Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 32

Ron Paul: Wrong on the Taliban

Ron Paul knows even less about the history of our enemies than he does about their proper treatment under the Constitution. He actually interrupted Monday night’s Republican candidates’ debate so he could interject the following:

I would like to point out one thing about the Taliban. The Taliban used to be our allies when we were fighting the Russians. So Taliban are people who want — their main goal is to keep foreigners off their land. It’s the al-Qaeda — you can’t mix the two. The al-Qaeda want to come here to kill us. The Taliban just says, “We don’t want foreigners.” We need to understand that, or we can’t resolve this problem in the Middle East. We are going to spend a lot of lives and a lot of money for a long time to come.

#ad#Everything in this statement is wrong. Everything. Let’s start with the most basic point. The Taliban most certainly were not “our allies when we were fighting the Russians.” How could they have been, considering that the Taliban did not exist at the time of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan?

I won’t belabor the point that it was not the United States but the Afghan mujahadeen, with the help of non-Afghan Muslims (mostly Arab), who did the actual fighting against the Soviets. We did, after all, fuel the anti-Soviet jihad with billions of dollars in materiel and other assistance -- through our intermediary, Pakistani intelligence, with the Saudis matching our aid dollar-for-dollar. Presumably, this is what Representative Paul was talking about. Nevertheless, while a number of the Taliban’s eventual founders were veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad, the fact is that the Taliban was not established as an organization until 1994. That is five years after the Soviet Union skulked out of Afghanistan and three years after it collapsed.

Paul’s claim that the Taliban is just opposed to foreign interference in Afghanistan is patently absurd. To begin with, the Taliban’s creation was a direct result not of foreign invasion but of Afghanistan’s internecine tribal warfare after the Soviets left and the Americans lost interest. Its unabashed goal was to crush Afghan factions that impeded its establishment of a retrograde sharia state.

Moreover, the Taliban craves foreign interference, without which it would never have come to power. A Pashtun movement driven by Islamic scholars and spearheaded by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, the Taliban owes its existence to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These Muslim nations, two of the only three nations in the world to recognize the Taliban-led government in Kabul, nurtured, armed, and financed the Taliban in its origin. They did so precisely because the Taliban was an effective ally in their machinations against regional rivals -- India for the Pakistanis and Iran for the Saudis. The alliance was also grounded in the Taliban’s espousal of Deobandism, an uncompromising construction of Islam propagated in Afghan madrassas built by the Saudis’ Muslim World League in conjunction with Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s supremacist Islamic movement.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Taliban willingly gave al-Qaeda safe haven, knowing full well that bin Laden’s network was engaged in a global jihad that targeted the United States as its primary enemy. Al-Qaeda struck American interests several times while it had sanctuary from the Taliban, attacking American embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen before orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. By quite consciously accommodating and protecting an international terrorist organization that was at war with the United States, the Taliban joined al-Qaeda and became an enemy of the United States. It was thus every bit as much a part of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. as was al-Qaeda itself. That is not only how war works, it is a straightforward application of the criminal-law principles that Representative Paul claims to like so much -- a conspirator and an aider-and-abettor is responsible for the actions of his confederates.

#page#Speaking of the criminal law, it bears remembering that the American invasion of Afghanistan was not inevitable. Contrary to Paul’s offensive depiction of a ravenous, empire-building America ever on the prowl for the next military conquest, the Bush administration did not rush to war. As I’ve pointed out before, in the weeks after 9/11, even after Congress authorized the use of military force, President Bush pointedly asked the Taliban to hand bin Laden and his organization over to the United States so that they could be tried -- bin Laden having been indicted years earlier by an American grand jury. The Taliban repeatedly refused. Our choice at that point was either to invade, overthrow the Taliban, and smash al-Qaeda, or to let it be known that the United States would tolerate a massive attack on our homeland. That was no choice at all.

Ron Paul is dangerously delusional about the Taliban’s Weltanschauung. To be fair, these are delusions he shares with leftists -- including members of the Obama administration-- who insist that we must purge all references to Islam from our consideration of the threat we face.

#ad#The Taliban does not say, “We don’t want foreigners.” If you are an Arab jihadist, an operative of Pakistan’s heavily Islamist intelligence service, or a Saudi Wahhabist royal ready to build Afghanistan’s next-generation madrassas, the Taliban is delighted to have you in their country. It is non-Muslims they don’t want. And it is non-Muslim superpowers that they especially despise, since these they see as standing athwart their divine mission to subject the world to the rule of Islamic law.

That is why they protected al-Qaeda even at the cost of their own power. That is why negotiating with them is self-defeating and leaving them alone, as Paul would have us do, is suicidal. Of course we should avoid unnecessary wars. But when we find ourselves in necessary wars, we need to win them. To adopt the Paul rationalization that such wars are our own fault and that we can secure ourselves by shrinking from them is just as fatuous as rationalizing that democracy will tame the jihad.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of  The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Candidates and Combatants

Monday night's debate featured an exchange between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum regarding the treatment of American citizens who join with our jihadist enemies to make war against our country. Watching it, I got the impression that Santorum was trying to suggest a wedge between himself and Romney where I don't think there is one -- and perhaps making a play for voters who have been spun up by Ron Paul's spurious claims about the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). (I addressed those claims in an exchange with the congressman's son, Sen. Rand Paul, a few weeks back -- see here and here).

The answers by both Romney and Santorum to the question posed seemed a bit confused -- not really wrong, but incomplete. That is to be expected when candidates are given just a few seconds to address complex issues. 

Romney was asked whether he would have signed the NDAA, as President Obama recently did. The matter is controversial because Paul, like much of the Left, claims it is unconstitutional: it provides for indefinite detention of American citizens if they are found to be enemy combatants. Romney replied that he would have signed the bill, correctly implying that, as the courts have held, American citizens may be detained under the laws of war if they join the enemy during wartime. 

Mitt's reasoning was not crystal clear. He said that while Americans have every right to express dissent, they do not "have a right to join a group that is killing Americans, and has declared war against Americans. That's treason. In this country, we have a right to take those people and put them in jail."

Well, yes, but there's never been any doubt that treason can result in imprisonment. It is a criminal offense -- the only one defined in the Constitution -- and it can be prosecuted in the civilian courts. Romney was being asked about military detention. On that score, treason is not the salient point. Nor is it dispositive that al Qaeda has declared war and is killing Americans -- after all, they had declared war against us and started killing Americans years before we began taking military prisoners.

Military detention is legitimate because we are at war and because Congress authorized combat operations right after the 9/11 attacks. This is what invokes the laws of war, under which enemy combatants may be captured and detained indefinitely without trial until the conclusion of hostilities. Congress's authorization of combat operations necessarily entails the killing and capturing of enemy forces. (Because Congress has authorized military force, there is no need to wrestle with the knottier questions of whether, and under what circumstances, a president may unilaterally order military detention.)

When asked if he wished to respond to Romney, Santorum stated:

First off, I would say this, what the law should be and what the law has been is that if you are a United States citizen and you are detained as an enemy combatant, then you have the right to go to federal court and file a habeas corpus petition and be provided a lawyer. That was the state of the law before the [NDAA] and that should be the state of the law today.
... [I]f you are a citizen and you are being held indefinitely, then you have the right to go to a federal court — and again, the law prior to the [NDAA] was that you had the right to go to a court, and for that court to determine by a preponderance of the evidence whether you could continue to be held. That is a standard that should be maintained and I would maintain that standard as president.

Nothing in Santorum's answer parts company with Romney. Romney only addressed the fact that the president has the power to detain; he did not delve into the due process owed to the detainee, Santorum's focus. I'm quite certain Mitt agrees with Rick that an American citizen detained as an enemy combatant has a right to challenge his detention in court. And as for being provided with a lawyer, the courts have strongly suggested that detainees should be given counsel at public expense to challenge their detention, even though there is ordinarily no right to counsel in a habeas case. (As we know, given the legion of lawyers who have volunteered their services to our wartime enemies, the right to counsel has not been much of an issue.)

Santorum is correct that this was the state of the law before the NDAA. It remains the state of the law. By saying it "should" still be the law, Rick implied that there may be cause for concern that the NDAA changed things, but this is not the case.

Under Supreme Court rulings, most recently the Boumediene case, not only American citizen detainees but alien detainees have been given the right to file habeas petitions in federal district court. The Supreme Court somehow found that the U.S. Constitution gave this right to alien terrorists making war against Americans. It is a generally accepted doctrine -- one that only Newt Gingrich, among the GOP candidates, has challenged -- that when the Supreme Court holds that a right derives from the Constitution, that right may not be repealed by statute. (It would certainly be interesting to know whether Rick and Mitt agree with Newt that the political branches should be able to reverse Supreme Court decisions, but I don't know that they've been asked.)

As it happens, the NDAA attempts no such repeal of detainee rights, but if it had done so, the courts would have struck it down, reasoning that a statute cannot amend the Supreme Court's construction of the Constitution. So there is no question that U.S. citizens maintain their habeas rights. While Santorum's commitment to maintain the habeas rights of Americans is admirable, Americans would maintain these rights regardless of the next president's views. The main point of habeas corpus is to guard against lawless executive action; the protection is guaranteed by the Constitution and does not depend on executive indulgence. 

Finally, a word about Ron Paul, who responded to the Romney/Santorum exchange by saying of the NDAA, "This is major. This says that the military can arrest an American citizen for under suspicion [sic], and he can be held indefinitely, without habeas corpus, and be denied a lawyer indefinitely even in a prison here."

This is just a demagogic rant -- the NDAA says no such thing. The NDAA does not permit the military to arrest anyone inside the U.S. -- though the Paul forces constantly repeat that claim, the NDAA says only that enemy combatants will be detained in military custody, not that the military will do the arresting if the combatant happens to be an American citizen captured in the U.S. (Think Jose Padilla, who was detained by the military after being designated an enemy combatant following his arrest by the FBI in Chicago.) The NDAA gives the military no new authority to operate inside our country. Furthermore, as noted above, while detention under the laws of war is "indefinite" in the sense that wars do not come with an end date, all detainees have the right to seek habeas corpus relief from the civilian federal courts and none has been denied counsel for this purpose. 

Flagging on Obamacare

My column this weekend is about why Mitt Romney, however inevitable he may seem to some, has not closed the deal for me. Hint: I couldn't care less about Bain Capital.

The issues in the election are Obamacare and debt. Focusing on them massively favors the GOP ... except that Romneycare is the building block for Obamacare and, far from admitting error, Mitt has doubled down. As readers will see, I believe his federalism defense of Romneycare is fatuous. The Massachusetts program is indefensible. By nominating someone who vigorously defends it, I am very worried that we are giving away our best rationale for deposing the president and dispiriting the base whose enthusiasm is vital. 

Moreover, the Republican establishment's rallying around Mitt despite his continued championing of Obamacare's precursor is of a piece with the GOP's abdication of the Obamacare fight which, as I pointed out in a November column, has been delegated to the lawyers fighting the constitutional issues in court. This has counterproductively made these issues center-stage. Important as they may be, they are a sideshow in the greater scheme of things.

I happen to think the Supremes are going to uphold Obamacare -- not that they should, but that they will (for the reasons outlined in the aforementioned column). That won't mean Obamacare is good policy; it is disastrous policy. It will just mean that Obamacare is one of the many suicidal things our Constitution allows a free people to do to itself. But when the Court's ruling comes down, the GOP will have done nothing to lay the groundwork for what should be the far more consequential political battle to repeal Obamacare -- indeed, by doing nothing and nominating Mitt, the GOP will be saying, implicitly, that it is fine with most of Obamacare, perhaps with a few Washington-style modifications. The Supreme Court decision will thus hit in July -- the campaign stretch-run -- and, if it comes out the way I think it will come out, it will be a crackling political victory for the Obama campaign.

I appreciate the great work Hans and others have done on keeping us abreast of the 8 zillion reasons why Justice Kagan should recuse herself. But guess what? She's not going to recuse herself. If the best we can do to make an argument for deep-sixing Obamacare is that one of the nine justices who will hear the case should be disqualified, the battle is already lost.

I loved Mona's column yesterday. As she powerfully demonstrates, the individual mandate -- which has gotten almost all the attention as the political debate morphed into a legal debate -- is not the worst thing about Obamacare. Her summation cannot be repeated often enough: "[W]hatever the outcome of these legal cases may be, the effort to get this poisonous hydra repealed -- by the elected branches of government -- cannot flag.

I fear it is flagging.

Right, Wrong, and Romney

After Rudy Giuliani, my old boss, dropped out of the 2008 GOP presidential sweepstakes, I supported Mitt Romney. That was not a difficult choice for me. The former Massachusetts governor is a good man and he loves the country as is. That I wish he were more conservative is not a deal-breaker for me. I wished the same thing about Rudy. Mitt, like Rudy, would make a fine chief executive.

More to the point, the choice in a nomination contest is not candidate A versus one’s ideal nominee. It is candidate A versus candidates B, C, D, et al. On that score, the contest was no contest -- Mitt was easily, in my mind, the best remaining in the field.

#ad#He may still be. He also may not. I’m not any less favorably inclined toward him than I was four years ago. It is silly, though, to portray as hypocrisy, or at least inconsistency, a reluctance to endorse today the same candidate one was happy to back the last go-round. This time around, B, C, D, and the rest are different. Not necessarily better, but different -- most combining ringing positives with steep drawbacks, signal achievements with weighty baggage.

Unless different is better, shouldn’t that mean the nod still goes to Mitt? Again, not necessarily. If we could analogize the race to a baseball game, the winner is not always determined by a straight-up comparison of the players. The game is situational. Say one of my best relief pitchers is a fire-baller, and he’s done a great job, blowing away hitter after hitter while saving our team’s last five games. But now, we find ourselves in a tight pennant race, playing a game we absolutely need to win. In the critical situation, the other team sends up its power hitter, a guy who absolutely crushes the fastball but couldn’t hit a curve if his life depended on it. So, when I make the call to the bullpen, I don’t want the guy who throws a hundred miles an hour; I want the pitcher with the big hook. Doesn’t mean I like the fireballer any less: It just means this match-up does not favor him.

I’m still very worried that the match-up with President Obama does not favor Governor Romney. I don’t mean to overrate Obama’s strength or underrate the sundry weaknesses of the other GOP contenders. But Romney’s match-up problem is glaring.

In 2008, Obamacare did not exist. In 2012, it vies with our astronomical national debt -- to which it will prodigiously contribute -- as the most crucial issue in the campaign. It is Obamacare’s trespass against the private economy and individual liberty that transformed the Tea Party into a mass movement, perhaps the most dynamic one electoral politics has seen in decades. And of all the Republican candidates, Romney is the weakest, the most compromised, when it comes to taking that fight to the president.

Like most conservatives, I’ve been hoping that Mitt would disavow Romneycare, the health-care reform he engineered as Massachusetts governor. I’ve been hoping he’d sensibly conclude it was a bad idea, exacerbated by the politics of a state whose Big Government enthusiasms make it an outlier in a center-right country. Romney, after all, has reversed several positions after being persuaded that he was in the wrong. Alas, despite having flopped more times than Flipper, Mitt has decided that Romneycare is his line in the sand -- the crown jewel of his gubernatorial term, the single stand that will prove how constant he can be when passionately convinced he was right.

I have found this doubling down impossible to swallow. First there’s the Tenth Amendment business. Being a Tenth Amendment kind of guy, I’m predisposed toward different-strokes-for-different-states arguments: What’s right for Massachusetts may not be right for Mississippi or Montana.

#page#Nevertheless, some things are wrong everywhere. One such thing is a massive government infiltration into the private economy, one that coerces the purchase of a commodity (health insurance) as a condition of living in the state. For one thing, such an exercise in steroid statism establishes a rationale in law for government intrusion into every aspect of private life: If health care is deemed a corporate asset, then “bad” behavioral choices must be regulated, lest someone get more than his share. Romney portrayed Romneycare as a model, at least for other states, if not for the nation. But no free-market, limited-government conservative thinks this officious onslaught is a model to be emulated anyplace.

#ad#Then there is the Romney line that the people in his state like Romneycare. Well, why shouldn’t they, at least for a time? The program schemed to exploit Medicaid’s byzantine rules in order to shift hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the rest of the country to Massachusetts. This was not a case of a state going its own way; it was a redistribution of wealth by which Massachusetts got Americans across the country to pay its obligations. And those obligations are metastasizing: Romneycare has driven up medical costs, driven up premiums, and increased taxes on all Americans as well as on citizens of the Bay State. As the Cato Institute (among others) points out, Romney’s claim not to have raised state taxes is false, although most of the rise occurred after he left office -- but only because of his unrealistic cost projections,

Obamacare is the issue that inspires the conservative base. Republicans simply must have the base’s enthusiastic support if they are to beat a lavishly funded incumbent who will pull no punches, none, in striving to keep his job. There is no serious person who doubts that Romneycare was the building block for Obamacare: The experts who helped design the former were consulted in the creation of the latter. Yet Romney continues to insist that Romneycare is a smashing success, one he suggests he’d do again without hesitation.

Of course he now says he’d fight to repeal Obamacare, but is Romney really the best candidate to be making that fight? How convincing will he be in decrying wealth redistribution, runaway government spending, and freedom-killing government mandates while he continues championing an overbearing state program that stands as a monument to all those things?

I keep hoping to hear those three words: “I was wrong.” But they’re not coming. Romney supporters on the right keep rationalizing that he is just doing what he must do to stay viable: resisting a colossal flip-flop that would be more damaging than all the others. The candidate, however, says no, and attests that he is defending Romneycare because he believes in it. I usually worry that politicians lie. I’m worried that this one is telling the truth.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

WITHDRAWN: CNBC Report that Bain Advised Obama Administration on Auto Company Bailout Has Been Refuted

UPDATE: CNBC HAS WITHDRAWN ITS EARLIER REPORT THAT MITT ROMNEY'S FORMER FIRM, BAIN CAPITAL, ADVISED THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ON THE AUTO BAILOUT. CNBC says the "Bain Consulting" in the report turns out not to be related to Romney's Bain firm.

I am deleting my earlier post about it, though I will save it in the event there needs to be some record of it -- I haven't thought that through, but in fairness to the Romney campaign, I want to delete the earlier post now.

Read A Matter of Principle

Lord Black's post reminds me to mention that one of the reasons I've been out of pocket is A Matter of Principle, his gripping memoir, which I was asked to review for the next edition of The New Criterion -- our friend Roger Kimball, the editor of the TNC, reviewed it in a recent issue of NR. I would say that there is no describing how profoundly Conrad was wronged by our nation's insane disdain for, and criminalization of, free enterprise, and how shocking it can be when the system decides not merely to pursue but to ruin a man and his family -- except that Conrad has described it with his characteristic panache and persuasive force. If you have not read it, you should. 

The Mitt-Bain Movie Is a Disgrace

I'm coming up for air after some deadlines that couldn't be delayed anymore, so I finally got around to watching the Mitt-Bain movie today. It is disgusting -- something you'd expect from Michael Moore or Occupy Wall Street. It plays on every juvenile prejudice in the book (Romney heckled, hands counting wads of cash, Romney speaking French, Romney statements out of context repeated again and again) It is wildly inaccurate even in what little it tells us about Bain (two of the four companies were not under Romney's direction when the job losses occurred). Moreover, we learn very little even about the four companies profiled (like whether they would have survived had Bain not intervened) -- all we hear is that, because of Mitt Romney personally, parents had to raid the college funds and skip meals so their children could eat. I'm surprised there wasn't a Romney look-alike pushing a wheelchaired granny off the cliff -- maybe she could even have landed on the Paul Ryan wheelchaired granny.

I realize that Romney started the attack ads and ran a lot of them. This is not a paean to Mitt, whom I like but about whom I have concerns -- especially in an election in which Obamacare is so central to our case. But I've given a very hard time to people around here when I thought they were being unfair to Newt and Rick Perry. I don't think I was wrong to do that, because I still think it was unfair. But I have to confess to feeling pretty embarrassed right now.

This film is shameful, and to recommend it or draw arguments out of it is shameful. I'm not saying the film ought to be banned -- politics, as someone recently recalled, ain't beanbag. This is exactly the sort of thing the Obama folk will be doing, so we might as well find out if Mitt can take a punch -- and I sure wish someone in Romneyland were reading Kevin or Avik, who've made great responsive cases while the campaign has been flatfooted. But for me, for what little it may be worth, the movie is much less a discredit to Mitt Romney than to people who are sullying themselves by promoting it and drawing "vulture" narratives out of it.

'Electable'

Sorry for the radio silence, folks -- swamped.

Rich and Mike, I think there's too much focus on "electable." The election is going to be about Obama. The big differences we see between our guys -- given that watching politics, and particularly GOP and conservative politics, is what we do around here -- are likely to seem like marginal differences to the broader electorate that eventually decides the November election. "Electable" is not only about the field, it's about the situation -- for example, I think Mitt is clearly a better, more polished candidate this time around, but I also think it is a tougher race for him this time around because Obamacare is our biggest issue, so Romneycare looms much larger now than it did in  ’08. And speaking of  ’08, who on January 10 of that year knew that, when the autumn-stretch of the race came, the financial meltdown would be the consuming issue? If we could have predicted such a thing, maybe Mitt would have seemed more electable than Senator McCain.

Newt has done himself a lot of damage in the last few days. But he's been a plausible candidate this time around, when in many cycles he would not be, because the main issue is Obama's radicalism -- the president has people frightened enough that what would appear to be insurmountable baggage in some elections could be cancelled out this time around. Besides Obama, the Tea Party movement is a big dynamic that did not exist in  ’08 -- maybe it makes Santorum or Perry more electable than they would have been at similar stages in other cycles.

I just think we overrate electability at this point. In a short time, whether it is weeks or months, we're going to have a candidate. What the polls say now about X or Y's standing head-to-head against Obama is close to meaningless. The election is going to be about how fed up with Obama the public is (or isn't), and that is a judgment that will be made against the backdrop of some known unknowns (debt, jobs, the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision, Iran, Europe's financial crisis . . .) and some unknown unknowns. Some of those things will tee up better for some of our guys than for others. But I think the GOP candidates who seem most plausible right now are in the range of acceptability needed to beat the president.

Personally, I can't get myself whipped up about which GOP candidate a handful of Dems say they want to run against -- some spinning, some maybe not. Let's face it: Every one of our guys presents some enticing vulnerabilities for the Obama camp. The problem they have is: We get to run against the president -- as the only folks in the election who will want to talk about his record. I think their problem is bigger than our problem.

"Electable"

Sorry for the radio silence, folks -- swamped.

Rich and Mike, I think there's too much focus on "electable." The election is going to be about Obama. The big differences we see between our guys -- given that watching politics, and particularly GOP and conservative politics, is what we do around here -- are likely to seem like marginal differences to the broader electorate that eventually decides the November election. "Electable" is not only about the field, it's about the situation -- for example, I think Mitt is clearly a better, more polished candidate this time around, but I also think it is a tougher race for him this time around because Obamacare is our biggest issue, so Romneycare looms much larger now than it did in '08. And speaking of '08, who on January 10 of that year knew that, when the autumn stretch run of the race, the financial meltdown would be the consuming issue? If we could have predicted such a thing, maybe Mitt would have seemed more electable than Sen. McCain.

Newt has done himself a lot of damage in the last few days. But he's been a plausible candidate this time around, when in many cycles he would not be, because the main issue is Obama's radicalism -- the president has people frightened enough that what would appear to be insurmountable baggage in some elections could be cancelled out this time around. Besides Obama, the Tea Party movement is a big dynamic that did not exist in '08 -- maybe it makes Santorum or Perry more electable than they would have been at similar stages in other cycles.

I just think we overrate electability at this point. In a short time, whether it is weeks or months, we're going to have a candidate. What the polls say now about X or Y's standing head-to-head against Obama is close to meaningless. The election is going to be about how fed up with Obama the public is (or isn't), and that is a judgment that will be made against the backdrop of some known unknowns (debt, jobs, the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision, Iran, Europe's financial crisis ...) and some unknown unknowns. Some of those things will tee up better for some of our guys than for others. But I think the GOP candidates who seem most plausible right now are in the range of acceptability needed to beat the president.

Personally, I can't get myself whipped up about which GOP candidate a handful of Dems say they want to run against -- some spinning, some maybe not. Let's face it: Every one of our guys presents some enticing vulnerabilities for the Obama camp. The problem they have is: We get to run against the president -- as the only folks in the election who will want to talk about his record. I think their problem is bigger than our problem.

Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney Are Right About Adoption

... and Terence Jeffrey is wrong. Adoption, like marriage, is not a matter the Constitution commits to federal government control. It is, like the vast run of day-to-day issues, a matter to be determined by the states. There is nothing conservative about imposing federal government mandates on matters the Constitution gives the federal government no say over.

If gay marriage is to be banned, it should be done, as Sen. Santorum and Gov. Romney said, by a constitutional amendment. That is the proper way of establishing a national standard when we decide we need to have one and the Constitution does not presently provide one.

As Rick and Mitt went on to say, if there were a federal marriage amendment in place and it did not address adoption, then marriage would be limited to man/woman couples but adoption would be a state law issue.

If Mr. Jeffrey wants a federal adoption standard imposed, then he should be arguing for a constitutional amendment banning adoptions by gay couples. But assuming the hypothetical that Rick and Mitt were addressing -- a marriage amendment and no adoption amendment -- there is nothing incoherent or inconsistent about positing that gay marriage would not be recognized nationally and adoption by gay couples would be decided by the states. That is how federalism works.