Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 45

More on Bachmann fighting fire with ... Steyn

Mark, Michele is making excellent use of one of the (many) flabbergasting facts in your tremendous book (I should say problematic book -- it's a problem for me in the sense that I have work to do but I can't put it down). Here she is in the Fox interview with Chris Wallace yesterday, about 14 minutes in, giving what's become her favorite example of why we need to reject President Obama's "new normal" government spending levels:

We had one employee at the federal Department of Transportation that made $170,000 a year at the beginning of the recession. We had the trillion dollar stimulus and eighteen months into the recession we had 1,690 employees making over $170,000. Government has really been growing at a lot of largesse. But people in the real world aren’t.  And that’s what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world.

No conformity at all -- as Mark says, "They're upturn girls living in a downturn world."

Since we're talking about shadows over Ames ...

Sarah Palin had 'em fired up last night. Interview with Sean is here.

Romney's Federalism

On a night when he was the clear winner, it was only natural that Mitt Romney got off the best line of Thursday’s GOP presidential debate. “Are you familiar with the Massachusetts constitution?”

He posed that question to Chris Wallace, the Fox News panelist who had been grilling him on Romneycare, the health-insurance program imposed on Bay State residents by the former Massachusetts governor and the state’s legislature. Governor Romney’s rivals have been pounding away at the program, portraying it as the model for Obamacare -- the deeply unpopular foundation for a nationally socialized health-care system, vigorous opposition to which catapulted Republicans to historic success in the 2010 midterm elections.

#ad#For good reason, GOP presidential hopefuls see immovable opposition to Obamacare as key to wresting the Oval Office from its current occupant. Romney’s frontrunner status, they reason, owes more to the party establishment’s dubious “It’s his turn” tradition than to any groundswell of support from the grassroots that swept Democrats out in the midterms. So the strategy is to use Romneycare -- particularly its dread mandate that individuals buy health insurance -- to hang Obamacare and its Big Government noose around Romney’s neck. Tim Pawlenty, a candidate groping for traction, has even coined the term “Obamneycare” to highlight the similarities between the two schemes.

That’s exactly where Mr. Wallace was going. “Do you believe the government has#...#the right to make someone buy a good or service just because they [sic] are a U.S. resident?#...#Where do you find that authority in the Constitution?”

It was then that Governor Romney abruptly turned the tables, challenging his questioner’s own understanding of constitutional law -- to be specific, the law laid down in a constitution that is both seven years older than the federal one and, under the GOP’s oft-claimed (but rarely practiced) small-government allegiance, more pertinent to the matter of health care.

Mr. Wallace is a Beltway habitué. That he seemed nonplussed by Romney’s retort is to be expected. In Washington, there is nothing but Washington. When they talk about “the government” they are thinking only of our soon-to-be $17 trillion–in–the–red collosus. What is surprising, though, is how little the other candidates on the stage seemed to grasp what Romney was talking about, notwithstanding their chest-pounding about slashing the size of government.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no more convinced that Governor Romney bleeds Tenth Amendment red than I am that Ron Paul is coming around on that whole Federal Reserve thing. Romney has a significant political vulnerability, and, like a lawyer boxed in by precedents, he’s got to take his escape hatches wherever he can find them. He may have landed on the Massachusetts constitution more out of necessity than conviction.

But land there he did, and it just might save him. To make this argument, the governor, who is clearly a sharp guy, has had to wrap his brain around the principle of federalism and what it portends: concepts of state sovereignty and limited central government in a pluralistic republic.

Let’s put health care to the side. Say a governor and state legislature had enacted a scheme to establish a state religion, or at least to advantage one religion over others. One could argue that this was -- or was not -- unwise policy. It certainly seems as hostile to liberty as the idea of coercing a citizen to buy a commodity as a condition of citizenship. Yet, for the first 160 years of governance under the federal constitution, there would have been nothing objectionable about it under U.S. law. Until the Supreme Court suddenly decided to “incorporate” the Establishment Clause against the states, the First Amendment was no bar. The federal government, as Jefferson put it, was “interdicted from intermeddling” in matters of religion -- religion was an issue left to the states and their citizens, and we trusted them to handle it responsibly.

That is the way our system is supposed to work. The federal government has a few discrete areas of national concern to regulate. The rest belong to the states and the people, to regulate or not as they see fit. In a free society, that means decisions on most matters of community life get made by the community that has to live with them -- and pay for them. In a pluralistic society, that means we could have 50 different ways of doing things -- meaning that if you find yourself in a state that is foolish enough to mandate the purchase of health insurance subsidized by taxes or penalties, you are free to move to some state that isn’t.

#page#The inability in a federalist system to impose a “one size fits all” solution on every choice decompresses a society -- which is now a society of over 300 million people with very different ideas about how we should live. It promotes social harmony by allowing people to gravitate to the communities where life best suits them.

If I were living in Massachusetts (or anyplace else), I would argue that health care is not a corporate asset and that it’s none of anyone’s business whether I choose to buy coverage. But if I lost that debate, and if the coercive mandate law bothered me enough, I could move to some state where the law was different. Or I might decide that, in the greater scheme of things, life in Massachusetts was worth enduring the nuisance and costs of state policies to which I objected. But in either event, none of my calculations would be the concern of someone living in, say, Colorado -- at least as long as he wasn’t being made to pay for it.

#ad#To the contrary, Romney’s competitors opined that the federal constitution barred states like Massachusetts from imposing an individual mandate as part of an effort to ensure that every citizen in the state was covered. And from there, the putative champions of limited government went haywire. Some want gay marriage banned. Some want abortion banned and criminalized. If you listened to them long enough, it was like listening to Democrats: If I disapprove of it, surely it must be prohibited. If I approve, surely it must be the law.

I confess to thinking we’ve lost our way. The Framers gave us a federal constitution for a confident, self-determining people -- people who could be trusted to make sensible choices, to govern themselves through legislation rather than be strait-jacketed in the uncompromising logic of law.

I happen to think gay marriage is an oddity -- a category error that misconstrues the concept and institution of marriage. But I also appreciate that many people of good will (as opposed to people pushing a corrosive, anti-establishment agenda) would permit it out of an admirable desire to treat homosexuals with compassion and accord them some of the legal privileges (tax treatment, property rights, inheritance, etc.) attendant to marriage.

I’m not crazy about the idea, but neither am I threatened by it. I don’t believe there are enough gay people who will want to marry that the institution of marriage will be meaningfully imperiled. Public opinion remains decidedly against gay marriage, and most states will never permit it. I don’t see the harm in allowing the few states that would vote to permit it do just that -- as long as other states may ban it in accordance with their own public policy, and as long as it is not a stealth invalidation of sincerely held religious beliefs. Gay marriage should never mean that Catholic adoption services must place babies with gay couples or cease operating.

Some respond, “Well, if you permit gay marriage, what’s to stop polygamy?” But if X then Y is a legal argument. We are a body politic, not the slaves of remorseless chains of legal reasoning. Legislation that permits one set of arrangements doesn’t require us to take the next step on the slippery slope.

Abortion is a heinous moral wrong because it takes human life. It is no less a taking of human life if conception is the result of rape or incest. Yet our society, fully understanding why it is revolted by abortion, favors these exceptions. And it wants abortion banned, but it does not want doctors and women prosecuted. These may not be logical distinctions, but they are sensible ones. They are accommodations that enable us to live harmoniously without agreeing. And they would prevent the vast majority of abortions.

If you want the federal constitution to ban something, then amend it. A constitutional amendment is not a prohibition imposed by the federal government, for the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. government are not the same thing. The Constitution is the compact of the people setting forth the terms on which we are bound together as a nation. In essence, it cannot be amended unless the provision in question garners super-majority support (two-thirds) in Congress, and then super-duper majority assent (three-fourths) in the states.

If banning state health-care mandates, gay marriage, and abortion, or other conservative policy prescriptions, can surmount those high hurdles, then they truly are reflective of the national will -- of what it means to be an American. That is what is minimally necessary before they should be imposed as a condition of living in the United States. Same for the Left’s agenda. If a policy preference can’t meet that demanding test, then by all means continue trying to convince people to see it your way. But in the meantime, these are matters for the states to decide for themselves -- and we ought to be confident that our fellow Americans will make rational choices, even if they differ from the choices we would make.

#page#One other thing: The country is going broke. Our fiscal straits are not going to be fixed by reconfiguring “baseline-budgeting” or prescribing “spending caps.” That is fantasy. It implies that the federal government should be intruding into every area of our lives, but just in a more moderate way -- one that leaves us, say, $22 trillion in debt rather than $24 trillion.

No, that won’t do. This gets solved only by drastically slashing the functions of the central government. It gets solved by zeroing out departments, agencies, and bureaucracies; by returning those functions to the states so that the people directly affected can decide what ought to be done and how much they’re willing to pay for it -- not with other people’s money but with their own.

#ad#That will never happen -- and thus, we will never pull back from the brink -- unless we return to the Original Idea: Trust the states and the people to govern themselves.

I think Mitt’s on to something. 

— 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.

One More on Riots as Protests

Stanley, I take your point, but I'm not really much moved by it. As you said in the first post, Livingstone is arguing that people should see the riots as political protest. The obvious effect of such a claim, if accepted, is to give the lawlessness the patina of legitimacy. On that point, It makes no difference that Livingstone is not in the trenches stoking the violence. Nor does it matter whether it was his intention to support or encourage the violence. By arguing that riots should be seen as dissent rather than mayhem, he spins them as righteous even if he personally thinks this method of conveying dissent goes too far. He is trying to make this about what he takes to be the underlying grievances rather than the lawless conduct. That has the effect of supporting the rioters regardless of whether that is his purpose -- and because I believe he is smart enough to know that, I can only conclude that he is doing this willfully.

As far as Obama is concerned, I was careful to say "lawlessness" rather than "rioting," which is a specific and extreme form of lawlessness. Still, even if Obama eventually came around to the point of seeking to channel the anger behind lawlessness into "productive electoral paths," your book documents that he has a history of resorting to "direct action" (or "Alinskyite hardball," as you aptly refer to it). You relate, for example, the 1988 landfill controversy in Chicago, in which Obama helped plan a demonstration that included breaking into a meeting between bank officials and community leaders for the purpose of enabling the demonstrators ("presumably including Obama," you point out) to intimidate the people in the meeting so they would not strike a deal. Moreover, you further show that, in his work on foundation boards, Obama steered funds to leftist groups like ACORN that had a history of advocating and participating in "direct action." 

The kind of lawlessness we're talking about does not rise to the level of rioting (although some of ACORN's shenanigans come pretty close), but it is extortionate, which is in the same ballpark. (And relatedly, I'm also convinced by your book's well supported surmise that Obama knew exactly who former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were when he teamed up with them on various things.) Once public actors expressly or impliedly endorse forms of extra-legal intimidation as a legitimate way of pursuing political objectives, they've contributed to the culture of lawlessness that leads to rioting -- whether that was their intention or not. Public actors have to stand unambiguously against extra-legal intimidation, extortion, and mayhem. Once they expressly or implicitly green-light steps outside the laws and processes of civil society, it becomes impossible to control how bad things will get because they've undermined the very premise that there are boundaries for our behavior. (If this is a misimpression in President Obama's case, I don't think, say, his administration's dismissal of the Black Panthers voter intimidation case was the best way to correct it.)

The Coming Crisis Over Palestinian Statehood

Even as we sort out the latest financial crisis, Newt Gingrich is calling our attention to the fact that, in just a few short weeks, we will be confronted by a hostile political power play on the international stage: a push by Palestinians, supported by Islamists, Europeans, and most of the rest of the U.N. to declare Palestinian statehood -- with East Jerusalem as the new state's capital and territory stretching to the 1967 borders (i.e., encompassing some of what is now Israeli territory -- thank you, President Obama).

Highlighting Anne Bayefsky's watchful eye on the U.N., the former House Speaker notes that in announcing anticipated speakers at the September opening session, the U.N. lists the speaker from "Palestine" as the "Head of State" -- the first time this has been done. Speaker Gingrich says of the U.N-Palestinian Authority plan to push for statehood without negotiating with Israel:

It would violate every standing agreement the Palestinians have with Israel, including the Oslo Accords, to negotiate a final border agreement. U.N. recognition would take place totally apart from any negotiation with Israel, and without the Palestinians renouncing violence or acknowledging Israel's statehood. The possibility of Western nations voting in favor of the plan at the U.N. would also strengthen terrorists' belief that their commitment to violence and their unwavering rejection of Israel's right to exist has begun to produce their desired goals.

So what the Obama administration do to thwart this U.N.-driven aggression? Newt argues that we should take a page out of recent history -- from 1989, to be precise:

The United States has the leverage to prevent this diplomatic disaster if the Obama Administration wants to use it: we are by far the largest donor to the U.N., financing roughly a quarter of its entire budget.

We should be willing to say that if the U.N. is going to circumvent negotiations and declare the territory of one of its own members an independent state, we aren't going to pay for it. We can keep our $7.6 billion a year. We don't need to fund a corrupt institution to beat up on our allies.

That is exactly how President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker handled a similar drive to force Palestinian statehood in 1989. As Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has pointed out, the Palestine Liberation Organization attempted at that time to earn recognition by the U.N. as a state, and its effort won significant support. But rather than cave to the Palestinians' manipulations, Secretary Baker warned that the U.S. would cut off contributions to U.N. agencies if they upgraded the P.L.O.'s status.

It worked back then. Can it work now? Unfortunately, we have an administration more inclined to cause diplomatic disasters than prevent them -- one that is more committed to U.N. multilateral governance than U.S. interests (See Doug Feith and Seth Cropsey's terrific cover essay in the July issue of Commentary), and one that has repeatedly taken the Palestinian side against our ally, reaffirming the U.N. message that terrorism, aggression, and denying a nation-state's right to exist are perfectly acceptable methods of achieving political objectives.

Nevertheless, as Prime Minister Netanyahu's recent visit to Washington illustrated, Israel has very strong bipartisan support in Congress -- and Congress can have a major say in whether we fund the U.N. Moreover, as the 2012 campaign heats up, this is an opportunity for GOP presidential candidates to drive the debate and put additional pressure on the White House. On the eve of an important debate among the announced candidates, Speaker Gingrich has picked just the right time to throw down this gauntlet. 

Re: Riots as Protests

Stanley, I agree with most of your analysis, but I think we parse it too fine when we start down the road of whether sympathetic commentary about lawlessness by people in the public eye is indicative of those people's support for the lawlessness.

We have watched this game be played for years by Islamists and Leftists -- as I recount in The Grand Jihad. Let's put aside for the moment that Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood are somehow hailed by their Western apologists as having forsworn violence even though Hamas is one of their organizations and even though their leaders endorse suicide attacks and praise bin Laden. The Brotherhood has ostentatiously rebuked al Qaeda's tactics at times -- all the while, again, praising al Qaeda in some of its statements to Arabic speaking audiences. These public displays obscure, quite intentionally, the fact that the Brotherhood and al Qaeda are on the same page as far as goals are concerned -- they want societies Islamicized.

The Brotherhood knows that there is no meaningful popular support in the U.S. (and in most of the West) for its agenda. But it punches above its weight -- i.e., its front organizations get lavish, respectful attention from government and from media -- because it is successfully leveraging the atmosphere of intimidation created by the terrorists. Their not so subtle message is: Incrementally accommodate us reasonable, moderate Islamists or create the rage and resentment (which we will stoke) that provokes terrorist attacks. While we debate ad nauseam whether they are really pro-terrorist or anti-terrorist, they laugh all the way to the sharia-compliant bank.

As you've documented for years here, and in Radical-in-Chief, "direct action" (lawlessness to extort concessions by the state and civil society) is a key part of the community organizer playbook. Even if organizers and their allies engage in lip-service condemnations of radical lawlessness, that lawlessness is knowingly leveraged to increase the bargaining power of Leftists as they pursue an agenda that just happens to be the same agenda the law-breakers desire. To me, it's irrelevant whether public officials and other public figures are sincere in condemning violence if they are willfully exploiting the violence for their own ends.

Violent extortion is a black-and-white thing -- often, a life-and-death thing. I think it's a mistake to overcomplicate it with a bunch of psychobabble in the nature of, "While we certain condemn the lawlessness, we must understand and address the root causes ..." You are either for civilization or against it. That's not a question as to which we ought to entertain a middle ground.

Re: The Newsweek Bachmann Cover

Andrew, great inside photography insights -- many thanks for them. I have a question. Would Christopher Buck have had to provide Newsweek with every shot he took, or would he have first winnowed them down to whatever number he submitted? I understand you're saying the photographer is not to be blamed for what happened, and obviously it is the magazine that decides what to put on its cover. But I am trying to understand whether Mr. Buck could have held back an photo that was poor professional quality (whatever its propaganda value) but elected not to. Does he just give the mag his whole disk (or chip, or ...?), or does he vet the shots first?

Re: 'He Will Have to Kill Romney'

How quickly we've gone from "Change you can believe in" to "Leave the guy, take the cannoli"!

Outrageous 7th Circuit Ruling Against Don Rumsfeld

I've been too busy to write about the ruling by a sharply divided three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit U.S. appeals court that former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld can be sued personally by two contractors who were detained in Iraq on suspicion of supplying weapons to insurgents. Were it to be upheld, the decision would be a disastrous blow against our armed forces -- inviting exactly the lawfare offensive that the Supreme Court warned against 60 years ago in the Eisentrager case.

Our friend David Rivkin is representing Secretary Rumsfeld. David has issued this statement:

Today’s decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is a blow to the U.S. military. According to two judges on the court, the judicial branch is best-suited to decide how to handle detainees captured and held in foreign war zones.  This decision is troubling, particularly for the uniformed personnel throughout the entire chain of command who are defendants in this lawsuit. Having judges second-guess the decisions made by the armed forces halfway around the world is no way to wage a war.  It saps the effectiveness of the military, puts American soldiers at risk, and shackles federal officials who have a constitutional duty to protect America.  That is why the Supreme Court has rejected every lawsuit filed by individuals seeking money damages against those who set and carry out national security policy.

Vague and unsupported allegations should not be sufficient to pull cabinet officials and military officers and soldiers up and down the chain of command into court and distract them from their duty to the country.  Indeed, that is exactly what federal courts of appeal and the Supreme Court have uniformly held—until this aberrant decision.  

We are confident that this legally mistaken and factually unsupported decision will ultimately be reversed.  

We agree with Judge Daniel Manion, who dissented from the two judges’ decision, that the court today has acted to “create new law” contrary to binding Supreme Court precedent and that acting in this “perilous arena is Congress’s role, not the courts’.”  Like Judge Manion, we are disappointed in the court’s “failure to recognize the consequences of its holding and the precedent it sets.” The same criticisms apply equally to the decision issued last week by a lower court in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Department of Justice is representing Secretary Rumsfeld and the other defendants in both of these matters. These are just two of the many dozens of lawsuits that have been filed against former cabinet officials and military personnel.  

When this case was brought to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, every living former Secretary of Defense, as well as numerous other national security officials, stepped forward to support the defendants in this case.  They recognize, correctly, the danger of subjecting military personnel and senior officials to civil litigation and personal liability for carrying out their duties. 

The decision of two judges not to dismiss the case was a serious mistake, but it will ultimately be reversed, just as the Supreme Court has twice thrown out similar cases against Attorney General John Ashcroft. 

The SEAL Tragedy

[Link to Max Boot's op-ed fixed.]

In the WSJ, Max Boot has an insightful, and at times moving, account of the failed mission this weekend, in which the Taliban shot down a helicopter killing 30 Americans, most members of the legendary SEAL Team Six, along with eight Afghans. The SEALs were on a rescue mission -- another U.S. contingent, Max explains, was caught in a firefight, which is how the enemy knew to look for the help that was on the way. 

As I've said before, too many times those of us who are critical of ambitious nation-building in the Middle East have over-emphasized the democracy project aspect of the mission (to which we object -- at least insofar as it risks our military to accomplish this dubious feat) and overlooked that a prominent feature of the mission is taking the fight to the enemy. As Max writes: 

... U.S. commandos generate intelligence, locate targets, and then swoop down on them. The "operators" are the model of manly understatement. They don't brag but convey a quiet confidence that they know what they are doing—and they do. As has been reported in several outlets, the Joint Special Operations Command—which comprises Navy SEALs, the Army's Delta Team, the Air Force's "Night Stalker" helicopter crews and other, even more clandestine forces—carries out a dozen operations a night in Afghanistan alone. Other JSOC contingents carry out raids in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and other lands where al Qaeda and its ilk operate. Most of these operations go so smoothly—resulting in a "jackpot," a wanted suspect killed or captured—that there is no mention of them in the press.

Max goes on to argue that the counterterrorism raids are necessary but insufficient to defeat the Taliban and its allies. A successful counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, he emphasizes, requires integration of these raids with "a critical number of boots on the ground," which enable our guys to hold the hostile areas that have been secured by clearing out the enemy.

This is where the COIN guys lose me. The idea is to clear and hold until we can turn our territorial gains over to competent Afghan forces, which we are training while, simultaneously, the Afghan population we are securing comes to buy in to the Afghan government we are nurturing. I won't belabor the record by repeating the reasons why I don't think this can work (certainly not in a few short years) and why it's fantasy to think Afghan Muslims are going to side with us against their fellow Afghan Muslims -- especially when the Obama administration is powerfully signaling that it wants to negotiate with, rather than annihilate, the Taliban, and get out of Afghanistan ASAP.

I am all for putting more boots on the ground -- lots more. But only if what we're trying to achieve is victory. That means victory over our enemies and their ultimate state sponsor, Iran -- which, despite its historic tensions with the Taliban, is delighted to assist the Taliban if the goal is killing Americans. We need to defeat the mullahs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and everyplace else they are promoting anti-American terror, including Tehran ... why we have made their territory immune from attack while they kill our troops with impunity in every other country is beyond me. This is not the Soviet Union we're talking about here -- it's Iran.

If we made a concrete enemy, Iran, our focal point -- instead of abstractions like "democracy," "freedom," "violent extremism," and "counterterrorism" -- our Middle East policy would be a lot more coherent and successful. Not necessarily invading Iran -- although not taking that option off the table -- but making clear that we seek both regime change and the defeat of Iran wherever in the world it operates. Moreover, for those committed to the freedom agenda, maybe I'm wrong that Islamic countries are not promising places for its advance, but you have to defeat the enemy first for freedom to have a prayer. Achieving victory over Iran and its confederation of terrorist regimes and factions, rather than the tenuous accommodation we seem to be aiming at, is an unavoidable precondition to real democracy promotion.

If we are not willing to make this commitment, to double down and defeat the enemy, then we must resign ourselves to this downward spiral in which (a) after all our enormous sacrifice, Iran continues extending its tentacles through the countries we've liberated and, while turning increasingly anti-American, those countries come to experience a different tyranny; and (b) we lose more of our heroic troops as their diminishing numbers make their counterterrorism missions more dangerous and degrade their capacity for self-defense -- against enemies who want to suggest to the world that Allah's mujahideen are chasing us out of the region and vanquishing a second superpower.  

That brings me to a final quote from Max Boot:

The loss underscores how heroic these men are—volunteers multiple times over who give up hope of a normal life to spend month after month deployed in one war zone after another chasing some of the most dangerous terrorists on earth. They know the risks they run: All Special Operations headquarters have a "wall of honor" displaying the pictures of fallen heroes—all supremely fit and dedicated young men struck down in the prime of life. Yet their comrades routinely strap on body armor and mount helicopters, night after night, knowing that their picture could soon hang on that wall.

While we should be in awe of special operators and their accomplishments, we should keep their capabilities in perspective: They cannot win a war by themselves.

No they can't. That's up to us. We either honor the memory of these brave warriors by resolving to win the war, with all that entails, or we should get out now before we lose more of them.