whenever a state of emergency is declared at any level of government in the Tarheel State, firearms sales or transfers are outlawed, as is carrying a firearm off one’s own premises (even for those with concealed-handgun permits). That doesn’t sound unreasonable at first blush, but officials have declared at least a dozen emergencies since September 2004, usually encompassing the entire state. This is an on/off switch for an enumerated right. Why have rights at all if the government can turn them off at will?

The future of the scope of the Second Amendment is unclear, but McDonald has guaranteed that, at last, a liberty the Founders considered worthy of a constitutional amendment will be taken seriously in courts across the land.

-- David Rittgers is an attorney and legal-policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece has been amended since its original posting.

Attorney General Eric Holder could have dictated most of Judge Susan Bolton’s decision blocking key parts of the Arizona immigration law.

The judge twists facts and logic to support the Justice Department’s claim that the state law preempts the federal immigration scheme. To do so, she accepts Justice’s implicit argument that it’s not the letter of the federal law that matters, but what parts of the law the executive decides to enforce. If her reasoning stands, we will basically cut Congress out of immigration policy and the states out of enforcement. Instead, our immigration system will entirely depend on executive discretion at a time when the executive has little interest in enforcing the law.

Judge Bolton notes that the Department of Homeland Security has set up a national operations center to promptly apprise local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies of the legal status of aliens they encounter in the course of their work. Federal law requires that DHS “respond to an inquiry by a federal, state, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status#...#for any purpose authorized by law, by providing the requested verification or status information.”

#ad#Bolton bizarrely turns this explicit acknowledgment that the federal government envisions a state role in enforcement, and this requirement that the feds cooperate with states and municipalities, against Arizona. If the state finds too many suspected illegal aliens, it will overburden the system. “An increase in the number of requests for determinations of immigration,” she writes, “will divert resources from the federal government’s other responsibilities and priorities.” Earlier in her decision, Judge Bolton sets out the different kinds of preemption, e.g. field preemption (where federal regulation is so comprehensive it “occupies the field”) and conflict preemption (where a state law is at odds with a federal law). This is something utterly different: “We can’t be bothered to answer the phone” preemption.

Judge Bolton makes much of the burden that will be placed on legal aliens by the Arizona law. At the margins, there will be some, of course. If they are stopped or arrested and suspected of being in the country illegally, they will be asked for proof of their legal status. Surely this is not unreasonable, since federal law requires that aliens carry proof of their legal status.

Taking her cues from the Justice Department suit, though, Judge Bolton worries that this arrangement will inconvenience too many aliens without proof of their legal status, such as “individuals who have applied for asylum but not yet received an adjudication” (who, we are sure, are flooding across the Mexico-Arizona border constantly). If they are arrested and their status is checked with the federal government, she continues, their release might be delayed. She deems all of this intolerable.

It will constitute an unacceptable “intrusion of police presence into the lives of legally-present aliens,” she maintains, and runs counter to the 1941 Supreme Court decision in Hines v. Davidowitz, which held that Congress wanted to protect legal aliens from “inquisitorial practices and police surveillance.” Here Judge Bolton slips from the merely implausible to the inadvertently hilarious. If you are arrested, it’s difficult to avoid “police surveillance” during your arrest. And checking in with the federal government about an arrestee’s status -- via an information-sharing system set up exactly for the purpose -- can hardly constitute an “inquisitorial practice.”

The bottom line is that Arizona wants to enforce the law against illegal aliens. It wants them to be cognizant of the fact that the state is serious about the law, and therefore to conclude that it’s best to leave or not come in the first place. Arizona did not deem these people illegal aliens. The federal government did, in laws passed by Congress and signed by the president of the United States. Arizona thinks those laws mean something. If the Justice Department’s suit -- and Judge Bolton’s line of argument -- prevails, then we’ll know that they don’t. The real law of the land will be our current, de facto amnesty, imposed by executive whim.

Judging from the previous remarks of key Senate Democrats, Senate majority leader Harry Reid isn’t likely to get enough votes for the energy bill he unveiled this week. Even without carbon caps or renewable-energy mandates on utility companies, Reid’s bill is too much of a job-killer to pass.

#ad#The sticking point is a provision of the bill that would eliminate all liability caps on damages from oil spills, a good idea in theory that in practice would drive many small oil companies out of business. Sens. Mary Landrieu (D., La.) and Mark Begich (D., Alaska), among others, have expressed opposition to lifting the cap, and Reid probably cannot pass a bill without their votes. This raises the question: Do the Democrats actually want to pass an energy bill?

Signs point to no. First, Landrieu and Begich have made their opposition to lifting the cap obvious. At a Senate Energy Committee hearing in May, Senator Landrieu said, “With all due respect to [my colleagues who] are calling for unlimited liability, it will put out of reach the possibility for insurance, which is extremely important for this and any industry to have to operate.”

The Democrats then floated the idea of raising the cap from $75 million to $10 billion. Senator Begich said in an interview that he thought “that might be too high.” Begich added, “We should examine it, and I think that is what Senator Murkowski is attempting to do here, is try to examine the right mix here.”

Begich was referring to a GOP alternative put together by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), ranking member on the Senate Energy Committee. Murkowski’s plan would have based federal liability limits on site- and company-specific factors such as water depth, safety record, proximity to emergency response, and well pressure. Perhaps not as strict a policy as the Democrats wanted, but in the same ballpark, and with the benefit of being able to attract support from key Senate Democrats and Republicans who wanted to reform oil-spill liability but in a way that protected jobs in their states.

Reid settled on a different strategy -- a political one. He put forward a bill that eliminated the $10 billion cap entirely, even though that likely dooms the bill’s chances. “They’re hoping it will be defeated,” says a GOP Senate aide who works on energy issues. “They have the talking points ready about how it’s the Republicans’ fault. But this is going to be a little bit harder for them to put on the Republicans when we had an alternative bill they rejected out of hand.”

The aide added, “It’s election season. We understand.”

To flesh out the Democrats’ political strategy a bit, imagine a Democrat saying the following: “We dropped cap-and-trade. Then we dropped the renewable-energy standard. We bent over backward to reach a compromise. But the obstructionist Republicans are just too deep in the pocket of Big Oil. We couldn’t even get them to vote for a bill addressing the effects of the Gulf oil spill.”

Missing from that speech are all the Democrats who opposed the measures every step of the way: Democrats such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who said that cap-and-trade would cost jobs in his state, and Max Baucus of Montana, who said that the Democrats’ maneuvers on oil-spill liability were more about messaging than getting the policy right. Missing also is the conclusion that a reasonable person might draw from the Democratic leadership’s retreat on energy, which is that it indicates just how radical its agenda was in the first place.

Reid’s strategy on energy indicates something else: With each successive legislative victory the Democrats have achieved, they’ve seen their standing in the polls take a hit. Maybe they’ve decided that, as far as politics are concerned, if success isn’t working, try failure.

— Stephen Spruiell is a National Review Online staff reporter.

Have you read Zev Chafets’s biography of Rush Limbaugh -- An Army of One? (Actually, the complete and proper title is “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”) It’s a highly interesting book about a highly interesting man. And Chafets is a total pro: as a writer and a journalist. (Extremely versatile fellow, too. Just look at his list of books.)

Here is something that Rush said on his radio program:

I talked to Zev via e-mail the other day, and he’s been blackballed from a lot of conservative television shows and networks. He has not been invited. He’s gotten some invitations on liberal programs, but no conservative programs are taking him to interview him. . . . I said, “Zev, that should not surprise you, it shouldn’t surprise you at all.”

#ad#Well, it surprises me. I think it’s downright weird. Chafets is A-1 interview material. Here is a guy who is basically a liberal -- not a lefty, but a good Cold War liberal, I think -- and, as I said in a review of his book, he completely “gets” Limbaugh: “gets” him and his audience (and Conservative America). All liberals should be so understanding, or even a fraction as understanding.

My review of Chafets’s bio? It appeared in the June 7 issue of National Review, and you may find it here. The review is just a shorty. I plan to say more about the book, and Rush, in this here column sometime later . . .

Interesting about Chafets’s name: It can be done many ways. There is a Utah congressman, a Republican, named Chaffetz. And there was, of course, Heifetz -- Jascha Heifetz.

Want to know a little more? Congressman Chaffetz’s father was once married to Kitty Dukakis. Kitty Dukakis’s father was Harry Ellis Dickson, who was a conductor of the Boston Pops, and also a violinist -- like Heifetz. (Well, nobody was a violinist quite like Heifetz.)

Chafets’s first name can be done a couple of different ways, too: On the cover of some of his books, he is “Ze’ev”; on others, “Zev.”

You can count on me for the really fundamental stuff, I know . . .

The other day, I was looking at some attacks on Republican candidates, and where did they come from? Something called the Patriot Majority. This is a left-wing PAC: the Patriot Majority. Can you imagine if a conservative outfit called itself the “Patriot Majority”? Armageddon!

And you may remember a bumper sticker from long ago: “The Moral Majority Is Neither.” That was a popular one in my hometown of Ann Arbor (as you can imagine).

Earlier this week, I had occasion to write about the Patriot Act. And I was reminded of a truth, long ago articulated: The worst thing about the Patriot Act is its name. If it were called something else, people wouldn’t get the McCarthy heebie-jeebies about it -- or would get fewer of them. Don’t you think?

And, as Impromptus readers have heard me say a hundred times, I never liked “Homeland Security” -- that word “homeland.” It’s just not very American. It has connotations of Vaterland and Volk.

But you can get used to anything. And “JNap” and “Homeland Security” just roll off my tongue. (Word to the wise: “JNap” is a shorthand for the director of homeland security, Janet Napolitano.) (Wonder where her ancestors came from.) (That was a joke: Naples, of course. In Italian, “Napolitano” means “Neapolitan,” as you know . . .)

A poll showed that 11 percent of Americans approve of Congress. As Bob Kasten, the former senator, quipped to me, “You gotta wonder who that one guy is -- the one in ten, approximately.” True! National Review has a quip about that 11 percent in our forthcoming issue: Who knew there were so many trial lawyers?

A sparkling remark (which I can say, because it was not mine, I’m sorry to report).

I’ve mentioned this before -- I think on the Corner. I think it’s weird that Vice President Biden refers to President Obama as “Barack” in public. He has done it again: “Barack and I are realists,” he said. When I brought this up with some colleagues the other day, Rick Brookhiser said, “Can you imagine Nixon referring to Eisenhower as ‘Dwight’?” Or “Ike”! I believe that Cheney, in private, called W. “sir.” And, in public, it was always “the president,” or “President Bush,” of course.

Is Biden’s use of “Barack” a little -- condescending? Patronizing? Is he merely trying to show intimacy? Is he just kind of clownish, or “out there”?

Let’s scroll through history a little. Can you imagine GHWB referring to Reagan as “Ronnie”? How about Garner, Wallace, and Truman? Would they have referred to the president as “Franklin” -- or “Frank”? The mind reels!

I like it when politicians, and other public figures, talk about themselves with complete candor. Not long ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she was a “flaming feminist.” Why, sure. I liked it when Governor Dukakis said proudly, “I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.” (Ginsburg worked for the ACLU, as you know.)

Hey, this column is kind of Dukakis-heavy, isn’t it? That’s strange, for 2010.

#page#I rather like what Cory Booker is doing over in Newark -- I say “over in Newark,” because I write from New York. Booker is the mayor of that city -- Democrat, of course. And he is having to do some serious economizing, in these straitened times. Let me quote from a news article:

The city budget shortfall is $70 million and Booker plans to meet the revenue shortfall with budget cuts instead of property tax increases.

“Taxes cannot be the answer,” Booker said.

Booker says property taxes in Newark have gone up 76 percent in the last decade and 19 percent in the past five years.

#ad#Booker also said this: “Call me Mr. Scrooge if you want, but there’ll be no Christmas decorations around the city.” You know, citizens -- people -- should put up Christmas decorations themselves. They can certainly do it around their own homes. How about in the city at large? Could maybe a civic group provide the decorations? But then, individuals, or a group, would need municipal permission, I’m sure.

Modern America can be such a headache, in its bureaucracy, not least.

I get about 300 pounds of press releases a day, and I habitually delete them without a second thought. Without a first one, really. But, as I was deleting one of them a few days ago, something caught my eye. It seemed that this particular press release was slamming MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Could it be true? It was. Well, who was slamming MADD?

Why, the “American Beverage Institute,” of course! I got a chuckle out of that name: the “American Beverage Institute.” And I thought immediately of Chris Buckley’s superbly comic, socially astute Thank You for Smoking. Three characters, three lobbyists, form the MOD Squad -- “MOD” standing for “Merchants of Death.”

I liked the movie too, much. Nice when that happens: when a good movie comes from a good book.

Needing some information on the Tiananmen Square massacre -- death toll, etc. -- I turned to the Encyclopedia Britannica (trusty source). I found the entry under “Tiananmen Square incident.” And “incident” seemed to me . . . a little weak. In fact, outrageous. I’m all for neutrality, in certain venues and under certain circumstances. But “Tiananmen Square incident”? Come on. Let’s not be so squeamish.

Time for a little language. During the British Open -- played at St. Andrews this year -- I saw a notice on the Internet: “Play suspended due to high wind.” I had a memory: Years ago, when I was working at a golf course, I put up a sign (written by me): “Course Closed Due to Wetness.” (It wasn’t raining -- in fact, the sun was shining -- but it had rained, long and hard, and the course was too wet to be playable. Would-be players needed to know that.)

An older man, a retired teacher, said, “You know, when I was growing up, you couldn’t say that -- that ‘due to’ was wrong. You said ‘owing to,’ or ‘thanks to,’ or ‘because of.’” Yes, “due to” is one of those bugaboos, for some. But you and I aren’t bugged, I know . . . 

A little music? For a piece in City Arts, go here. It deals with Lisa Batiashvili, the Georgian violinist (I ain’t talkin’ Marietta); Alan Gilbert, the American conductor; Magnus Lindberg, the Finnish composer (despite the Swedish name); and a few other things. The italics don’t come through online, I’m afraid. But maybe you can read some italics in!

I’ve been bouncing around the country a bit lately, and stopped by my dear old hometown of Ann Arbor. I saw a sign that brought sort of a smile to my face. It reminded me that Ann Arbor has a sister city in Nicaragua, Juigalpa. Ann Arbor made Juigalpa a sister city in 1986. Why 1986? You know. If you know the political coloration of Ann Arbor, you just know.

In 1986, Nicaragua was ruled by a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, the Sandinistas. (The Sandinistas retook power recently under electoral machinations, and have rigged the system to lengthen their stay. We’ll see how long Nicaragua remains even nominally democratic.) The Reagan administration was supporting the Nicaraguan “contras,” whom some called the Nicaraguan “resistance,” which drove the Left crazy. It was very important for a little leftist citadel like Ann Arbor to express solidarity with Sandinista Nicaragua -- and to shake its fist at the villainous Reagan administration. Hence, sister-cityhood with Juigalpa. Forever, I guess!

I think two Ann Arbor mentions in one column is enough . . .

Oh, I’ve got a million more things to say to you -- high, low, and medium -- but I should wrap it up. Let me leave you with something American -- really American. In fact, I think I saw this on the Fourth of July. I was at a little fair. And there was this food truck whose specialty was hot dogs. On the truck was written “Banquet in a Bun.” And with that, you could get a “Bucket o’ Fries.” A banquet in a bun and a bucket o’ fries -- when you eat them, you can almost hear a Sousa march.

Thanks, guys, and see you.


#JAYBOOK#

Recent polls show that more than 70 percent of the public holds an unfavorable view of Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) wins about a 10 percent approval rating; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has similarly rock-bottom poll numbers.

Why this astounding -- and growing -- disdain for our lawmakers? After all, Congress has had plenty of scandals and corruption in the past, such as the House post-office and check-kiting messes, the Charles Keating payoffs, and the Abscam bribery.

#ad#But lately, Congress seems not merely corrupt, but -- far more worrisome -- without apparent concern that it has become so unethical.

A “culture of corruption” was the slogan of the Democratic Party to win back Congress in 2006. And indeed there was lots of sleaze then among incumbent Republicans.

Reps. Duke Cunningham (R., Calif.), Bob Ney (R., Ohio) and Tom DeLay (R., Tex.) all left Congress under a cloud. Rep. Mark Foley (R., Fla.) and Sen. Larry Craig (R., Idaho) saw their careers ruined over creepy sex allegations. Convicted felon Jack Abramoff ran a criminal-lobbying syndicate by which Big Money earned special attention from Republican lawmakers.

But when reform-minded Democrats took over, the mess got no better, and possibly worse -- suggesting that the problem was not politics, but what Congress itself had become. Rep. William Jefferson (D., La.) was convicted on multiple counts, including bribery and racketeering. Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), who recently stepped down as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, for over a year has been under investigation for numerous transgressions -- from rent-control violations and tax avoidance to improper lobbying and omissions from financial-disclosure forms. The late Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.) had seemed destined for an investigation into quid-pro-quo relationships between the money he received from boosters and the earmarks he earned them. Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) managed to get a cut-rate home loan from a tottering bank -- and a great deal on a vacation home in Ireland from a seller with connections to someone for whom Dodd lobbied for a presidential pardon.

Presidents come and go, but Congress stays the same in its habit of borrowing money. In the latest nearly half-trillion-dollar spending bill, Congress included more than 5,000 special earmarks. Senators and representatives routinely dole out dubious grants to their own constituents, usually in some way connected with campaign contributions. They worry little about the rising federal debt or the value of such spending for the nation at large.

When questioned, our representatives -- reminiscent of the old French court at Versailles -- act like they live in a rarified, untouchable universe.

Rangel shrugged off his ethics problems as racially motivated. Would-be reformer Pelosi -- who, along with other Democrats, has railed about corporate CEOs and their perks -- asked that her taxpayer-provided plane travel be upgraded so that she would not have to refuel on her way home to California. Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia struck a Capitol Hill police officer who asked her to show identification upon entering a House office building. Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) called an airline attendant a “bitch” last year after she repeatedly asked him to turn off his cell phone in accordance with federal law.

It is understandable, but not healthy, for a democracy to have little respect for legislators such as these. So, how could these self-absorbed grandees show voters a little contrition?

A good start would be to ban the egomaniac naming of monuments, parks, buildings, and roads after living senators and representatives. The rest of us don’t expect to have things named after us at work or school for simply doing our jobs. Congress should not either.

Members of Congress should employ pay-as-you-go lawmaking. It is easy to win friends by handing out someone else’s money, but harder to ask voters to pay the ensuing bill. Appropriate the money first; spend it second.

Can’t legislators go back home and get a life after their terms? Why don’t they quit lobbying their former colleagues for profit, and stop finagling for lifelong sinecures at some federal or state agency?

And why can’t members of Congress abide by the very laws they pass? If members wish to change health care, they should enroll in the same plans they mandate for others. Congressional offices should be subject to the same labor rules that private businesses work under -- from sexual-harassment statutes to overtime compensation.

Our self-absorbed Congress should start to reform, fast. Right now, the American people seem to think that the main purpose of holding congressional office is to boost egos and get rich later on -- and in the process make the rest of us poorer.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold onto a majority in the House. They’ll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list.

#ad#That’s one plausible scenario. The shift of opinion away from Democrats so evident in the polls could turn out to be illusory. The widely held assumption that Republicans will turn out in greater numbers than Democrats could prove wrong.

Democratic candidates do indeed have a money advantage in many close races, and their campaign committee has more cash than its Republican counterpart.

All that said, this Democratic spin sounds a lot like the Republican spin back in the 2006 cycle. If the numbers don’t change too much from 2004, Republicans said then, we can hold on. If the numbers don’t change too much from 2008, Democrats think now, they can hold on.

But the Republicans, as George W. Bush said, took “a thumping” in 2006. And most signs suggest Democrats will take a thumping this year, too.

To see why, take a look at the generic-ballot question: Which party’s candidate will you vote for in elections to the House? The current Real Clear Politics average shows Republicans ahead by 45 percent to 41 percent. Ten of this month’s 15 opinion polls asking the question had Republicans ahead; Democrats led in four (twice by 1 percent), and one poll showed a tie.

Keep in mind that the generic-ballot question historically has tended to under-predict Republican performance in off-year elections. Gallup has been asking the question since 1950 and has shown Republicans leading only in two cycles, 1994 and 2002, and then by less than the 7 and 5 points by which they won the popular vote for the House in those years.

So the Republicans’ current lead in the generic-ballot question suggests they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when they won a 245-188 margin in the House -- larger than any they’ve held ever since.

Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.

In 1994, I wrote an article in U.S. News & World Report arguing that there was a serious chance that Republicans could capture the 40 seats that they needed then, as now, for a majority in the House. It was the first mainstream media piece suggesting that, and it appeared on the newsstands on July 11.

I cited as evidence five polls showing incumbent Democratic congressmen trailing Republican challengers. None of those Democrats had scandal problems; all five lost in November.

Today, a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the last seven weeks.

They’re from all over the country: one each from Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota; two from Virginia; three from Pennsylvania. Most if not all of these incumbents are personally attractive, hardworking, and ethically unsullied.

Some of these poll numbers are mind-boggling. Tom Perriello, a 727-vote winner in Virginia 5 in 2008, has been running two weeks of humorous ads showing what a hard worker he is. A poll shows him trailing Republican state Sen. Robert Hurt 58 percent to 35 percent.

In industrial Ohio 13, which Barack Obama carried 57 to 42, a poll shows incumbent Betty Sutton trailing free-spending Republican Tom Ganley 44 percent to 31 percent.

As Geraghty notes, we haven’t seen polls released by many other Democrats on Republican target lists. Most are conducting polls; many have reason to release favorable results if they’re available. This looks like a case where the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Two years ago, Barack Obama was elected president with a historic 53 percent of the vote -- more than any other Democrat in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

These metrics -- the generic-ballot results and polls in individual districts -- suggest that House Democrats are headed toward historic losses. Quite a swing in 18 months.

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 The Washington Examiner.

Your Honor:

In regard to the proposal to build an Islamic center at the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack in Manhattan, I commend you for saying: “Everything the United States stands for and New York stands for is tolerance and openness, and I think it’s a great message for the world.#...#” But I would urge you to question whether this project truly represents that idea -- or whether it undermines it.

#ad#Start with this: Before this project is approved, surely New Yorkers and other Americans should know who will be picking up the more than $100 million tab. Would you not be distressed were it later to be revealed that funds had been contributed by people who also finance terrorism?

You’ll recall that, after the 9/11 attacks, your predecessor Rudy Giuliani turned down a $10 million check from a Saudi prince who had said that America shares blame for the atrocity. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the Islamic center project, has said that U.S. policies “were an accessory to the crime that happened.” How is that different?

By the way, the Saudi royal family embraces Wahhabism, an interpretation of Islam that cannot be said to value “tolerance and openness.” Among other things, in Saudi Arabia non-Muslim houses of worship are prohibited and “infidels” -- people like you and me -- may not set foot in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina upon pain of death. Newt Gingrich has called on Abdul Rauf to state clearly that he disagrees with such policies. Is that not a reasonable request?

I have an additional suggestion: If this project -- also called the “Cordoba Initiative”-- is really to “symbolize interfaith cooperation,” if it’s really to be an “inter-religious center,” a 13-story home for “multi-faith collaboration,” should it not contain a synagogue and a church as well as a mosque?

I would recommend putting each on a different floor. On the highest floor, let’s put the church -- since Christians founded this great nation of ours. One floor down, let’s put a synagogue, since Jews were among the earliest immigrants to find religious freedom in America. And one floor farther down, we’d have the mosque, a place for a newer generation of immigrants to gather and worship freely.

Here’s my guess: If you propose this to Abdul Rauf, emphasizing, as you have in the past, the First Amendment rule that the government “shouldn’t be in the business of picking” one religion over another, he will nonetheless refuse. He will offer all sorts of explanations, but the truth, I suspect, is that he believes that Islam is not “one of the world’s great religions” but rather the only true religion, that others are false and wicked. He will find it blasphemous that you want this center to give equal status to Christianity and Judaism. And he will see putting a church and synagogue on higher floors as symbolizing more than equality.

#page#
A bit of relevant history: Islam began, proudly, as a warriors’ religion. Beginning in the seventh century, Islamic armies burst out of Arabia and conquered much of the known world. Among their practices: They razed the houses of worship of those they defeated and built mosques upon the ruins. This was a way of sending a message. These early Muslims were not just adept fighters -- they also were skilled communicators.

#ad#The al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is built on the site where the First and Second Temples of the Jewish people once stood. However, some Muslims deny that there ever were Jewish houses of worship on that site. Why not ask Abdul Rauf his opinion? Might it influence your opinion of the imam, should he claim that there were no temples in Jerusalem prior to the Arab/Muslim conquest of that city?

Similarly, when Muslim armies conquered the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople, later to be renamed Istanbul, they turned the St. Sophia Basilica into a mosque.

As for the allusion to Cordoba: Proponents of this project say they mean to hearken back to a time when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in relative tranquility -- under the rule of a Muslim caliph. But others believe it is intended to refer to the mosque built atop the remains of a church in Cordoba after soldiers of Allah conquered Spain.

Prior to 9/11, most of us viewed the World Trade Center as simply an office building, a place where people worked hard day after day. But to the terrorists waging war against us, and their supporters, enablers, and apologists, the Twin Towers were the great Cathedral of Capitalism, a symbol of the power of what they call the “Zionist-Crusader” forces, against which they are waging jihad. That is what they believe they destroyed that day. To them, an Islamic center built on this site would commemorate their victory in what they regard as a historic battle.

Abdul Rauf may sincerely disapprove of the 9/11 attacks. But given his ties to groups linked with the Muslim Brotherhood -- former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has reported on that here -- there is reason for concern about what he actually does believe. To find out for certain, why not pose the questions I’ve suggested? See if you’re satisfied with the answers you receive.

Mayor Bloomberg, you are the custodian of hallowed ground. We all want you to govern wisely on this sensitive issue. It is my sincere hope that, by writing you this letter, I may help you do that.

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

Now that Congress has passed -- thanks to the peeling off of a bare minimum of Senate Republicans -- and President Obama has signed a financial regulatory bill with a massive scope and untold costs, and a bill extending unemployment benefits without paying for them, he and the Democratic leadership have two more big items to rush through before Congress’s August recess. They are a bill that will ostensibly help small business and the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan.

#ad#While Congress is claiming it wants to help small business, confirming Kagan could mean great harm to business owners crippled by costly regulation. Based on her writings and her arguments as Obama’s solicitor general (which is all we have to go on, since she has never served on the bench), not only is Kagan likely to rule against constitutional challenges to Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and other onerous laws, but she is also likely to do what she can to make it nearly impossible for smaller “regulated firms,” as she calls them, to have their day in court in the first place.

In blasting Republicans for delaying passage of the small-business bill, Obama proclaimed, “Small businesses are the engine of job growth, and measures to cut their taxes and make lending available should not be held hostage to partisan tactics.” Yet in preparing legal briefs for the Obama administration, Kagan effectively argued that small businesses that object to a particular law or regulation as unconstitutional should be held hostage to the administrative-review process of the agency responsible for enforcing that law or regulation. According to Kagan, “regulated firms” should have no standing to bring a constitutional claim to federal courts until they “exhaust” every remedy at the regulatory agency.

Kagan’s prescription would be an unaffordable option for the vast majority of small businesses, as they could spend years in the exhausting “exhaustion” process before they could seek relief in court. This radically restrictive view of legal standing to challenge agency authority has been rejected by Democratic-appointed judges in federal courts and was given a stinging rebuke late last month by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

In this case (in which attorneys with my Competitive Enterprise Institute served as co-counsel), the two-person Nevada accounting firm Beckstead & Watts challenged the constitutionality of the board that issues the costly accounting mandates under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. In her October 2009 brief for the Supreme Court, Kagan argued that the court should throw the case out before even considering the constitutional merits.

The brief, which lists Kagan as “counsel of record,” argued that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia “lacked jurisdiction because petitioners failed to exhaust the exclusive statutory review procedures” at the agency. Directly attacking the reasoning of Judge James Robertson, appointed to the D.C. District Court by President Clinton, Kagan maintained that Robertson’s decision to even let the case proceed was “contrary to bedrock principles of judicial review of administrative action.”

#page#Standing is indeed one of the bedrock elements of judicial review under our Constitution. Article III requires that there actually be a “case” or “controversy” before federal courts can rule on the legal merits of a law or regulation, and the plaintiff has to show a sufficient injury or the likelihood of one from the policy at hand to give him standing to sue. This edict keeps the courts from being a pure policymaking body.

#ad#Yet, from the perspective of natural rights -- or indeed common sense -- some modern court rulings have turned the element of standing upside down. Activists such as environmentalists can get standing to challenge a policy with the most trivial of injuries. On the other hand, small-business owners who suffer very definite injuries from laws and regulations that harm their livelihoods typically face an uphill battle in getting their day in court.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, for instance, was able to get an injunction on the U.S. Navy’s use of ship-tracking sonar technology in training exercises because the noise allegedly disturbed whales and dolphins, and this adversely affected NRDC members’ “scientific, recreational, and ecological interests.” (The injunction would be later be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Winter v. NRDC.) And in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Bay State was able to get standing for its suit to require the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon-dioxide emissions because of alleged injuries to the state in terms of land that would be lost because of global warming in approximately 100 years.

In her confirmation hearings this summer, Kagan appeared sympathetic to a broad definition of injury when it comes to standing for activists filing environmental lawsuits. In response to a question from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, she told the Judiciary Committee on June 29 that an injury sufficient for standing “can be of many different kinds. It can be economic injury, but it can also be a kind of injury that you get when the environment is degraded and you can’t use the parks in the way you would have wanted to use the parks.”

But for Americans who spend their time building businesses as well as going to parks, Kagan would apparently try to shut the courthouse door. Mark W. Smith, founding partner of the New York law firm Smith Valliere and Martinez PLLC and author of Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left’s Stranglehold on the Courts, notes that Kagan appears to be selective in her principles on standing and in her empathy for plaintiffs. “It is ironic how liberal jurists like Elena Kagan seem willing to allow all sorts of liberal plaintiffs to get redress in the courts,” Smith says. “But if you are a small business caught in the web of the government’s bureaucracy, forget about it.”

State and federal courts already make it difficult to challenge specific regulatory actions, citing the “exhaustion doctrine” that plaintiffs must seek every possible administrative remedy at the agency before they can get judicial review. But this typically hasn’t applied to constitutional challenges to provisions of the statutes that created or gave power to the agency in question. As the California Supreme Court has remarked, “It would be heroic indeed to compel a party to appear before an administrative body to challenge its very existence and to expect a dispassionate hearing before its preponderantly lay membership on the constitutionality of the statute establishing its status and functions.”

#page#But in her Supreme Court brief, Kagan maintained that Beckstead &Watts, the small firm challenging the PCAOB, was required to perform just such a heroic task. The firm had not challenged as unconstitutional any specific rule or action of the PCAOB. It maintained that the PCAOB’s structure under Sarbanes-Oxley violated the separation-of-powers principles of the Constitution because of the limits the law places on the president and his direct lieutenants in appointment and removal of the board’s members.

#ad#While the D.C. federal appeals court ruled against the firm on the merits of its challenge, it found that the plaintiffs had more than satisfied requirements for standing. Judge Judith Rogers -- appointed to the court by President Clinton -- wrote in the majority opinion that because the “constitutional challenges to the Act are collateral to the Act’s administrative review scheme, the exhaustion doctrine does not apply, and we hold that the district court had subject matter jurisdiction over the complaint.”

Kagan emphatically disagreed. She wrote in the brief that “petitioners were not free to forgo that route in favor of a direct facial challenge.” For “even when an agency cannot itself rule on the merits of a constitutional challenge, a regulated firm cannot bypass exclusive administrative review procedures established by Congress if the constitutional claims can be meaningfully addressed in the Court of Appeals after the administrative review.” What Kagan essentially was saying was that a small business cannot challenge a regulation in court, no matter the reason and no matter the impact on its bottom line, until the government agency has taken its own sweet time -- whether that is months or years -- reviewing the challenge.

There’s one other slight problem with Kagan’s call for exhausting agency procedures. The administrative-review scheme in this case and others grants judicial review to appeal a sanction or punishment imposed by the agency. Beckstead & Watts faced onerous compliance costs from regulation but was never actually sanctioned. Hence, it had no penalty to appeal in order to seek judicial review.

No problem, says Kagan’s brief: All a business has to do is simply break the law. “Beckstead and Watts (or any other firm) could challenge the Board’s authority to conduct an inspection or investigation by refusing to comply and raising its constitutional challenges#...#in a disciplinary action brought by the Board,” the brief declares.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court wasn’t comfortable with Kagan’s proposition that a firm needs to break laws in order to get access to justice. Noting that Beckstead & Watts would face “severe punishment should its challenge fail,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote dryly in the June 28 opinion, “We normally do not require plaintiffs to bet the farm by taking the violative action before testing the validity of the law,#...#and we do not consider this a meaningful avenue of relief.”

The court then gave Beckstead & Watts “declaratory relief” on the merits, though it did not go so far as to invalidate the PCAOB’s appointments, as critics of Sarbanes-Oxley would have liked. The decision to grant this firm even a small amount of relief, however, was 5 to 4. This suggests that the outcome of the Kagan nomination could be the action of the greatest consequence for small business that the Senate faces before the August recess.

-- John Berlau is director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of counsel for the plaintiff in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

 

During the past week, conservative educational icons have been sparring over whether the Right ought to embrace the new “Common Core” standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The debate has gained urgency as more than 25 states have signed on in the past two months.

Fordham Institute honchos Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli argued last week in a thoughtful National Review Online column that the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) fueled an explosion of mediocre state standards, undermining accountability and reform. They see the Common Core as a remedy. University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene responded that there’s good reason to believe that the Common Core won’t deliver on its promises and that it will impose real costs.

#ad#What to make of this? Here’s my two cents: Finn-Petrilli and Greene are both right. The Common Core standards are superior to those in place in most states, and transparency and market efficiency can benefit dramatically from a clear, rigorous national standard. Uniform standards and performance measures can help us test new educational techniques on a level playing field, so that we can deliver useful tools and techniques to more schools and students. These are all things that conservatives can embrace. The Common Core is a good start, and a stunning political triumph.

But this “state-led” effort has been aggressively driven by the Obama administration, there’s a huge chance that it will dramatically boost federal control of K–12 schooling, that teachers’ unions and other status quo interests will make their influence felt, and that state and local control will be undermined.

Also, we have excellent reasons to fear that states will fail to negotiate the enormous implementation hurdles ahead. Past experience teaches that the odds aren’t great that states, funders, vendors, and the feds will maintain their stride when it comes to making the tedious, small-bore, and potentially costly -- but critical -- revisions to assessments, accountability, curricula, professional development, teacher education, and instructional materials.

Common Core supporters must also face the reality that a slew of governors, state chiefs, and legislators will be turning over this fall, that the officials charged with enacting the Common Core may have little investment in the effort, and that even sympathetic leaders may have little inclination to spend what it’ll take to do it right as they struggle with gaping fiscal holes in 2011 and beyond.

#page#There are telling parallels to NCLB. Back in 2001, conservative thought was similarly split on the act. The Bush administration argued that standards, transparency, accountability, and choice for students in failing schools were pillars of conservative reform -- while critics saw overreach, the perils of wrong-headed implementation, and a Trojan horse that could open the way for all kinds of federal mischief. Both sides made good points. But the aftermath reminded us that grand political projects (conservative or liberal) tend to look best in the early days, while the conservative temperament has historically attended to unanticipated consequences and warily emphasized what might go wrong.

#ad#Indeed, it was Mike Petrilli who penned a chapter titled “The Problem with ‘Implementation is the Problem’” for a book that Finn and I edited back in 2007. In that piece, Mike pointed out that the problem with NCLB’s school-choice provisions, which he liked in theory, was not a matter of bungled implementation but of advocates’ wishing away design flaws and political obstacles.

Thus the distance between Finn and Petrilli’s hopeful conservatism and Greene’s more skeptical discipline is well-trod turf. It’s the old Jack Kemp–versus–Bob Dole divide, and it’s woven into the fabric of contemporary conservatism. It’s an important, if familiar, theme. And it’s useful to see Mike, Checker, and Jay giving a healthy workout to an educational question that will likely loom large in 2012.

-- Frederick M. Hess is director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.