If I were an invited guest in your home, there is a tacit expectation about how I should comport myself while enjoying your hospitality. While I might think your home décor is frumpy, your dog is the product of a confused gene pool, and the dinner was on par with the Golden Corral, unless I want a quick escort to the door, I’d best keep those views to myself.
Not so with Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa, the President of Mexico, who apparently feels that anyone with five names, one of which is Jesús, has the right to critique the domestic affairs of another country.
Scorning the box that had been provided behind the podium so that, standing side by side, Calderón and Obama wouldn’t look like Mutt and Jeff, the Mexican president concluded his official visit to the Obama White House last week with this inchoate polemic against Arizona’s efforts to defend itself against the invading hoards from Mexico:
“In Mexico, we are and will continue being respectful of the internal policies of the United States and its legitimate right to establish in accordance to its Constitution whatever laws it approves. (How comforting.)
“But we will retain our firm rejection to criminalize migration so that people that work and provide things to this nation will be treated as criminals." (Let me see if I’ve got this right, Filipe. You believe that your people, who break into this country illegally but “work and provide things to this nation,” should get a free pass and shouldn’t be considered criminals? This wouldn’t have anything to do with the $25 billion your illegal worker bees send back to the mother country, would it?)
Then Calderón’s tag team partner stepped to the podium:
“I think the Arizona law has the potential of being applied in a discriminatory fashion. Now, after it was initially passed, the Arizona Legislature amended it and said that this should not be carried out in a discriminatory way. But I think a fair reading of the language of the statute indicates that it gives the possibility of individuals who are deemed suspicious of being illegal immigrants from being harassed or arrested. And the judgments that are going to be made in applying this law are troublesome.”
Translated: “I agree with the little guy.”
One would expect that the president of the United States, who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, a provision of which compels the president to protect the country against invasion, would not side with a representative of the country that is invading it.
This Obama-Calderón rope-a-dope of American popular sovereignty – a term which means the will of the people in a constitutional democracy is the only foundation for government – was carefully scripted before the White House press conference. It would have to have had Obama’s approval or else Calderón would never have engaged in so naked an act of domestic interference.
Curiously, then, the same Obama who spends a good deal of time genuflecting to world leaders and apologizing for our past interference in the internal affairs of other countries had no problem allowing Americans to be lectured by the leader of this third world country whose administration’s major accomplishment has been stabilizing the prices of corn tortillas.
Flushed with the White House smack-down he had delivered against a constitutionally elected Arizona legislature enacting its own sovereign laws, Calderón was limo-ed down to the Capitol building so he could lecture Americans once again via their elected representatives:
“There is an issue where Mexico needs your cooperation. That is, stop the flow of high-powered weapons and other lethal weapons across the border. I fully respect and admire the U.S. Constitution. And I understand that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that all good American citizens the ability to defend themselves and their nation.
“In Mexico, over the past three years, we have seized 75,000 guns and high-powered weapons and more than 80 percent of which have been able to track, from the United States. I would ask Congress to help us … and ask [you Senators and Representatives] to consider the return of the Assault Weapons Ban.”
Of course that brought the Democrat side of the adoring assemblage to their feet, applauding and back-slapping each other in an orgasmic frenzy.
But whoa! Hold on there, Filipe. As we say down here in the land of pickup trucks, guns, and bibles, that dog won’t hunt.
Let’s just put the real issue right out front so everyone can see this drivel for what it is. The ban on assault weapons expired in the U.S. because Congress didn’t extend it – the very folks hypocritically applauding Mighty Mouse’s request. It’s Obama and his gun-hating crowd who want to reinstate it. Second Amendment gun rights advocates oppose it. Once again, Calderón meddled in a domestic political issue while acting as a shill for Obama – obviously with OB’s approval.
The term "assault weapon" is a government-engineered, emotionally charged, propaganda label intended to conjure up in the minds of the uniformed an image of a military killing tool. Pop open one of these “assault weapons” and you’ll see internal workings no more fearsome than those of a deer rifle that fires one round of ammunition for each trigger pull. In order to turn an “assault weapon” into something like an AK-47 the entire internal firing mechanism would have to be removed and replaced. Why would drug gangs go to such trouble when they can buy the real McCoy almost anywhere in the world – which is where they buy them, not in the U.S.?
Since the Calderón Administration took office, 23,000 people have been murdered in mostly drug and gun violence. Calderón is following Obama’s “Blame America First” strategy and looking for a scapegoat. Unfortunately, his argument won’t hold water because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, says that of the 100,000 weapons which the Mexican authorities recovered in shootouts with drug cartel bad guys, only 18,000 had serial numbers that could be traced to U.S. manufacturers and of those, only 7,900 were purchased from licensed gun dealers – probably by people who could pass the background check and who, for a fee, resold the weapon to a goon. The other 10,100 came from criminals who don’t bother to abide by the Assault Weapons Ban that the disingenuous Calderón appealed for Congress to reinstate.
Continuing his anti-American diatribe:
“I completely disagree with the recent adoption of the law in Arizona. It is a law that not only ignores a reality that cannot be erased by decree, but also introduces a terrible idea: using racial features as a basis for applying the law. And so I agree, I agree with the President when he says that this new law carries a high risk when they violate the basic values we all matter. (sic)”
Once again the adoring Democrats leapt to their feet in tauromachian ecstasy, including Attorney General Holder and Homeland Security chief (and former Arizona governor) Napolitano whose job performances give new meaning to the word “indolent”.
Meanwhile, the feckless Republicans sat there allowing their country and their constituents to be excoriated by President Frijoles. While it would have been the supreme insult to walk out during the insults from a head of state (or to have never shown up in the first place) it would at least have demonstrated that congressional Republicans weren’t invertebrates.
Calderón explained the meaning of the “reality that cannot be erased by decree” in a speech criticizing Arizona last month in Mexico during which he said, "Criminalizing immigration, which is a social and economic phenomena, this way opens the door to intolerance, hate, and discrimination." In other words, Calderón believes immigration, even illegal immigration, is a “social and economic” phenomenon – “a reality that cannot be erased by degree.” Gee; maybe we should replace the U.S. Border Patrol with Welcome Wagon Ladies.
El Presidente’s comment on “… using racial features as a basis for applying the law,” is comical. I don’t think too many blue-eyed blonds are going to be asked for their ID in America, and to my knowledge, illegal Mexicans don’t wear signs on their back.
But there’s a darker side to illegal crossings from Mexico that neither Calderón nor Obama wants to talk about. An increasing number of detained dark-skinned illegals are OTMs (other than Mexican) from “countries of interest” – like Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and other terrorist havens. We’ve known for years since 9/11 that this was happening because the House Committee on Homeland Security was presented a report in 2006, "A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border”, with proof of it. Our government publishes a "Captured OTM" list (shown partially at this link) and the threat was picked up as a news story by a television station owned by Ann Cox Chambers, no friend of conservative causes, and reported in Part One and Part Two segments. Both segments are worth watching.
But, back to the story at hand. After a long day of anti-American rhetoric, a fella’ needs some rest and repast. So Obama feted his best bud from south of the border with a soiree that the most grandiose party-giver would turn green-eyed with envy. Confected by the best of the best, celebrity chef Rick Bayless, a master of Mexican cuisine, was flown in from – where else – Chicagoland to make the magic happen.
While unemployment flitted around 10%, the stock market was in a free-fall, oil burbled from an explosion in the Gulf, North Korea snarled at its southern neighbor, and soldiers were dying in Afghanistan, the beautiful people, about 200 of them, attired in tuxedos and gowns, attended the White House state dinner and dined on an herb green ceviche of Hawaiian opah appetizer followed by Oregon Wagyu beef in Oaxacan black molé (a Mexican concoction, which we proletariats would call salsa) with side dishes of black bean tamalon and grilled green beans, washed down by two wines crafted by Mexican vintners and a sparking wine with the eponymous name Carlos Santana après the legendary rock star.
After a triple dessert of chocolate-cajeta tart, toasted homemade marshmallows, and Graham cracker crumble and goat cheese ice cream, the beautiful people sauntered out to a “luxury marquee on the South Lawn of the presidential mansion,” which southern bubbas would call a big tent, about the size of the first 65 yards of a football field, replete with stage and dance floor. There they were treated to the entertainment of R&B diva, Beyonce, while lights coruscated like the half-time laser show at the Super Bowl. The evening was topped off by dancing as Barack and Michelle boogied the night away.
One thing you can say about the Obamas: they sure know how to party – at taxpayer expense.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
“… you’ve made enough money.”
Once again the real Obama, the one he kept repressed well enough to get elected, pushed the cork out of the bottle when he began to speak sans the teleprompter to an Illinois crowd recently as he tried to sell his massive, ObamaCare-rivaling Wall Street reform bill.
His prepared remarks, handed out in advance to reporters, said:
“Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.”
But when he began ad libbing, it came out like this:
We’re not … we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean … I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But … you know … part of the American way is… you know… you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop … ah … fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.
“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”?
“… we [don’t] begrudge success that’s fairly earned”?
“We don’t want people to stop … fulfilling the core responsibilities … to grow the economy”?
Wow! Freud would have a field day with these revealing, subconscious disclosures.
So, the worldview of the Maximum Leader is that people deserve a certain amount of money, and when they earn that amount, that’s enough? Who decides how much is enough? Him? Obama wants to limit our salt and fat intake, medical treatments, and energy consumption. Now he wants a say in the fruits of our labor?
Seems to me that how much money people want to earn is sorta’ up to them in a private enterprise economy. Obama made $5.5 million dollars last year. Good for him. But if you average his income over 12 months, he passed the “enough” mark in early January when he had already ascended into the stratospheric top 1% of incomes.
Elena Kagan, Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court (who, we’re told, really relates to “ordinary people”) revealed in her Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week that she is a debt-free millionaire. Her net worth is more than $1.76 million according to her disclosure documents – making her distinctly unlike ordinary people. I wonder if Obama thinks she’s made enough.
Continuing his ad lib, OB said: “… we [don’t] begrudge success that’s fairly earned.” Gee. I guess success begrudgement has nothing to do, then, with a tax code that discriminates against the most successful half of income earners who pay all of the federal income tax while the political class unceasingly whines that the “rich” don’t pay their fair share.
Why even mention begrudging success unless you begrudge success?
Hey; I don’t begrudge you having a $110,000 car.
You don’t? Then why did you bring it up?
Ah! But there’s a qualifier. “We (I assume that’s the royal plural pronominal self-reference) ... we don’t begrudge success if it’s ‘fairly’ earned” And “fairly earned” would be …???
Dale Earnhardt Jr. will probably make about $35 million this year driving a car in circles at dangerous speeds. Is that fairly earned? After all, he doesn’t go anywhere.
How about Tiger Woods? Splitting his career between women and golf, (about 50/50, I think) he will still bank about $110 million this year for repeatedly hitting a little white ball and is on track to be the first athlete with a career income of $1 billion. Is that fairly earned? Has he made “enough”? Too much?
Are the billions we pay Congress and the President “fairly earned” when they push through legislation over the objections of the voters they were elected to serve? And to add insult to injury they exempt themselves from it?
Then comes this loopy Obamaspeak: “We don’t want people to stop … fulfilling the core responsibilities … to grow the economy.”
Since when did it become anyone’s “core responsibility” to “grow the economy”? I don’t think the purpose of my day job is “to grow the economy.” The economy grows when I and others do our jobs well and get to keep enough of our income from government theft that we are able to buy things and create more jobs.
In his Discourse on Trade, written in 1691, Sir Dudley North wrote:
“The main spur to Trade, or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is the exorbitant Appetites of Men, which they will take pains to gratifie, and so be disposed to work, when nothing else will incline them to it; for did Men content themselves with bare Necessaries, we should have a poor World.”
Old Dudley understood human nature. If folks were inclined to earn just enough to get by, we would have a poorer world than the one we have. It is the “exorbitant appetites of men” that incline people to work hard and take pains (and risks) to “gratifie” those appetites. Enriching the world or local economy is a by-product of that pursuit.
But there is a way to kill the golden goose that America has been since Jamestown: implement Obamanomics. Back when Candidate Obama encountered Joe the Plumber, once again off the teleprompter, thus scaring the bejeebers out of his handlers who knew they were hearing tomorrow’s headlines, the guy who believes “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” justified his intention to raise taxes (on the half of Americans that pay them) because "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna’ be good for everyone. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everyone."
What a winning idea! Why don’t we start with the richest man in the world who, according to Forbes, is Carlos Slim Helú. And by a stroke of good fortune, he’s a Mexican – with a net worth of about $55 billion. Let’s see now, Mexico has a population of about 111 million people in about 28 million households … $55 billion divided by 28 million … carry the zero … good grief! If we could just persuade Slim to embrace the enlightened ideas of Obamanomics, that would give every Mexican household almost $2,000. Of course, Slim would be a one-trick pony ‘cause he could only do this once. But if we work this right, it might get the 11 million Mexican illegals who broke into our country to reverse course and break into their own country.
Like Willie Sutton, who said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” the United States has its problem with illegal Mexican immigration because this is where the money is. I really get torqued by the morally bankrupt Mexican administrations whose leaders, ever since the Aztecs were in charge, stuff their pockets with cash, export their poverty to this country, and then have the chutzpah to lecture us, as Filipe Calderon did this week, about the inherent injustice of illegal immigration and the racism of the new Arizona law, which is a copy of the unenforced federal law. Of course, Barack “Blame America First” Obama, congenially standing next to Calderon, had no problem with the scolding. At least he didn’t bow to the guy.
When I think of the richest people in America – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison (Oracle), the family of Sam Walton, and Sergey Brin (Google) – I don’t hew to any of Obama’s screwball ideas about work and wealth. It is these people, whose pursuit of stretch goal achievements created a better world – not the statist government that Obama is trying to create. These people weren’t concerned with cockamamie ideas like “core responsibilities” to “grow the economy.”
Unlike Obama’s zero-sum view of wealth, I can’t imagine that anyone feels defrauded by the billions these people have accumulated because they earned those billions in transactions where customers and clients got what they wanted in return for the money they paid over. Both parties to the transactions won – something Obama doesn’t get because he and the political class of his ilk have never ever created economic value!
Obama, Elena Kagan, and other beneficiaries of liberal guilt are elitists because they rose too fast in their careers to mature in the process. They were helped by too many invisible hands that’ll never get any credit for opening the doors to the success they currently enjoy. And they are bereft of any of the humbling reverses most of us commoners suffered early in our careers that has kept us from believing our own baloney later in our careers – unlike the Obamas of elite political society.
A Rasmussen poll this week found that many voters (41%) feel that a randomly selected sample of people from the phone book could do a better job than their elected representatives in Congress. That’s up 8 percentage points since Obama took the White House and Congress encamped in the Capitol.
I’m not surprised. Since the founding of the Republic over 200 years ago, our leaders, with few exceptions, have been lawyers, and there has been little variance in their number – about 65% of the Senate, about 50% of the House, and most of the presidents.
Ironically, the people we elect to wield the greatest influence over the American economy are the same people who have had the least success in creating it.
His prepared remarks, handed out in advance to reporters, said:
“Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.”
But when he began ad libbing, it came out like this:
We’re not … we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean … I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But … you know … part of the American way is… you know… you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop … ah … fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.
“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”?
“… we [don’t] begrudge success that’s fairly earned”?
“We don’t want people to stop … fulfilling the core responsibilities … to grow the economy”?
Wow! Freud would have a field day with these revealing, subconscious disclosures.
So, the worldview of the Maximum Leader is that people deserve a certain amount of money, and when they earn that amount, that’s enough? Who decides how much is enough? Him? Obama wants to limit our salt and fat intake, medical treatments, and energy consumption. Now he wants a say in the fruits of our labor?
Seems to me that how much money people want to earn is sorta’ up to them in a private enterprise economy. Obama made $5.5 million dollars last year. Good for him. But if you average his income over 12 months, he passed the “enough” mark in early January when he had already ascended into the stratospheric top 1% of incomes.
Elena Kagan, Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court (who, we’re told, really relates to “ordinary people”) revealed in her Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week that she is a debt-free millionaire. Her net worth is more than $1.76 million according to her disclosure documents – making her distinctly unlike ordinary people. I wonder if Obama thinks she’s made enough.
Continuing his ad lib, OB said: “… we [don’t] begrudge success that’s fairly earned.” Gee. I guess success begrudgement has nothing to do, then, with a tax code that discriminates against the most successful half of income earners who pay all of the federal income tax while the political class unceasingly whines that the “rich” don’t pay their fair share.
Why even mention begrudging success unless you begrudge success?
Hey; I don’t begrudge you having a $110,000 car.
You don’t? Then why did you bring it up?
Ah! But there’s a qualifier. “We (I assume that’s the royal plural pronominal self-reference) ... we don’t begrudge success if it’s ‘fairly’ earned” And “fairly earned” would be …???
Dale Earnhardt Jr. will probably make about $35 million this year driving a car in circles at dangerous speeds. Is that fairly earned? After all, he doesn’t go anywhere.
How about Tiger Woods? Splitting his career between women and golf, (about 50/50, I think) he will still bank about $110 million this year for repeatedly hitting a little white ball and is on track to be the first athlete with a career income of $1 billion. Is that fairly earned? Has he made “enough”? Too much?
Are the billions we pay Congress and the President “fairly earned” when they push through legislation over the objections of the voters they were elected to serve? And to add insult to injury they exempt themselves from it?
Then comes this loopy Obamaspeak: “We don’t want people to stop … fulfilling the core responsibilities … to grow the economy.”
Since when did it become anyone’s “core responsibility” to “grow the economy”? I don’t think the purpose of my day job is “to grow the economy.” The economy grows when I and others do our jobs well and get to keep enough of our income from government theft that we are able to buy things and create more jobs.
In his Discourse on Trade, written in 1691, Sir Dudley North wrote:
“The main spur to Trade, or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is the exorbitant Appetites of Men, which they will take pains to gratifie, and so be disposed to work, when nothing else will incline them to it; for did Men content themselves with bare Necessaries, we should have a poor World.”
Old Dudley understood human nature. If folks were inclined to earn just enough to get by, we would have a poorer world than the one we have. It is the “exorbitant appetites of men” that incline people to work hard and take pains (and risks) to “gratifie” those appetites. Enriching the world or local economy is a by-product of that pursuit.
But there is a way to kill the golden goose that America has been since Jamestown: implement Obamanomics. Back when Candidate Obama encountered Joe the Plumber, once again off the teleprompter, thus scaring the bejeebers out of his handlers who knew they were hearing tomorrow’s headlines, the guy who believes “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” justified his intention to raise taxes (on the half of Americans that pay them) because "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna’ be good for everyone. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everyone."
What a winning idea! Why don’t we start with the richest man in the world who, according to Forbes, is Carlos Slim Helú. And by a stroke of good fortune, he’s a Mexican – with a net worth of about $55 billion. Let’s see now, Mexico has a population of about 111 million people in about 28 million households … $55 billion divided by 28 million … carry the zero … good grief! If we could just persuade Slim to embrace the enlightened ideas of Obamanomics, that would give every Mexican household almost $2,000. Of course, Slim would be a one-trick pony ‘cause he could only do this once. But if we work this right, it might get the 11 million Mexican illegals who broke into our country to reverse course and break into their own country.
Like Willie Sutton, who said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” the United States has its problem with illegal Mexican immigration because this is where the money is. I really get torqued by the morally bankrupt Mexican administrations whose leaders, ever since the Aztecs were in charge, stuff their pockets with cash, export their poverty to this country, and then have the chutzpah to lecture us, as Filipe Calderon did this week, about the inherent injustice of illegal immigration and the racism of the new Arizona law, which is a copy of the unenforced federal law. Of course, Barack “Blame America First” Obama, congenially standing next to Calderon, had no problem with the scolding. At least he didn’t bow to the guy.
When I think of the richest people in America – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison (Oracle), the family of Sam Walton, and Sergey Brin (Google) – I don’t hew to any of Obama’s screwball ideas about work and wealth. It is these people, whose pursuit of stretch goal achievements created a better world – not the statist government that Obama is trying to create. These people weren’t concerned with cockamamie ideas like “core responsibilities” to “grow the economy.”
Unlike Obama’s zero-sum view of wealth, I can’t imagine that anyone feels defrauded by the billions these people have accumulated because they earned those billions in transactions where customers and clients got what they wanted in return for the money they paid over. Both parties to the transactions won – something Obama doesn’t get because he and the political class of his ilk have never ever created economic value!
Obama, Elena Kagan, and other beneficiaries of liberal guilt are elitists because they rose too fast in their careers to mature in the process. They were helped by too many invisible hands that’ll never get any credit for opening the doors to the success they currently enjoy. And they are bereft of any of the humbling reverses most of us commoners suffered early in our careers that has kept us from believing our own baloney later in our careers – unlike the Obamas of elite political society.
A Rasmussen poll this week found that many voters (41%) feel that a randomly selected sample of people from the phone book could do a better job than their elected representatives in Congress. That’s up 8 percentage points since Obama took the White House and Congress encamped in the Capitol.
I’m not surprised. Since the founding of the Republic over 200 years ago, our leaders, with few exceptions, have been lawyers, and there has been little variance in their number – about 65% of the Senate, about 50% of the House, and most of the presidents.
Ironically, the people we elect to wield the greatest influence over the American economy are the same people who have had the least success in creating it.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Who is Elena Kagan?
Language is the garment of thought, said Thomas Carlyle. If so, Elena Kagan, Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy of retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, is practically naked. So little has she written that would tell us who she is – the garments of her thoughts – she’s a candidate for the charity of a Goodwill store.
In addition to a paucity of published articles, opinions, or legal analyses of issues or case law, she has never been a judge – not even ruling on a traffic court case – and her practice of private law amounts to a scant two years. At age 50, her entire professional experience has been in academia and stints in government positions. She is conspicuous for her obscurity.
Yet Obama’s effusive introduction of this unknown as his SOTUS nominee bordered on the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.
Obama said he wanted a justice who understood "the real world … someone in touch with ordinary Americans … with a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people." Kagan is “one of the nation’s foremost legal minds,’’ Obama gushed. Her confirmation would create "a court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before." Wow!
Joe “Six Pack” Biden – Mr. Everyman – raved “She is Main Street. Both her parents were the son and daughter of immigrants. ... This is a woman who's lived in the real world."
Really? I don’t know what “real world” Obama and Biden think Kagan inhabited, but it isn’t the one into which I was born and lived. And if Nominee Kagan has any understanding of how settled law affects the daily lives of ordinary people, she must have read about it on the editorial pages of The New York Times.
Just how “real world” and how “in touch with ordinary Americans” is Elena Kagan?
Kagan grew up on Manhattan West Side in the rarified atmosphere of privilege. Her father was a tenant lawyer and activist. Her mother taught at the Hunter College High School – one of the elite Manhattan schools that occupied two floors of a downtown New York office building. Kagan was one of the super-bright kids chosen to attend this prestigious program. One of her school mates recalls that Kagan’s ambition was to be a Supreme Court justice and in fact her graduation picture was taken in judicial robes with a gavel.
After graduation from Hunter she attended and graduated from Princeton, another elite school, from which she won a Fellowship to study philosophy at Worchester College of Oxford. Upon returning to America, she enrolled in Harvard Law School, another elite school, and was selected to write for the law review. Upon graduation she landed a prized clerkship with federal appeals court Judge Abner Mikva in Washington, D.C., which launched her into a clerkship with 80-year old Justice Thurgood Marshall when she was only 27 years old.
As her clerkship wound down, Kagan began to think of career paths. She worked in private law practice with the firm of Williams & Connolly, but that apparently wasn’t her cup of tea because she moved on after only two years to join the faculty of the University of Chicago where she taught law. Another young lawyer, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, was also teaching law there “on the side” but did so as an instructor, not as a faculty member.
Despite having published only one article in the “publish or perish” world of academia, Kagan was granted tenure, objected to by her fellow faculty and unheard of in universities of any stature. By then Judge Mikva had joined the Camelotian White House of Bill Clinton as Counsel and wanted Kagan as his associate – a heady experience for a career-minded woman in her mid-30s.
As Clinton’s second term ended, he nominated Kagan for a seat on the Appeals Court bench, where Mikva had served, which would have skipped her over laboring on a lowly federal District Court seat. But the Bush Administration took over the White House and her nomination went nowhere. The bench seat she’d hoped for went to John Roberts, now Chief Justice of SCOTUS.
Kagan attempted to return to Chicago to teach law but the Law School wouldn’t have her, so she landed a faculty position with Harvard Law. Two years after that she was promoted to full professor, and two years after that she was the first female Dean of the Law School. As a former college professor myself, I can say that upward mobility of this speed for someone with so thin a curriculum vitae is unheard of.
Enter the Obama Administration and Kagan is invited to become the first woman Solicitor General in 2009. The SG is a lawyer whose client is the United States. When cases come to the Supreme Court, it is the SG who argues the government’s position (which is presumably the people’s position) against Constitutional challenges. Odd that a person who had never practiced law, never argued a case, or never held a judicial bench would obtain such a position, but Kagan got it – maybe because she had one important trump card: she was a graduate of Harvard Law, which seems to be a hall pass to almost any position in government.
In her hearing before the Judiciary Committee for Solicitor General, she said she believed foreign law should be used to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Thirty-one Senators voted against confirming her nomination.
In one sense, it comes as no surprise that Harvard graduate Obama would nominate Harvard graduate Kagan to the highest bench in the land, where only Harvard and Yale grads live. At age 50, Kagan has had a breath-taking rise to the top, and if confirmed, will exercise the “last word” in contested law for perhaps the next 40 years.
Despite her privileged life, what has Kagan accomplished? There’s not much of a written trail, but there are some markers of how she thinks about the Constitution she will swear to uphold.
Her Princeton undergraduate thesis was entitled "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933." In the acknowledgements for this tome she wrote that her brother’s “involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”
Then there’s the Manichean world of Thurgood Marshall under whose spell she fell as a 20-something sitting at the feet of the 80-year-old judicial Gameliel. In his speech on the 200th anniversary of the Constitution’s ratification Marshall opined that the Founders were unwise and "the government they devised was defective from the start …” thus his view of the Constitution was that of a “living” (i.e. evolving) document subject to temporal interpretations. In her panegyric of her former mentor, published in the Texas Law Review, Kagan wrote,” For in Justice Marshall's view, constitutional interpretation demanded, above all else, one thing from the courts: it demanded that the courts show a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged. It was the role of the courts, in interpreting the Constitution, to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government -- to safeguard the interests of people who had no other champion. The Court existed primarily to fulfill this mission." To be fair, Kagan does not say that this is her view, but she should be prepared to reveal how swayed she is by Marshall’s “empathy standard” for judging cases.
Finally (because there is not space to discuss more material here) there is Kagan’s pathetic performance arguing the government’s case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This was a First Amendment argument over the rights of corporations to exercise free speech, in this case an uncomplimentary video on demand about Hillary Clinton that the FEC had blocked as a violation of the infamous McCain-Feingold Act. The appellate court had upheld the injunction, which was appealed and overturned at the SCOTUS level, much to the consternation of Obama who lectured SCOTUS in his SOTUS speech. Kagan’s deputy argued that McCain-Feingold, which bans corporate broadcast ads within 60 days of a general election, could also be used to restrict corporate or union funding of books that advocated the election or defeat of candidates.
Taken aback, Judge Roberts, in a rare move for the Court, called a rehearing to broaden the argument of corporate free speech rights. Kagan began Round Two by saying “the government's answer has changed” on the book issue, to which subdued laughter rippled through the courtroom. At one point Kagan’s bush-league advocacy skills had her questioning the Court, causing Chief Justice Roberts to remind her that in here the judges ask the questions and the advocates answer them.
Then came her erroneous claim that the Court had tacitly ratified expenditure limits “for over a century” on corporation political speech, which brought down the wrath of Justices Kennedy and Scalia on Kagan whom they reminded that the Court doesn’t have its own agenda to troll for laws on which it wishes to rule; someone must first file a complaint. Therefore, the absence of the Court’s disapproval is not approval.
So here’s my question: Obama promoted his selection of Kagan as one who understood "the real world … someone in touch with ordinary Americans … with a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people." Kagan’s privileged membership in the elite circles of career mobility in academia and government policy positions patently fails to square with this pretense.
So why Kagan? Only Obama knows the real answer, leaving us to guess at it.
One guess is that Obama considers the Judiciary to be the junior partner in the tripartite division of power envisioned in the constitutional government fashioned by the Founders. Obama wants a Court that is deferential to the Executive and Congress – the big boys – letting them sort out the tough issues while SCOTUS sits quietly in its second class role. He made this clear in his SOTUS speech. Then when he hinted that Kagan might be his pick, Obama said, “It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically. What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error.”
When Kagan was announced as his nominee, Obama recalled her role in advocating the government’s position in Citizens United v. FEC, saying "powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens." Unless, of course, those powerful interests are the government or are approved by the government. ObamaCare comes to mind.
Kagan’s champions are already heralding her as a consensus builder. However, one Harvard Law professor said she was more of a coalition builder. She quickly learns who is on the right, left, and the center of every issue. While she was the Dean at Harvard Law, she believed she could pull the center over to her side. So knowing where each faction stood on an issue, and where she wanted to go, she would have the two-thirds needed to win. The Harvard Law professor said. “It was not that she won over people after they suddenly saw the wisdom of what she wanted.” She was smart enough to count the votes before calling the question.
Elena Kagan will undoubtedly be confirmed. Oddly some of the same people who felt Clarence Thomas lacked the experience to be a Supreme Court Justice will be untroubled by Kagan’s thin CV.
It then remains to be seen how Kagan figures into Obama’s determination to remake America.
In addition to a paucity of published articles, opinions, or legal analyses of issues or case law, she has never been a judge – not even ruling on a traffic court case – and her practice of private law amounts to a scant two years. At age 50, her entire professional experience has been in academia and stints in government positions. She is conspicuous for her obscurity.
Yet Obama’s effusive introduction of this unknown as his SOTUS nominee bordered on the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.
Obama said he wanted a justice who understood "the real world … someone in touch with ordinary Americans … with a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people." Kagan is “one of the nation’s foremost legal minds,’’ Obama gushed. Her confirmation would create "a court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before." Wow!
Joe “Six Pack” Biden – Mr. Everyman – raved “She is Main Street. Both her parents were the son and daughter of immigrants. ... This is a woman who's lived in the real world."
Really? I don’t know what “real world” Obama and Biden think Kagan inhabited, but it isn’t the one into which I was born and lived. And if Nominee Kagan has any understanding of how settled law affects the daily lives of ordinary people, she must have read about it on the editorial pages of The New York Times.
Just how “real world” and how “in touch with ordinary Americans” is Elena Kagan?
Kagan grew up on Manhattan West Side in the rarified atmosphere of privilege. Her father was a tenant lawyer and activist. Her mother taught at the Hunter College High School – one of the elite Manhattan schools that occupied two floors of a downtown New York office building. Kagan was one of the super-bright kids chosen to attend this prestigious program. One of her school mates recalls that Kagan’s ambition was to be a Supreme Court justice and in fact her graduation picture was taken in judicial robes with a gavel.
After graduation from Hunter she attended and graduated from Princeton, another elite school, from which she won a Fellowship to study philosophy at Worchester College of Oxford. Upon returning to America, she enrolled in Harvard Law School, another elite school, and was selected to write for the law review. Upon graduation she landed a prized clerkship with federal appeals court Judge Abner Mikva in Washington, D.C., which launched her into a clerkship with 80-year old Justice Thurgood Marshall when she was only 27 years old.
As her clerkship wound down, Kagan began to think of career paths. She worked in private law practice with the firm of Williams & Connolly, but that apparently wasn’t her cup of tea because she moved on after only two years to join the faculty of the University of Chicago where she taught law. Another young lawyer, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, was also teaching law there “on the side” but did so as an instructor, not as a faculty member.
Despite having published only one article in the “publish or perish” world of academia, Kagan was granted tenure, objected to by her fellow faculty and unheard of in universities of any stature. By then Judge Mikva had joined the Camelotian White House of Bill Clinton as Counsel and wanted Kagan as his associate – a heady experience for a career-minded woman in her mid-30s.
As Clinton’s second term ended, he nominated Kagan for a seat on the Appeals Court bench, where Mikva had served, which would have skipped her over laboring on a lowly federal District Court seat. But the Bush Administration took over the White House and her nomination went nowhere. The bench seat she’d hoped for went to John Roberts, now Chief Justice of SCOTUS.
Kagan attempted to return to Chicago to teach law but the Law School wouldn’t have her, so she landed a faculty position with Harvard Law. Two years after that she was promoted to full professor, and two years after that she was the first female Dean of the Law School. As a former college professor myself, I can say that upward mobility of this speed for someone with so thin a curriculum vitae is unheard of.
Enter the Obama Administration and Kagan is invited to become the first woman Solicitor General in 2009. The SG is a lawyer whose client is the United States. When cases come to the Supreme Court, it is the SG who argues the government’s position (which is presumably the people’s position) against Constitutional challenges. Odd that a person who had never practiced law, never argued a case, or never held a judicial bench would obtain such a position, but Kagan got it – maybe because she had one important trump card: she was a graduate of Harvard Law, which seems to be a hall pass to almost any position in government.
In her hearing before the Judiciary Committee for Solicitor General, she said she believed foreign law should be used to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Thirty-one Senators voted against confirming her nomination.
In one sense, it comes as no surprise that Harvard graduate Obama would nominate Harvard graduate Kagan to the highest bench in the land, where only Harvard and Yale grads live. At age 50, Kagan has had a breath-taking rise to the top, and if confirmed, will exercise the “last word” in contested law for perhaps the next 40 years.
Despite her privileged life, what has Kagan accomplished? There’s not much of a written trail, but there are some markers of how she thinks about the Constitution she will swear to uphold.
Her Princeton undergraduate thesis was entitled "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933." In the acknowledgements for this tome she wrote that her brother’s “involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”
Then there’s the Manichean world of Thurgood Marshall under whose spell she fell as a 20-something sitting at the feet of the 80-year-old judicial Gameliel. In his speech on the 200th anniversary of the Constitution’s ratification Marshall opined that the Founders were unwise and "the government they devised was defective from the start …” thus his view of the Constitution was that of a “living” (i.e. evolving) document subject to temporal interpretations. In her panegyric of her former mentor, published in the Texas Law Review, Kagan wrote,” For in Justice Marshall's view, constitutional interpretation demanded, above all else, one thing from the courts: it demanded that the courts show a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged. It was the role of the courts, in interpreting the Constitution, to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government -- to safeguard the interests of people who had no other champion. The Court existed primarily to fulfill this mission." To be fair, Kagan does not say that this is her view, but she should be prepared to reveal how swayed she is by Marshall’s “empathy standard” for judging cases.
Finally (because there is not space to discuss more material here) there is Kagan’s pathetic performance arguing the government’s case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This was a First Amendment argument over the rights of corporations to exercise free speech, in this case an uncomplimentary video on demand about Hillary Clinton that the FEC had blocked as a violation of the infamous McCain-Feingold Act. The appellate court had upheld the injunction, which was appealed and overturned at the SCOTUS level, much to the consternation of Obama who lectured SCOTUS in his SOTUS speech. Kagan’s deputy argued that McCain-Feingold, which bans corporate broadcast ads within 60 days of a general election, could also be used to restrict corporate or union funding of books that advocated the election or defeat of candidates.
Taken aback, Judge Roberts, in a rare move for the Court, called a rehearing to broaden the argument of corporate free speech rights. Kagan began Round Two by saying “the government's answer has changed” on the book issue, to which subdued laughter rippled through the courtroom. At one point Kagan’s bush-league advocacy skills had her questioning the Court, causing Chief Justice Roberts to remind her that in here the judges ask the questions and the advocates answer them.
Then came her erroneous claim that the Court had tacitly ratified expenditure limits “for over a century” on corporation political speech, which brought down the wrath of Justices Kennedy and Scalia on Kagan whom they reminded that the Court doesn’t have its own agenda to troll for laws on which it wishes to rule; someone must first file a complaint. Therefore, the absence of the Court’s disapproval is not approval.
So here’s my question: Obama promoted his selection of Kagan as one who understood "the real world … someone in touch with ordinary Americans … with a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people." Kagan’s privileged membership in the elite circles of career mobility in academia and government policy positions patently fails to square with this pretense.
So why Kagan? Only Obama knows the real answer, leaving us to guess at it.
One guess is that Obama considers the Judiciary to be the junior partner in the tripartite division of power envisioned in the constitutional government fashioned by the Founders. Obama wants a Court that is deferential to the Executive and Congress – the big boys – letting them sort out the tough issues while SCOTUS sits quietly in its second class role. He made this clear in his SOTUS speech. Then when he hinted that Kagan might be his pick, Obama said, “It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically. What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error.”
When Kagan was announced as his nominee, Obama recalled her role in advocating the government’s position in Citizens United v. FEC, saying "powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens." Unless, of course, those powerful interests are the government or are approved by the government. ObamaCare comes to mind.
Kagan’s champions are already heralding her as a consensus builder. However, one Harvard Law professor said she was more of a coalition builder. She quickly learns who is on the right, left, and the center of every issue. While she was the Dean at Harvard Law, she believed she could pull the center over to her side. So knowing where each faction stood on an issue, and where she wanted to go, she would have the two-thirds needed to win. The Harvard Law professor said. “It was not that she won over people after they suddenly saw the wisdom of what she wanted.” She was smart enough to count the votes before calling the question.
Elena Kagan will undoubtedly be confirmed. Oddly some of the same people who felt Clarence Thomas lacked the experience to be a Supreme Court Justice will be untroubled by Kagan’s thin CV.
It then remains to be seen how Kagan figures into Obama’s determination to remake America.
Monday, May 10, 2010
L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!
In the movie Patton, during the Sicily campaign, General Patton calls General Lucian Truscott to his headquarters and outlines an “end run” around the German flank he wants from Truscott in the form of an amphibious assault on the northern town of Brolo, threatening the German escape route across the Strait of Messina. Truscott asks for a day to prepare, which Patton refuses to grant. Patton warns Truscott to “guard against being too conservative” and admonishes him to remember “L’audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!” (Audacity, audacity, always audacity), which the movie Patton incorrectly attributes to Frederick the Great.
Last month, fed up with the feds, Gov. Jan Brewer took matters into her own hands and demonstrated l'audace by signing into Arizona law what is already a federal felony – to be in this country illegally – thus starting a firestorm of outrage from the liberal left.
Macbethian images of Nazism and Hitler were conjured up – one by the president of the Hispanic Federation, who is too young to know anything about life in the time of Hitler except through history books, and another, from Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who to my knowledge has never served outside of California for any period and was a 9-year old in Los Angeles when Hitler killed himself. Screeds from the media fulminated against the new police state of Arizona. Too tempting a target to resist adding a dollop of demagoguery, Obama waded in, once again as factually misinformed as in the infamous Cambridge police incident, and threatened to use the power of the DOJ to investigate civil rights violations.
A recent Rasmussen poll showed 70% of Arizonians were in favor of the law and Brewer’s popularity soared. Yet some of the carpers against the law were the same crowd that rammed through a healthcare law that was overwhelmingly opposed by the citizenry. “Misguided and irresponsible,” Pelosi said of the Arizona law.
It’s been three years since immigration reform wasn’t rammed through Congress and the southern border of the U.S. is as leaky as ever. About 11 million illegals are living in the country, about 500,000 in Arizona. Arizonians have had to spend millions in tax dollars to educate and medicate these illegals and they’re predictably torqued that Washington refuses to enforce the laws on the books and guard the borders. They’ve been screaming that their houses are broken into and, if left vacant for even a short while, occupied by illegals and drug smugglers, their property is vandalized and stolen, people have been intimidated, even threatened.
While Republicans and Democrats dithered, trying to figure out how to engineer another “reform” law – in this case one that would not recriminate either party’s efforts to pander to the Hispanic vote – rancher Rob Krentz was murdered on his own land by an illegal, presumably a drug smuggler, whose tracks led back into Mexico. A deputy sheriff was wounded in the desert near Phoenix by in a shootout with illegals after discovering a cache of marijuana. Helicopters led to the capture of 17 illegals in the area of the shootout, three of whom matched the deputy’s description. A 15-year old Maricopa County girl was raped and kidnapped by an illegal who had been in this country 10 years.
These are not the kind of illegals that mow lawns and do odd jobs that Americans won’t do. Since the southern border is so easy to penetrate, it has attracted the bad guys from Mexico and Central America. The Chiricahua Corridor in Arizona, near which Rob Krentz was murdered, is notoriously a drug smuggler’s interstate highway. Lately, they have gotten into the people smuggling business, and the price of admission to the U.S. is $2,500. If you want to enter the country and don’t have the cash, you carry the smuggler’s dope. People smugglers are called “coyotes” – not the kind that howl at the moon – the kind that would shoot, rape, or steal from his customer in a heartbeat. One research reporter dug into the police records of two coyotes and found that they had been arrested and released by the courts or law enforcement 35 times.
Normally, when a disaster occurs that affects Americans, you’d expect Obama to jump in Air Force One and head to the site for a photo-op. Not so in Arizona where this disaster doesn’t produce the visual images of swollen rivers and flattened houses. We aren’t likely to see Obama walking the coyote’s corridor or talking to people who have been victimized by the dereliction of the federal government. However, he had no trouble jumping before a TV camera to make the outrageous statement: “You can imagine, if you are a Hispanic-American in Arizona – your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed. That’s something that could potentially happen. That’s not the right way to go.”
Obama’s statement is such a distortion it borders on deceit. We live in a world in which identification is routinely required. Buying alcoholic beverages? Produce ID. Buying an airline ticket or boarding a flight? Produce ID. Using health insurance to pay for an appointment with your doctor? Produce ID. Checking into a hotel? Produce ID. Picking up a prescription for a controlled substance? Produce ID (and sign your name on a roster). Entering certain buildings? Produce ID. Cashing a check? Produce ID. Need I go on?
Although Obama alludes to racial profiling, the liberal media screams it. This too is bogus. There aren’t enough police in Arizona to stop and ID everyone who looks Hispanic to determine their legality. Taking your kid to get ice cream isn’t going to result in having to produce papers or ID unless you do something that involves the police. Then they have the right to find out who you are – not who you say you are – and that requires some form of government-issued identification. That’s the “papers” Obama refers to. If you have no identification, no driver’s license because you left your identity “papers” at home, you won’t be arrested even if you are a purple Martian with antenna ears. But you will be held until you can establish that you are here legally.
The Arizona law is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the liberal elites complain. The Fourth Amendment says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …” Note the word “unreasonable.” True, there is no objective standard for what is “reasonable” and what is “unreasonable,” but the Supreme Court in 2005 upheld the ruling that police questioning does not represent a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. I have had a home in Fannin County (Blue Ridge) Georgia for eight years and have been stopped at least a dozen times at road blocks for no reason and asked to present my driver’s license and registration/insurance card. There is no Constitutional protection against this even if I argue that it “profiles” only people driving a car on a certain road.
Obama is apparently unaware that for 70 years federal law has required aliens (people who are not citizens) to have with them at all times some evidence that they are in this country legally. That can be a green card, a student visa, other kinds of visas, or a stamped foreign passport. Absent these, a person will be detained, not arrested, until proof of legal entry is established. Arizona simply confirms existing law.
Obama can beat his breast and threaten to sue Arizona, which he has said is under consideration, but his Attorney General Holder is going to be on shaky ground. In 2005, Arizona won a federal court case that challenged the constitutionality of a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. In 2006, it won a challenge to its human smuggling law. In 2008, it won its case to make it illegal to employ an illegal (what a novel idea.)
No, the real problem here isn’t that Arizona has preempted federal immigration law. In fact it copied the federal law. The real problem is that we have a federal government that is not upholding its constitutional obligations – that pesky thing that Obama and members of Congress swore to protect and defend.
It’s no longer hip or cool to believe that the U.S. Constitution – the most magnificent document ever produced by a committee – has any relevance in modern generations. Our president doesn’t think so. Most of our judges don’t think so. Some members of our Congress don’t even know what it says. When asked the constitutional basis for the healthcare reform insurance mandate, John Conyers (D-MI) said, “the good and welfare clause and a couple of others.” Of course, there is no “good and welfare” clause in the Constitution.
Just this week I received an email from a friend in which a disclaimer inside of a book published by Wilder Publishers stated: “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.” The book involved? The Constitution of the United States of America, with the Bill of Rights and all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and the Articles of Confederation. PC madness run amok.
Article Four, Section Four of the Constitution says: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion …” It doesn’t say a military invasion. It doesn’t say an armed invasion. It simply says “invasion” – to intrude, encroach, infringe without permission.
Writing in The National Review last month, Andrew McCarthy got it right: “In adopting the Constitution, in giving their consent to our social contract, the sovereign states agreed to cede some of their authority in exchange for one overriding benefit. It was not to have an overseer to monitor our salt intake, design our light bulbs, prepare for our retirement, manage our medical treatments, or mandate our purchases. It was to provide for our security. It was to repel invasion by aliens who challenged our sovereign authority to set the conditions of their presence on our soil.
“For that reason, border security has always been the highest prerogative of sovereignty. Immune from judicial interference, it answers to no warrant requirement. At the border, the federal government does not need probable cause – or any cause at all – to inquire into a person’s citizenship, immigration status, or purpose for attempting to enter our country. Agents can detain immigrants and citizens alike. They can perform bodily searches. They can go through every inch of a would-be entrant’s belongings, read his mail, and scrutinize the contents of his computer. A person subjected to this treatment may find it degrading or unfair, but the courts have nothing to say about it. At stake, after all, is the irreducible core of a sovereign people’s power to protect themselves from intruders.”
For the several states along the border with Mexico, however, the federal government has surrendered its power … and thus its legitimacy.
Last month, fed up with the feds, Gov. Jan Brewer took matters into her own hands and demonstrated l'audace by signing into Arizona law what is already a federal felony – to be in this country illegally – thus starting a firestorm of outrage from the liberal left.
Macbethian images of Nazism and Hitler were conjured up – one by the president of the Hispanic Federation, who is too young to know anything about life in the time of Hitler except through history books, and another, from Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who to my knowledge has never served outside of California for any period and was a 9-year old in Los Angeles when Hitler killed himself. Screeds from the media fulminated against the new police state of Arizona. Too tempting a target to resist adding a dollop of demagoguery, Obama waded in, once again as factually misinformed as in the infamous Cambridge police incident, and threatened to use the power of the DOJ to investigate civil rights violations.
A recent Rasmussen poll showed 70% of Arizonians were in favor of the law and Brewer’s popularity soared. Yet some of the carpers against the law were the same crowd that rammed through a healthcare law that was overwhelmingly opposed by the citizenry. “Misguided and irresponsible,” Pelosi said of the Arizona law.
It’s been three years since immigration reform wasn’t rammed through Congress and the southern border of the U.S. is as leaky as ever. About 11 million illegals are living in the country, about 500,000 in Arizona. Arizonians have had to spend millions in tax dollars to educate and medicate these illegals and they’re predictably torqued that Washington refuses to enforce the laws on the books and guard the borders. They’ve been screaming that their houses are broken into and, if left vacant for even a short while, occupied by illegals and drug smugglers, their property is vandalized and stolen, people have been intimidated, even threatened.
While Republicans and Democrats dithered, trying to figure out how to engineer another “reform” law – in this case one that would not recriminate either party’s efforts to pander to the Hispanic vote – rancher Rob Krentz was murdered on his own land by an illegal, presumably a drug smuggler, whose tracks led back into Mexico. A deputy sheriff was wounded in the desert near Phoenix by in a shootout with illegals after discovering a cache of marijuana. Helicopters led to the capture of 17 illegals in the area of the shootout, three of whom matched the deputy’s description. A 15-year old Maricopa County girl was raped and kidnapped by an illegal who had been in this country 10 years.
These are not the kind of illegals that mow lawns and do odd jobs that Americans won’t do. Since the southern border is so easy to penetrate, it has attracted the bad guys from Mexico and Central America. The Chiricahua Corridor in Arizona, near which Rob Krentz was murdered, is notoriously a drug smuggler’s interstate highway. Lately, they have gotten into the people smuggling business, and the price of admission to the U.S. is $2,500. If you want to enter the country and don’t have the cash, you carry the smuggler’s dope. People smugglers are called “coyotes” – not the kind that howl at the moon – the kind that would shoot, rape, or steal from his customer in a heartbeat. One research reporter dug into the police records of two coyotes and found that they had been arrested and released by the courts or law enforcement 35 times.
Normally, when a disaster occurs that affects Americans, you’d expect Obama to jump in Air Force One and head to the site for a photo-op. Not so in Arizona where this disaster doesn’t produce the visual images of swollen rivers and flattened houses. We aren’t likely to see Obama walking the coyote’s corridor or talking to people who have been victimized by the dereliction of the federal government. However, he had no trouble jumping before a TV camera to make the outrageous statement: “You can imagine, if you are a Hispanic-American in Arizona – your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed. That’s something that could potentially happen. That’s not the right way to go.”
Obama’s statement is such a distortion it borders on deceit. We live in a world in which identification is routinely required. Buying alcoholic beverages? Produce ID. Buying an airline ticket or boarding a flight? Produce ID. Using health insurance to pay for an appointment with your doctor? Produce ID. Checking into a hotel? Produce ID. Picking up a prescription for a controlled substance? Produce ID (and sign your name on a roster). Entering certain buildings? Produce ID. Cashing a check? Produce ID. Need I go on?
Although Obama alludes to racial profiling, the liberal media screams it. This too is bogus. There aren’t enough police in Arizona to stop and ID everyone who looks Hispanic to determine their legality. Taking your kid to get ice cream isn’t going to result in having to produce papers or ID unless you do something that involves the police. Then they have the right to find out who you are – not who you say you are – and that requires some form of government-issued identification. That’s the “papers” Obama refers to. If you have no identification, no driver’s license because you left your identity “papers” at home, you won’t be arrested even if you are a purple Martian with antenna ears. But you will be held until you can establish that you are here legally.
The Arizona law is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the liberal elites complain. The Fourth Amendment says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …” Note the word “unreasonable.” True, there is no objective standard for what is “reasonable” and what is “unreasonable,” but the Supreme Court in 2005 upheld the ruling that police questioning does not represent a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. I have had a home in Fannin County (Blue Ridge) Georgia for eight years and have been stopped at least a dozen times at road blocks for no reason and asked to present my driver’s license and registration/insurance card. There is no Constitutional protection against this even if I argue that it “profiles” only people driving a car on a certain road.
Obama is apparently unaware that for 70 years federal law has required aliens (people who are not citizens) to have with them at all times some evidence that they are in this country legally. That can be a green card, a student visa, other kinds of visas, or a stamped foreign passport. Absent these, a person will be detained, not arrested, until proof of legal entry is established. Arizona simply confirms existing law.
Obama can beat his breast and threaten to sue Arizona, which he has said is under consideration, but his Attorney General Holder is going to be on shaky ground. In 2005, Arizona won a federal court case that challenged the constitutionality of a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. In 2006, it won a challenge to its human smuggling law. In 2008, it won its case to make it illegal to employ an illegal (what a novel idea.)
No, the real problem here isn’t that Arizona has preempted federal immigration law. In fact it copied the federal law. The real problem is that we have a federal government that is not upholding its constitutional obligations – that pesky thing that Obama and members of Congress swore to protect and defend.
It’s no longer hip or cool to believe that the U.S. Constitution – the most magnificent document ever produced by a committee – has any relevance in modern generations. Our president doesn’t think so. Most of our judges don’t think so. Some members of our Congress don’t even know what it says. When asked the constitutional basis for the healthcare reform insurance mandate, John Conyers (D-MI) said, “the good and welfare clause and a couple of others.” Of course, there is no “good and welfare” clause in the Constitution.
Just this week I received an email from a friend in which a disclaimer inside of a book published by Wilder Publishers stated: “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.” The book involved? The Constitution of the United States of America, with the Bill of Rights and all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and the Articles of Confederation. PC madness run amok.
Article Four, Section Four of the Constitution says: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion …” It doesn’t say a military invasion. It doesn’t say an armed invasion. It simply says “invasion” – to intrude, encroach, infringe without permission.
Writing in The National Review last month, Andrew McCarthy got it right: “In adopting the Constitution, in giving their consent to our social contract, the sovereign states agreed to cede some of their authority in exchange for one overriding benefit. It was not to have an overseer to monitor our salt intake, design our light bulbs, prepare for our retirement, manage our medical treatments, or mandate our purchases. It was to provide for our security. It was to repel invasion by aliens who challenged our sovereign authority to set the conditions of their presence on our soil.
“For that reason, border security has always been the highest prerogative of sovereignty. Immune from judicial interference, it answers to no warrant requirement. At the border, the federal government does not need probable cause – or any cause at all – to inquire into a person’s citizenship, immigration status, or purpose for attempting to enter our country. Agents can detain immigrants and citizens alike. They can perform bodily searches. They can go through every inch of a would-be entrant’s belongings, read his mail, and scrutinize the contents of his computer. A person subjected to this treatment may find it degrading or unfair, but the courts have nothing to say about it. At stake, after all, is the irreducible core of a sovereign people’s power to protect themselves from intruders.”
For the several states along the border with Mexico, however, the federal government has surrendered its power … and thus its legitimacy.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Eurofication of America
In Wealth of Nations, published the year that America declared its independence, Adam Smith advised “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” Smith went on to show that he was a believer in pay-as-you-go for governments so that current expenditures should be paid with current income (taxes and tariffs) and surpluses should be saved for the inevitable rainy days when the state’s income is inadequate for its expenditures. Borrowing should be limited.
Historically the U.S. national debt has been the quantified aftermath of our recessions and wars. During WW II rationing and high middle-class taxes were the norm because political leaders believed we could have “guns or butter” but not both. And while there was no rationing during the Korean War, there were high taxes and social sacrifices in other ways.
The pay-as-you-go fiscal restraint went out of the window when the theories of John Maynard Keynes, whose 1936 magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, began to hold sway with modern era government leaders around the world. Before Keynes, economics had been concerned with microeconomics – the mechanism of markets directing the allocation of resources. Keynes, however, thought on a macroeconomic plane and persuaded his acolytes that government debt was not the villain it had been characterized to be and in fact was little different than moving money from one pocket to another in the same pair of trousers. If government borrows from its citizens it’s no different than a child borrowing from a parent – the family is no poorer. Of course Keynes lived before global economies existed when a government’s debt isn’t always owned by a family member – a citizen of the country.
Keynesian economics was a license for ill-conceived governmental spending programs, mushrooming debt, and over- taxation, the Pandoran evils of today’s political policies. While FDR embraced Keynesian economics, the Eisenhower administration, valued pay-as-you-go so strongly that his Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey, recognized the moral hazards of Keynesianism by observing, “I do not think you can spend yourself rich.” Successive presidents were not so sober-minded, especially the current one and his predecessor.
Since 1960, politicians began to believe we could have “guns and butter” and lots of other goodies too. Thus while Lyndon Johnson was fighting the Viet Nam war, he was also busy inventing The Great Society, Medicare, Medicaid, the “war on poverty” (a war we’ve lost along with trillions of dollars) and politicians since made no pretense at fiscal sanity – a balanced budget – as evidenced by the fact that there has only been four years of the past 50 in which revenues exceeded outlays. Washington’s use of government revenues to pander to special interests has raised vote-buying to a new art form.
To pay for government profligacy taxes went up and to assure reelection tax rates became more progressive. When John Edwards campaigned in 2004 on the “Two Americas” theme he meant it to be the familiar trope of class warfare. "One America does the work while another America reaps the reward," Edwards whined. "One America pays the taxes while another America gets the tax breaks."
Edwards was more right than he realized. There are indeed two Americas – those that pay federal taxes (53%) and those that don’t (47%). Out of 100 Americans, the wealthiest three pay about the same amount in taxes as the other 97 combined. With all of Obama's new spending plans, the “two Americas” tax distortion will increase.
Because of its steep progressivity, the income tax makes an increasing majority of American citizens indifferent about government's growth, doubly so among the 60% who get more from the government than they pay in taxes.
In addition to destroying the foundation of a democracy, progressive tax rates don’t increase government revenue because of the workings of Hauser’s Law. A San Francisco investment economist, Kurt Hauser studied historic tax revenue and concluded in a 1993 article that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." Capital flees government regimes that treat it harshly and flows to where it’s treated well.
Even liberals understand that the tax aversion of the rich causes them to change their behavior and exploit loopholes. Corporate taxes aren’t a solution either. American corporate tax rates are virtually tied with Japan as the highest in the world. Besides that, corporations don’t pay taxes; they collect them. Their customers pay them.
No, the real money in a middle class society like ours is held by, well, the middle class. How to get at that money is a problem when candidate Obama promised there would be no middle class tax increase.
What to do … what to do. Here’s an idea. Appoint a commission to study the unsustainable trajectory of debt that Obama has ignited in his quest to transform American, and let the commission report its findings and recommendations – after the 2010 elections, of course. We wouldn’t want the recommendations to become campaign issues.
This week, the debt commission – laughably named the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – had its kick-off meeting with Obama, one of the co-conspirators who created the fiscal irresponsibility the commission will study. The other co-conspirator is no longer a government employee. The commission will examine ways “to meaningfully improve” the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook.
You can be sure that a value-added tax will be among the recommendations the commission makes, giving Obama the cover he needs to renege on his pledge not to increase taxes on the middle class. The VAT is essentially the love child of the French, who implemented it in the 1950s and are hardly paragons of economic virtue or champions of capitalism. Every step along the chain of production that adds value is taxed, so it is highly regressive. Obviously, the end consumer pays the total VAT tax, but the intermediaries additionally pay their proportional share. The VAT is a money machine, which is why liberal intellectuals and politicians love it.
John Volker mentioned the VAT as a new source of U.S. tax revenue earlier this month. His apostasy is surprising because he fought the inflation dragon of the Carter administration and the VAT is inherently inflationary. Pelosi, John Podesta, and other Obama minions have also taken up the chant for the VAT tax. Rather than waste editorial space explaining how it works, take an aspirin, or better still a stiff adult beverage, and read the Wikipedia version. The VAT is invisible unlike other taxes you must calculate or can see on a receipt. Therefore, there is no way of knowing how much of your income you are hypothecating to the federal government, so it will move us silently down the road to the statist goals of the Obama administration.
If history is an indication, a VAT will have numerous effects on American society, all of them bad. It will expand the cost of government, increase income tax rates, slow economic growth, destroy jobs, and impose even more arcane compliance costs on the VAT payers than the current tax code. In very a real sense, a value-added tax is a value-destruction tax. Unlike VAT countries like Germany and Japan whose economies are fueled by exports, ours is fueled by consumption – 70% of the GDP – so it’s insane to impose a consumption tax, which a VAT is, without repealing the existing tax on production – the 16th Amendment that created income taxes and allowed Congress to circumvent the Constitutional prohibition on direct taxes.
Not only would the combination of income and VAT taxes vaporize economic growth, it would affront the freedom of Americans even more than the healthcare legislation because it would forever doom the Founders' vision of limited government. Grover Norquist, the tax opponent spokesman for Americans for Tax Reform, found the right synecdoche for the tax. “VAT” he said, “is French for big government.”
Before the European VATs were put into effect, the average EU tax burden was 28% of GDP. By 2006 with the VATs the EU average tax burden was 40% of GDP. Average European government spending was about 30% of GDP when the VATs were instituted in the late 1960s. Today, European government spending is 47% of GDP.
In 2008, the average resident of West Virginia, one of the poorest American states, had an income $2,000 a year higher than the average resident of the European Union, according to economist Mark Perry of the University of Michigan. There’s no free lunch. The quid pro quo for European cradle-to-grave entitlement is a lower standard of living and it hits the middle class the hardest.
This week a damning report from Medicare’s chief actuary surfaced saying the new healthcare “reform” will actually raise costs $311 billion more than they would be over the coming 10 years. The report had been delivered to HHS Kathleen Sebelius one week before the historic healthcare vote in Congress and she sat on it, not revealing it to the Congress. This shows two things: first, government programs never achieve their planned outcomes; second there is a deepening mistrust of government, which worsens with every new revelation of deception.
A Rasmussen Poll in late March found that Americans oppose a VAT by 60% to 22%. As they learn more about it, as they did with healthcare, they will oppose it even more. Then last week, the Senate went on the record about the VAT, when John McCain forced a vote on a non-binding, "Sense of the Senate" resolution against the idea of a VAT. The vote was 85-13 against the VAT, with 12 of the 13 contra votes coming from Democrats. The lone Republican voting in opposition was George Voinovich of Ohio, who thankfully retires this year.
Many years ago, the satirist and social critic H.L. Mencken wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins; all of them imaginary.” So expect to hear lots of horror stories from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform designed to scare Americans into knee-jerk government schemes as was done with the bank bailouts, the corporate and auto bailouts, and the stimulus spending which failed to prevent unemployment from rising to calamitous levels as Obama had promised.
If they lose control of the House in the November elections, Democrats may try to impose the VAT on an unwilling public – as they did with ObamaCare – during their lame duck session as they careen toward the party’s Götterdämmerung. They’d have nothing to lose. But if not and if Obama is reelected, he will almost certainly propose a VAT and press Congress to enact it timed, of course, to take effect in late-term so the effects won’t have time to be a Republican campaign issue in 2016.
With a VAT tax, Obama’s transformation of America into Euro-America will be complete.
Historically the U.S. national debt has been the quantified aftermath of our recessions and wars. During WW II rationing and high middle-class taxes were the norm because political leaders believed we could have “guns or butter” but not both. And while there was no rationing during the Korean War, there were high taxes and social sacrifices in other ways.
The pay-as-you-go fiscal restraint went out of the window when the theories of John Maynard Keynes, whose 1936 magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, began to hold sway with modern era government leaders around the world. Before Keynes, economics had been concerned with microeconomics – the mechanism of markets directing the allocation of resources. Keynes, however, thought on a macroeconomic plane and persuaded his acolytes that government debt was not the villain it had been characterized to be and in fact was little different than moving money from one pocket to another in the same pair of trousers. If government borrows from its citizens it’s no different than a child borrowing from a parent – the family is no poorer. Of course Keynes lived before global economies existed when a government’s debt isn’t always owned by a family member – a citizen of the country.
Keynesian economics was a license for ill-conceived governmental spending programs, mushrooming debt, and over- taxation, the Pandoran evils of today’s political policies. While FDR embraced Keynesian economics, the Eisenhower administration, valued pay-as-you-go so strongly that his Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey, recognized the moral hazards of Keynesianism by observing, “I do not think you can spend yourself rich.” Successive presidents were not so sober-minded, especially the current one and his predecessor.
Since 1960, politicians began to believe we could have “guns and butter” and lots of other goodies too. Thus while Lyndon Johnson was fighting the Viet Nam war, he was also busy inventing The Great Society, Medicare, Medicaid, the “war on poverty” (a war we’ve lost along with trillions of dollars) and politicians since made no pretense at fiscal sanity – a balanced budget – as evidenced by the fact that there has only been four years of the past 50 in which revenues exceeded outlays. Washington’s use of government revenues to pander to special interests has raised vote-buying to a new art form.
To pay for government profligacy taxes went up and to assure reelection tax rates became more progressive. When John Edwards campaigned in 2004 on the “Two Americas” theme he meant it to be the familiar trope of class warfare. "One America does the work while another America reaps the reward," Edwards whined. "One America pays the taxes while another America gets the tax breaks."
Edwards was more right than he realized. There are indeed two Americas – those that pay federal taxes (53%) and those that don’t (47%). Out of 100 Americans, the wealthiest three pay about the same amount in taxes as the other 97 combined. With all of Obama's new spending plans, the “two Americas” tax distortion will increase.
Because of its steep progressivity, the income tax makes an increasing majority of American citizens indifferent about government's growth, doubly so among the 60% who get more from the government than they pay in taxes.
In addition to destroying the foundation of a democracy, progressive tax rates don’t increase government revenue because of the workings of Hauser’s Law. A San Francisco investment economist, Kurt Hauser studied historic tax revenue and concluded in a 1993 article that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." Capital flees government regimes that treat it harshly and flows to where it’s treated well.
Even liberals understand that the tax aversion of the rich causes them to change their behavior and exploit loopholes. Corporate taxes aren’t a solution either. American corporate tax rates are virtually tied with Japan as the highest in the world. Besides that, corporations don’t pay taxes; they collect them. Their customers pay them.
No, the real money in a middle class society like ours is held by, well, the middle class. How to get at that money is a problem when candidate Obama promised there would be no middle class tax increase.
What to do … what to do. Here’s an idea. Appoint a commission to study the unsustainable trajectory of debt that Obama has ignited in his quest to transform American, and let the commission report its findings and recommendations – after the 2010 elections, of course. We wouldn’t want the recommendations to become campaign issues.
This week, the debt commission – laughably named the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – had its kick-off meeting with Obama, one of the co-conspirators who created the fiscal irresponsibility the commission will study. The other co-conspirator is no longer a government employee. The commission will examine ways “to meaningfully improve” the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook.
You can be sure that a value-added tax will be among the recommendations the commission makes, giving Obama the cover he needs to renege on his pledge not to increase taxes on the middle class. The VAT is essentially the love child of the French, who implemented it in the 1950s and are hardly paragons of economic virtue or champions of capitalism. Every step along the chain of production that adds value is taxed, so it is highly regressive. Obviously, the end consumer pays the total VAT tax, but the intermediaries additionally pay their proportional share. The VAT is a money machine, which is why liberal intellectuals and politicians love it.
John Volker mentioned the VAT as a new source of U.S. tax revenue earlier this month. His apostasy is surprising because he fought the inflation dragon of the Carter administration and the VAT is inherently inflationary. Pelosi, John Podesta, and other Obama minions have also taken up the chant for the VAT tax. Rather than waste editorial space explaining how it works, take an aspirin, or better still a stiff adult beverage, and read the Wikipedia version. The VAT is invisible unlike other taxes you must calculate or can see on a receipt. Therefore, there is no way of knowing how much of your income you are hypothecating to the federal government, so it will move us silently down the road to the statist goals of the Obama administration.
If history is an indication, a VAT will have numerous effects on American society, all of them bad. It will expand the cost of government, increase income tax rates, slow economic growth, destroy jobs, and impose even more arcane compliance costs on the VAT payers than the current tax code. In very a real sense, a value-added tax is a value-destruction tax. Unlike VAT countries like Germany and Japan whose economies are fueled by exports, ours is fueled by consumption – 70% of the GDP – so it’s insane to impose a consumption tax, which a VAT is, without repealing the existing tax on production – the 16th Amendment that created income taxes and allowed Congress to circumvent the Constitutional prohibition on direct taxes.
Not only would the combination of income and VAT taxes vaporize economic growth, it would affront the freedom of Americans even more than the healthcare legislation because it would forever doom the Founders' vision of limited government. Grover Norquist, the tax opponent spokesman for Americans for Tax Reform, found the right synecdoche for the tax. “VAT” he said, “is French for big government.”
Before the European VATs were put into effect, the average EU tax burden was 28% of GDP. By 2006 with the VATs the EU average tax burden was 40% of GDP. Average European government spending was about 30% of GDP when the VATs were instituted in the late 1960s. Today, European government spending is 47% of GDP.
In 2008, the average resident of West Virginia, one of the poorest American states, had an income $2,000 a year higher than the average resident of the European Union, according to economist Mark Perry of the University of Michigan. There’s no free lunch. The quid pro quo for European cradle-to-grave entitlement is a lower standard of living and it hits the middle class the hardest.
This week a damning report from Medicare’s chief actuary surfaced saying the new healthcare “reform” will actually raise costs $311 billion more than they would be over the coming 10 years. The report had been delivered to HHS Kathleen Sebelius one week before the historic healthcare vote in Congress and she sat on it, not revealing it to the Congress. This shows two things: first, government programs never achieve their planned outcomes; second there is a deepening mistrust of government, which worsens with every new revelation of deception.
A Rasmussen Poll in late March found that Americans oppose a VAT by 60% to 22%. As they learn more about it, as they did with healthcare, they will oppose it even more. Then last week, the Senate went on the record about the VAT, when John McCain forced a vote on a non-binding, "Sense of the Senate" resolution against the idea of a VAT. The vote was 85-13 against the VAT, with 12 of the 13 contra votes coming from Democrats. The lone Republican voting in opposition was George Voinovich of Ohio, who thankfully retires this year.
Many years ago, the satirist and social critic H.L. Mencken wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins; all of them imaginary.” So expect to hear lots of horror stories from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform designed to scare Americans into knee-jerk government schemes as was done with the bank bailouts, the corporate and auto bailouts, and the stimulus spending which failed to prevent unemployment from rising to calamitous levels as Obama had promised.
If they lose control of the House in the November elections, Democrats may try to impose the VAT on an unwilling public – as they did with ObamaCare – during their lame duck session as they careen toward the party’s Götterdämmerung. They’d have nothing to lose. But if not and if Obama is reelected, he will almost certainly propose a VAT and press Congress to enact it timed, of course, to take effect in late-term so the effects won’t have time to be a Republican campaign issue in 2016.
With a VAT tax, Obama’s transformation of America into Euro-America will be complete.
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