The Liberal Supreme Court Rhetoric vs. The Reality

Shortly after President Bush selected Judge John G. Roberts, Jr., for nomination to the Supreme Court, liberal groups began to attack the choice as “out of the mainstream.” As the Chicago Tribune notes, “Some liberal advocates called for an all-out war to stop the nomination,” with people like NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan declaring that “President Bush has consciously chosen the path of confrontation, and he should know that we, and the 65 percent of Americans who support Roe, are ready for the battle ahead.”* ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0507200185jul20,1,147122.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed )

So, how does the rhetoric match up to the reality? Let’s look at the most established (and reliable) liberal news sources in the country: the New York Times and the Washington Post. As the New York Times reported,
“Now the question is whether Judge Roberts, if confirmed, will, like those two justices, commit himself to recapturing a distant constitutional paradise in which the court was faithful to the original intent of the framers or whether, like the justice he would succeed, he finds himself comfortably in the middle rather than at the margin.
His résumé suggests the latter, as does his almost complete lack of a paper trail. There are no flame-throwing articles or speeches, no judicial opinions that threaten established precedent, no visible hard edges.
To the extent that as a judge he has expressed a limited view of federal power, that is consistent with the views of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom he is being named to succeed, and would not change the balance on the court.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/national/20legal.html?ei=5094&en=8f7eadf2245decd8&hp=&ex=1121918400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print)
As the Washington Post adds, “the president passed over a number of highly conservative judges whose nominations would have been seen as far more ideological and polarizing than that of Roberts. Given that this was the first but probably not the last Supreme Court vacancy he will be asked to fill, Bush signaled a less confrontational approach toward the Senate than he has adopted with his lower-court nominations.” So much for Keenan’s declaration that Bush has “Bush has consciously chosen the path of confrontation.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/19/AR2005071901946.html)

Of course, these liberal groups would prefer a liberal Democrat on the Court to a Republican “comfortably in the middle rather than at the margin” in the words of the New York Times. Yet maybe they should focus on trying to win elections and communicating better with the American public rather than attacking what John A. Rogovin, a Washington lawyer who served in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration and as general counsel of the independent Federal Communications Commission, recently called “one of the most measured, thoughtful judges out there."

Then again, character assassination of good federal judges is nothing new to these groups.

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* As a side note, let's putaside for the moment that 6 out of the 9 Justices on the Court today support a Constitutional right to abortion, so that the shrill liberal scream of "save Roe! save Roe!" -- implying that Roe is at stake in this confirmation -- is a deliberate tactic to mislead Americans. (http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/07/07/dorf.scotus.elections/) This confirmation will not change the balance on Roe v. Wade, no matter how conservative a justice Bush could pick. With the most recent case in 2000 (Stenberg v. Carhart), 6 justices supported Roe and 3 opposed it in their opinions. In fact, according to Keenan's own numbers, those who support Roe are actually OVERrepresented on the Supreme Court at the moment -- albeit not by much -- assuming that 65% of American support Roe. Let's set aside for the moment whether I support Roe too -- which I believe I do. The fact is, the sreams of "save Roe" are mere tactics in a political war, and representative of these groups' heated rhetoric that twists facts to pursue their own transparent agendas.

Hell... frozen over... already?

"[Chirac] has become a commentator of political and international life ... without offering any solutions."

Sound like it was written by a Republican?

Well, it was from Francois Hollande, first secretary of the French Socialist Party. At least the American left still loves the man, because "[p]olls show that French President Jacques Chirac has lost the confidence of more than 60 percent of his [own] countrymen."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20050718-101343-2579r.htm

Combine that with Schroeder's recent drops in the polls (with those polled indicating that his government has moved too far away from the U.S.), and you have justice. :-P

State Run Healthcare

For those who want state provided universal healthcare, this article is a must. It details the corruption following a program "created 40 years ago to provide health care for the poorest New Yorkers" which, as the NY Times claims, was "once a beacon of the Great Society era." (I didn't know the terms "beacon" and "Great Society Era" could possibly be put together in the same sentence. Leave it to the NY Times...) Yet even when the corruption is clear, as The New York Times notes is the case with Medicaid in New York, "State health officials [have] denied in interviews that Medicaid was easily cheated, saying that they were doing an excellent job of overseeing the program." Now, some would argue that the state should be providing healthcare for everyone as a given right. Can you even imagine how costly and ineffective that would be?

Affordable and adequate healthcare should be available for every American. But, as New York's Medicaid fiasco shows, it would be irresponsible to trust state bureaucracies to accomplish it. Surely there is a more effective, and less overbearing, alternative. The Great Society, in the end, would seem anything but Great. I'll choose economically-sensible efficiency over Johnson-esque "Greatness" anyday.

Great timing...

Recently, a few British papers came out with a story about a "Muslim scholar denied entry to U.S." after Customs officials found that "his answers to basic questions were not 'in alignment' with his background check or documentation."

Outraged about his case and two similar high profile cases that had made the press earlier, "A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, said: 'This is extremely worrying following on from the refusal of the US to admit Yusuf Islam and Tariq Ramadan. It seems the US has very little knowledge about British Muslims. These are all mainstream people who have no record of involvement in unlawful activities. They are stigmatising ordinary Muslims.'"

The timing of this statement is priceless: only eight days after what happened in the city of London? Hmmmm...

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,9959,1529297,00.html

For All Those Who Attack No Child Left Behind....

Take this: Younger Students Show Gains in Math and Reading .

"Nine year old students born in the mid-1990's, on average, earned the highest scores in three decades, in both subjects." -- These are students who've been through the system largely after No Child Left Behind was passed (assuming school entrance at 5 or 6).

There is still a way to go, nobody will argue that. But for all the Democrats that claim No Child Left Behind failed, please explain the record levels of improvement nationally (for instance, the test results cited in the link) and in NY State.

I'm sure people will have their own ways to brush the results off. But the fact is that NCLB is getting results, and was a piece of legislation passed by BOTH Democrats and Republicans under President Bush's leadership. Democrats would have been able to take some of the credit for it (Ted Kennedy was a sponsor for crying out loud), but instead even its Democratic backers have flipped sides and attacked it as empty. These results are not empty. Democratic rhetoric, however, is.

Big City Union Shifts Support to Bloomberg

Big City Union Shifts Support to Bloomberg

I think the title says enough.

It is sad when journalists can't read...

Below is a letter to the editor I just sent off to the Washington Post (and to ever editor's e-mail I could get my hands on...). It's not intended to be published (way too long and I don't have time to be concise today), but it is because this column contains the same old Democratic arguments about Ambassador Wilson's supposed report debunking the Niger-Iraq connection (albeit, he recognizes Rove didn't break the law, but instead focuses on Cheney). My intent in sending the letter was more to point out his incompetence to his colleagues rather than make a public point. This site is my public point. ;) Well, here's the letter:

To the editor,

Having read Richard Cohen's recent column "Rove Isn't the RealOutrage," I was astonished to see such a poorly researched piece could ever make it into the Washington Post. It is an embarassment to your paper and, while merely an opinion piece, substantially lowered my regard for your paper. It seems the days of Woodward's investigative reporting are clearly gone. Mr. Cohen seems incompetent of even reading a simple, albeit long, Congressional report!

As Cohen wrote, "It was Plame ... who chose her husband to go to Africa to see if Saddam Hussein's Iraq had tried to buy uraniumin Niger. He went and later said that he found nothing, but George W. Bush said otherwise in his 2003 State of the Union address. It was supposed to be additional evidence that Iraq had, in the memorable word uttered by Vice President Cheney, 'reconstituted' its nuclear weapons program. That, of course, is the real smoking gun in this matter...The inspired exaggeration of the case againstIraq, the hype about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda's links to Hussein, makes everything else pale in comparison...Wilson was both armed and dangerous. He claimed the truth."" Clearly, Cohen did not read or take into account the U.S. Senate's bipartisan "Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" before writing his piece, even though that is the authoritative report of theCongressional investigation into Iraqi WMD estimates before the war. (available here)

As the report notes about Wilson's trip to Niger and his subsequent statements to Congress and the press, "The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article (“CIA DidNot Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,” June12,2003) which said, 'among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’' Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged.'"

The report continues to cite repeated inconsistencies in Ambassador Wilson's Congressional testimony and other statements. As it notes, for instance, "First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraqand, specifically, as refuting both the possibility that Nigercould have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium. The intelligence report ... noted that Nigerien officials denied knowledge of any deals to sell uranium to any rogue states, but did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium. Second, the former ambassador said that he discussed with his CIA contacts which names and signatures should have appeared on any documentation of a legitimate uranium transaction. In fact, the intelligence report made no mention of the alleged Iraq-Nigeruranium deal or signatures that should have appeared on any documentation of such a deal. The only mention of Iraq in the report pertained to the meeting between the Iraqi delegation and former Prime Minister Mayaki... DIA and CIA analysts said that when they saw the intelligence report they did not believe that it supplied much new information and did not think that it clarified the story on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. They did not find Nigerien denials that they had discussed uranium sales with Iraq as very surprising because they had no expectation that Niger would admit to such an agreement if it did exist. The analysts did, however, find it interesting that the former Nigerien Prime Minister said an Iraqi delegation had visited Niger for what he believed was to discuss uranium sales."

Rather than debunk the reports of Iraq-Niger uranium sales, then, Wilson's reporting only confirmed to DIA and CIA analysts that, according to the former Nigerian PM, an Iraqi delegation had likely visited Niger to discuss those sales. And even so, "Because CIA analysts did not believe that the report added any new information to clarify the issue, they did not use the report to produce any further analytical products or highlight the report for policymakers. For the same reason, CIA’s briefer did not brief theVice President on the report, despite the Vice President’s previousquestions about the issue." Rather than serve as additional evidence of the Vice President's statements as Cohen claims, then, the report confirms that Wilson's report was never briefed to the Vice President or used for further analysis for the Administration at all.

What the Senate's bipartisan "Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" demonstrates, if anything, is that Ambassador Wilson either is armed with a terribly poor memory or a politically-motivated streak of dishonesty. Hardly, however, "the truth" as Cohen claims.

Neither is Cohen, and he does a disservice to your paper and its readers with his recent column. I prefer to think that Cohen was either too lazy to actually read the Senate's report or did not know it existed. Then the inaccuracies in his column would be gross negligence above all else. I suspect, however, that he did read the report and chose to ignore it, casting aside the most comprehensivegovernment report on the issue to suit his ownpolitically-motivated goals. How ironic that, in accusing Vice President Cheney of ignoring government reports, exaggerating his claims, and lying to make political gains, Richard Cohen would be guilty of all three.

Chris is too conservative once again

With his estimates I mean. According to NY Times reporting this morning, "an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion." So much for possibly as high as 90 billion. As the article notes further,

"Most of the increase in individual tax receipts appears to have come from higher stock market gains and the business income of relatively wealthy taxpayers. The biggest jump was not from taxes withheld from salaries but from quarterly payments on investment gains and business earnings, which were up 20 percent this year. That was similar, though much smaller than a sharp rise in tax revenue during the stock market boom of the late 1990's, which was followed by plunges in revenue when the market bubble burst." (The full article is available here)

Now, for all the Democrats that cite President Clinton for balancing the budget, take note. According to Dick Morris, Clinton's chief political advisor at the time (eg Clinton's Rove -- "The Architect" -- for his 1996 success), the budget was balanced not because Clinton reduced spending (in most areas he did the opposite), but because of the huge increases in tax revenue from the stock market's boom. With more tax revenue, the government could afford to spend what it had been all along. Add to that a Republican-controlled House at the time which refused to approve the drastic increases in spending that Clinton wanted (which would have unbalanced the budget), and a balanced budget took form.

Then, when the stock bubble burst, the increased tax revenue that the bubble brought suddenly disappeared, returning the government to an unbalanced state -- beginning with the recession started just before Bush took office.

There are a few things that should be noted there. First, the Clinton administration's "balanced budget" was not the result of "Clintonomics." Clinton wanted to spend more, but, when Republicans retook the House in 1994, they would not let him. Their constraints, tied to a stock market boom and the tax revenues from it, were what led the budget to be balanced at all. As Wikipedia even notes, "The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 led to a push for a balanced budget, forcing President Clinton to agree to reducing the deficit. Major economic growth and GOP led spending controls such as Welfare Reform allowed for a balanced budget (when Social Security surplus was counted as revenue) by early in Clinton's second term in 1997 - considerably earlier than what Clinton's own projections for this had indicated."

Second, the surplus only came in Clinton's SECOND term, even though the economy began heating up late into George H.W. Bush's term (too late to help him in the election), and booming early into Clinton's first term. Even with a booming economy, Clinton did not balance the budget until the beginning of his second term in office -- when Republicans in the House rejected 4 budgets in which Clinton proposed huge spending increases and only affirmed the fifth budget that Clinton sent to Congress which eliminated much of the increased spending the Clinton proposed.

Third, unlike the very end of George H.W. Bush's Presidency when the economy began to really heat up, at the very end of Clinton's Presidency the economy began to really sour. When George W. Bush came to office, it was the beginning stage of a recession. Despite this, in the past election, Democrats hammered Bush for not balancing the budget in his first term -- which Clinton could not manage to do in his first term even as the economy began to boom by the time he took office in 1993!

Fourth, the increase in tax revenues under the Clinton administration were based on a bubble. When stock prices were inflated, more money came in from capital gains tax. But those revenues could not be sustained. In essence, they were based off a huge structural gap that inevitably had to burst. Not only were they unstable, then, but they were unnatural and not based on actual economic performance. The fact was that investors though stocks were worth more than they really were worth and that they thought the economy was in better shape than it really was -- the definition of a bubble, after all, is when the price of stock diverges significantly from its actual value. Clinton's increased tax revenues were ultimately based, then, more on the faulty judgments of economic agents rather than sound economic theory.

Fifth, part of the bubble was caused by CEO's like those at Enron and Worldcom cooking their books to make it look like their companies (and therefore their stocks) were worth more than they really were. The fact that such CEO's were not as regulated as they should have been during Clinton's economic boom, and held more accountable, may have caused tax revenues to increase in the short term under Clinton, but, when the bubble burst, it also made the damage all the worse. While most liberals I've seen have blamed Bush for the actions of the CEO's (and draw all sorts of connections), the fact is that most, if not all, of the crimes they committed were during the stock market boom UNDER CLINTON.

Sixth, Clinton's success with reducing deficits, along with the shrinking deficit now under Bush, reflect victories of conservative economic theory that the budget can be balanced through increased economic activity rather than through tax hikes that reduce that hamper that activity. There's a reason why the U.S. is outperforming the E.U. these days (bringing the Euro back down and making many investors clammer back for dollars): the Europeans have the huge handicap of excessive, excessive taxes that make the competition for economic performance a no brainer. The E.U. is working with one hand tied behind its back, and the best part is that it is E.U. nations themselves, and not any outside force, that tied it. The way to reduce deficits is in large part to promote economic growth, which will naturally bring in more revenues with the tax rate remaining constant, rather than increase taxes and decrease economic activity. Yes, it sounds supply side. But there's a reason Columbia's Professor Mundell received a Nobel Prize for his theory, even if it -- like all economic theories -- has its fair share of problems.

Seventh, in probably the only point that staunch Democrats will agree on, Congressional restraint is necessary to balancing the budget too. Republicans in Congress must push the administration to reduce what has been at times reckless spending. If Congress defeated 4 of 5 budgets Clinton proposed in one year alone because of reckless spending, Congress certainly can be stricter with Bush about his own reckless spending in his budgets. That's its job, regardless of the party that controls it. And, in the end, Bush himself will look a lot better after his second term if part of his legacy is restoring a balanced budget along with economic growth after the recession, much like Clinton's legacy looks more rosy to people who lionize him for balancing the budget -- even though he fought all he could for budgets that would, had they have passed Congress, results in further deficits rather than fiscal sanity.

Finally, Republicans should recognize that, despite Democratic rhetoric, Democrats are not really interested in balancing the budget at all. If they ever retake both the White House and Congress together (G-d forbid!), you can be sure they will spend the same amount which they've always wanted to spend. After all, at the same time as Democrats blast Bush for deficits, they have attacked him for not spending enough on education (even though he increased the budget of the Department of Education by 58% in his first four years), healthcare (universal health care, right?), et al. If the Republican Party is really the party of fiscal responsibility, it must act the part now while it has the reigns and prove that, when a Party has power, it does not have to just spend more and more pork. Republicans in Congress should make Bush's budget a bit more Kosher and eliminate the pork. That, combined with the robust but more stable economic performance that has taken root over the past two years, would be a great financial legacy for this Pax Romana of Republican dominance and will set the legacy of the Republican Party for years to come.