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Liberals, as personified by the New Yorker, have suddenly come to the realization they have made a mistake making fun of Clarence Thomas. Walter Russell Mead has a post in The American Interest that will please freedom lovers.
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
“In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.”
This is one of the most startling reappraisals to appear in The New Yorker for many years. …
… Toobin is less interested in exploring why liberal America has been so blind for so long to the force of Clarence Thomas’ intellect than in understanding just what Thomas has achieved in his lonely trek across the wastes of Mordor. And what he finds is that Thomas has been pioneering the techniques and the ideas that could not only lead to the court rejecting all or part of President Obama’s health legislation; the ideas and strategies Thomas has developed could conceivably topple the constitutionality of the post New Deal state. …
… What we didn’t know, and what the world at large didn’t know until very recently, was that the New Deal constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked. Intellectually its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.
In the case of the Second Amendment, the collapse has already come. Back in my Pundit High days, anyone who dared to suggest that the Bill of Rights gave individuals the right to bear arms would have been laughed out of the class as an ignorant yahoo. These days, that is the accepted view of the US Supreme Court and most of the legal profession. The resurrection of the Second Amendment proves that the “dead letter” clauses of the Constitution can come back to life — and suggests that Clarence Thomas understands how this can be done. …
… As Toobin tells the story, the revival of the Second Amendment was the first great triumph of the new approach. Thomas and others assembled a mountain of evidence that convinced increasing numbers of legal scholars that the Second Amendment must be read as conferring an individual right to bear arms — not merely a generic endorsement of the right of each state to maintain a militia. More, this right was intended as political: to check the power of the state to overawe and crush the people. As a result, the once seemingly unstoppable movement toward gun control has gone into reverse gear.
The startling possibility now beginning to dawn on some observers is that these same methods applied to the Tenth Amendment would lead to a much more far reaching revision to constitutional doctrine. The text of the Amendment is simple and short:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The standard interpretation is that this merely restates an assumption that undergirds the Constitution as a whole and so has no special meaning or significance in law. If reading the rest of the Constitution leads you to uphold some act or law as constitutional, this amendment would not affect that judgment. Therefore it can be and usually is ignored. That is certainly what we were told to do with it in the hallowed halls of Pundit High.
But there is another view of this amendment. …
Yesterday we had a piece on how the media have over used the word “unexpectedly” when describing the Obama economy. Thomas Sowell has written about one unusual economic feature.
Many in the media are saying how unusual it is for our economy to be so sluggish for so long, after we have officially emerged from a recession. In a sense, they are right. But, in another sense, they are profoundly wrong.
The American economy usually rebounds a lot faster than it is doing today. After a recession passes, consumers usually increase their spending. And when businesses see demand picking up, they usually start hiring workers to produce the additional output required to meet that demand.
Some very sharp downturns in the American economy, such as in the early 1920s, were followed quickly by bouncing back to normal levels or beyond. The government did nothing — and it worked.
In that sense, this is an unusual recovery in how long it is taking and in how slowly the economy is growing — while the government is doing virtually everything imaginable. …
Alan Krueger has made a career out of bad scholarship. He is now the administration’s top economist; joining his sinking theories to a sinking ship. James Pethokoukis has the story. Krueger and his sidekick Card had determined from a telephone survey that raising the minimum wage in New Jersey resulted, not in a decrease of employment, but an increase. However, more careful researchers using actual payroll records showed what a normal sentient human would expect – a decrease in employment following a minimum wage hike. Or course that has not stopped the Dems from trumpeting Krueger’s study for years. So now this failed economist will be promoting the “secret sauce” for jobs we’re going to hear about next week.
… Krueger, who was Tim Geithner’s economist over at Treasury, is probably best known for his 1990s study that showed raising the minimum wage in New Jersey didn’t increase unemployment among fast-food workers. But that study seems to have been debunked. This is just one example (among many):
“We re-evaluate the evidence from Card and Krueger’s (1994) New Jersey-Pennsylvania minimum wage experiment, using new data based on actual payroll records from 230 Burger King, KFC, Wendy’s, and Roy Rogers restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We compare results using these payroll data to those using CK’s data, which were collected by telephone surveys. We have two findings to report. First, the data collected by CK appear to indicate greater employment variation over the eight-month period between their surveys than do the payroll data. … Second, estimates of the employment effect of the New Jersey minimum wage increase from the payroll data lead to the opposite conclusion from that reached by CK. For comparable sets of restaurants, differences-in-differences estimates using CK’s data imply that the New Jersey minimum wage increase (of 18.8 percent) resulted in an employment increase of 17.6 percent relative to the Pennsylvania control group, an elasticity of 0.93. In contrast, estimates based on the payroll data suggest that the New Jersey minimum wage increase led to a 4.6 percent decrease in employment in New Jersey relative to the Pennsylvania control group.”
But for good or ill, I don’t think Krueger’s ideas will have much impact on the Obama White House. Krueger won’t even be sitting in the job when Obama rolls out his new jobs plan on Sept. Moreover, it’s the political shop running policy right now, not the propellerheads. And the reelection team believes little can be done to alter the economy’s path over the next 15 months. Any big stimulus plan, even assuming effectiveness, would open Obama to GOP charges of being a reckless spender. Better, they think, to instead make the case that Obama has the best ideas to improve the economy over the next four years, not Rick Perry or Mitt Romney. In short, the Obama reelection plan is the Obama jobs plan. Krueger’s job will be explain away the bad jobs and GDP numbers and tell American why the GOP is wrong.
Victor Davis Hanson thinks this last vacation was a “Vineyard Too Far.”
By Sunday afternoon, the Gallup tracking poll showed a 17-point spread in the president’s approval rating — 38 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval. Such polls are fickle and can go up and down quickly, often depending on unwarranted and unfair perceptions and media hype, hinging on everything from hurricanes to killing bin Laden. That said, these recent abysmal numbers might suggest that for the first time, a considerable number of Americans is starting to be turned off not just by Barack Obama’s economic policies, but by Barack Obama himself. But why now?
The president’s latest Martha’s Vineyard vacation was a public-relations disaster, wholly unnecessary, and in part responsible for Obama’s most recent slide in the polls. Part of the problem was purely coincidental and no one’s fault: Who could have expected that while the president of the United States was resting on an exclusive private beach on a tony island on a calm August day, millions of Eastern Seaboarders around him would be engaged in a media-driven frenzy of emergency preparation and evacuation?
Yet most of the negative perception was the president’s own doing. …
Nile Gardiner wonders if the White House is going to rein in Michelle’s spending.
… It is unclear what the total cost to the taxpayer actually amounts to. According to one estimate provided by the Daily Mail, the First Lady stands accused by sources inside the White House of spending “$10 million of US taxpayers’ money on vacations alone in the past year.” Judging by the amount of vacation time Michelle Obama has taken and the level of security and staffing that she has, this sounds like a plausible figure. It would be in the public interest to have the exact numbers provided by the White House so that Americans know precisely how much of their money is being spent on vacations.
There does appear to be an unhealthy sense of entitlement on the part of the First Lady, which seems in poor taste at a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, the housing market is collapsing, and the United States is facing the strong possibility of a double-dip recession. Perhaps Mrs Obama could take a few tips on austerity as well as humility from her British counterpart Samantha Cameron, who has just one assistant, in contrast to at least 17 personal staff for the First Lady, and doesn’t feel the need to travel en masse with an entourage at taxpayers’ expense. The vast majority of Americans are making significant sacrifices at this time of economic turmoil, and tens of millions are struggling even to make ends meet. It’s time for both the President and the First Lady to exercise a bit of fiscal responsibility, not least when they are spending other people’s hard-earned money.