Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn has an excellent article on the bureaucratic tyranny that we live under and have yet to overthrow.
As I said last year, the short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life…
…Thus, America in the 21st century – a supposedly “center-right” nation governed by a left-of-center political class, a lefter-of-center judiciary, and a leftest-of-center bureaucracy.
Liberalism, as the political scientist Theodore Lowi wrote, “is hostile to law”, and has a preference for “policy without law”. The law itself doesn’t really matter so much as the process it sets in motion – or, as Nancy Pelosi famously put it, “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.” When Lowi was writing in the Seventies, he noted that both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission were set up by a Congress that didn’t identify a single policy goal for these agencies and “provided no standards whatsoever” for their conduct. So they made it up as they went along.
Where do you go to vote out the CPSC? Or OSHA? Or the EPA? …
This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money. …
Fred Barnes thinks that the mood of the country will make Democrat Senators more willing to consider the Republican agenda.
…Ten Democrats whose seats are up in 2012 come from right-leaning states or saw their states scoot to the right this week: Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jim Webb of Virginia, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Jon Tester of Montana, and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.
It’s a good bet that some or all of them will be sympathetic to cutting spending, extending the Bush tax cuts, scaling back ObamaCare, and supporting other parts of the Republican agenda. With Democratic allies, Republicans will have operational control of the Senate more often than Majority Leader Harry Reid and Mr. Obama will.
…The biggest problem for Democrats is the new wedge issue—spending, the deficit and debt. It divides them, and Tuesday’s losses only deepen the divides. Mr. Obama indicated at his press conference on Wednesday that he wants to preserve practically everything he’s done in the past two years, including the spending. A bloc of Democrats disagrees. …
Jennifer Rubin agrees with Fred Barnes and adds these thoughts.
…And let’s not forget Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who ran and won by repudiating Obama’s agenda. You may be skeptical that self-styled moderate Democrats will buck the president. Certainly, their track record in that regard is poor. But the 2010 midterm elections and these lawmakers’ own re-election have a way of focusing Democrats on the perils of Obamaism. And to give you a sense of the danger these Democrats face, Ohio, Nebraska, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, and New Mexico will all have Republican governors — and, if those officials do their jobs properly, a taste of what a conservative reform agenda looks like.
Will the Democrats at risk in 2012 desert Obama all the time? Of course not. But in key areas, it certainly will appear that there is a bipartisan consensus on one side and the president on the other. With Harry Reid — he of gaffes and never a sunny disposition — leading the Senate Democrats, this could become quite entertaining and, for the electorate, illuminating.
Jennifer Rubin has more on the Senate.
As I noted yesterday, the new Senate will have more Republicans and, just as important, many more nervous Democrats. Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is thinking along the same lines:
“I think the most interesting thing to watch in the next Congress is how many Democrats start voting with us,” McConnell said.
“Every one of the 23 Democrats up [for re-election] in the next cycle has a clear understanding of what happened Tuesday,” he said. “I think we have major opportunities for bipartisan coalitions to support what we want to do.”
…Senator-elect Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has to run again in two years for a full term, has already promised to take aim at Democratic policies — literally.” You can add in Kent Conrad. And Jim Webb.
And finally, you have the Blue State senators whose states aren’t all that Blue anymore. “Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin will say goodbye to Badger State delegation colleague Russ Feingold; Pennsylvania’s Sen. Bob Casey and Florida’s Bill Nelson will be joined on the Hill in January by conservative Republicans instead of by fellow Dems; and Sen. Sherrod Brown witnessed the Democrat in Ohio’s Senate contest beaten by almost 20 points.” In short, they risk being shown up by their states’ more-conservative senators. …
And we have to thank Jennifer Rubin for some delightful news, if it is true.
Republicans will be rubbing their hands with glee if this turns out to be for real:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is gathering input from colleagues as she weighs whether to stay in Democratic leadership and run for minority leader after losing control of the House Tuesday night, according two senior Democratic aides and one lawmaker. … For members of her inner circle, the calls suggest that she may not be ready “to turn the keys over” while she’s gauging the more general feelings of Democrats outside her tightest clutch of backers, according to one of the aides.
Can you imagine? The voters deliver a historic thumping, toss out more than 60 Democrats, and the survivors — in a demonstration of how clearly they understood the voters’ message — put Pelosi in charge of their caucus. Oh, and she is the most vilified Democrat on the scene, and perhaps the figure who appeared most frequently in campaign ads — for the other party.
True, her caucus is now far more liberal — smaller, but more liberal. These are the Dems from the most solidly Blue districts whom no Republican, even in a historic sweep year, could unseat. But even they must have more common sense than to install the pol who became a poster girl for the Obama backlash. Right? I mean that would be like passing a monstrous health-care bill the public doesn’t want while ignoring record unemployment. Oh. Yes. Don’t count Nancy out quite yet.
John Podhoretz comments on the somber mood of the GOP. Podhoretz notes that Republicans cannot override the president’s veto. But if the House votes to repeal Obamacare, and votes to continue the Bush tax cuts, whoever blocks these measures from becoming laws will rightfully feel the voters’ scorn in 2012.
…Nobody cares what the GOP might want to enact. Instead, the voters want the GOP to oppose, block and prevent.
They want the GOP to oppose any further expansion of government, and block any new programs the president and his party might want. A major corollary to this is a general desire to see the size of government reduced, though how this is to be accomplished no one actually knows.
They want the GOP to block tax increases, which presents the party with an enormous challenge given the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will happen automatically on Dec. 31.
And they want the GOP to prevent the imposition of ObamaCare, which will only be fully implemented starting in 2013. …
Charles Krauthammer has an interesting take on the elections. He thinks that the Obama agenda is dead, but that would require rational thought on the part of Liberals who think they know better than everyone else.
…the massive Republican swing of 2010 was a reaction to another rather unprecedented development – a ruling party spectacularly misjudging its mandate and taking an unwilling country through a two-year experiment in hyper-liberalism.
…Tuesday was the electorate’s first opportunity to render a national verdict on this manner of governance. The rejection was stunning. As a result, President Obama’s agenda is dead. And not just now. No future Democratic president will try to revive it – and if he does, no Congress will follow him, in view of the carnage visited upon Democrats on Tuesday.
This is not, however, a rejection of Democrats as a party. The center-left party as represented by Bill Clinton remains competitive in every cycle. (Which is why he was the most popular, sought-after Democrat in the current cycle.) The lesson of Tuesday is that the American game is played between the 40-yard lines. So long as Democrats don’t repeat Obama’s drive for the red zone, Democrats will cyclically prevail, just as Republicans do.
Nor should Republicans overinterpret their Tuesday mandate. They received none. They were merely rewarded for acting as the people’s proxy in saying no to Obama’s overreaching liberalism. As one wag put it, this wasn’t an election so much as a restraining order.
The Republicans won by default. And their prize is nothing more than a two-year lease on the House. The building was available because the previous occupant had been evicted for arrogant misbehavior and, by rule, alas, the House cannot be left vacant. …
In City Journal, Fred Siegel asks whether the rest of the country is going to bail out the Ponzi scheme states.
…But another division is likely to compete for center stage in the next two years: the split between, on one side, California and New York—two states, deeply in debt, whose wealthy are beneficiaries of the global economy—and, on the other, the solvent states of the American interior that will be asked to bail them out. This geographic division will also pit the heartland’s middle class and working class against the well-to-do of New York and California and their political allies in the public-sector unions.
…Californians rejected an ill-drafted proposal to legalize marijuana, but they also adopted two resolutions sure to send their state deeper into the economic swamp. Proposition 23 would have suspended the state’s draconian environmental laws until unemployment, currently at 12.5 percent, comes down to 5 percent. It was defeated, 61 percent to 39 percent. Proposition 25, drafted by one of the state’s premier pressure groups, the California Federation of Teachers, sought to allow the legislature to pass a budget with simple majorities instead of the current two-thirds supermajority, which requires a degree of GOP support. Naturally, it passed. In New York, where the latest budget estimates suggest a $9 billion shortfall (up from an earlier estimate of $8.2 billion) for the fiscal year beginning next April, most of the state’s incumbents were unaffected by the national trend.
The mood in much of the rest of the country was quite different. In the nation’s interior, Republicans gained ten governorships and may have picked up as many as 20 state legislatures. In traditionally blue Minnesota and Wisconsin, both houses of the legislature are now in Republican control. This sets up what could be an ugly fight in which a Tea Party–inflected national Republican Party, encouraged by its strength in the interior states, forces California and New York—now heavily dependent on federal subsidies—to reduce their spending sharply. The coastal giants would no doubt respond by threatening defaults, which could affect the credit standing of the entire country, since many of the bonds are held by foreign investors. …
Tunku Varadarajan gives a list of his first impressions on the elections.
…4. Marco Rubio will go far. Gracious in victory, he was elegantly non-hubristic in his evaluation of the Republican gains in this election. Don’t discount him as a running-mate for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012: after all, how priceless for the GOP is an electable, “post-racial” Hispanic? More likely, he will be honing his skills for 2016.
5. California and New York are, truly, at odds with the rest of America. Their economies are so large that their politics has been captured in an iron grip by the unions. At least California has a semblance of two-party politics; New York, by contrast, is quite Third World in its asphyxiating, uniparty dominance (a dominance that was abetted, this time, by the most embarrassing Republican candidate in the history of the state).
6. Thank God for Rob Portman: His election ensures that a robustly intellectual free-trader will have a seat in the Senate, all the better to combat the likely Democratic protectionism that awaits us in the run-up to 2012. (I’m delighted to report that Pat “Club for Growth” Toomey will be there, too, to support him.) …
George Will writes about Liberals.
…George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.
“These ideas,” Boudreaux says, “are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else’s contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments.” Liberalism’s ideas are “about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of ‘Big Ideas’ that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people.”
This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power – are government commands and controls – superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society’s spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said “yes.”
Newsbiscuit has some fun.
In a ‘big society’-style drive to eliminate unnecessary public spending on the security services, passengers flying out of UK airports are to be encouraged to perform security checks on themselves, instead of requiring the assistance of expensive airport police.
Members of the public will be expected to pat themselves down, peer inside their own shoes and use a mirror to check if they are looking shifty, before going through a doorway and saying ‘bleep’ loudly if they are carrying any metal items. The move is expected to save millions of pounds a year, and hopes are high that airline passengers will be kept safe from all but the most dishonest hardline terrorists. …