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OK, we know Lincoln acted extra-constitutionally during the beginning months of the Civil War. How does that compare to the current lawlessness? Answers from a WSJ OpEd by a Georgetown Law prof.
… Scholars have debated whether Lincoln exceeded his power by suspending the writ and whether Congress’s retroactive ratification cured any constitutional infirmity. Whatever one’s answer, this is a case of a president—himself a constitutional lawyer—trying, under impossible circumstances, to be as faithful to the Constitution as possible.
Contrast all of this with President Obama’s announcement that he is unilaterally suspending part of the Affordable Care Act. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama is a constitutional lawyer. And like Lincoln’s action, Mr. Obama’s was a unilateral executive suspension of the law. But in every other way, the president’s behavior could not have been more different from Lincoln’s.
First, Lincoln’s action was at least arguably constitutional, while Mr. Obama’s is not. The Constitution has a provision for suspending habeas. It has no general provision for executive suspension of laws. English kings used to suspend laws, but the Framers rejected that practice: The president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Second, Lincoln volunteered an articulate constitutional defense of his action. Mr. Obama seemed annoyed when the New York Times dared to ask him the constitutional question. When the reporter asked whether he had consulted with lawyers about the legality of the mandate’s delay, he declined to answer.
As for Republican congressmen who had the temerity to question his authority, Mr. Obama said only: “I’m not concerned about their opinions—very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.” Mr. Obama made no mention of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin—a Democrat, a lawyer and one of the authors of ObamaCare—who said: “This was the law. How can they change the law?” …
Mark Steyn reacts to what NSA does “accidentally.”
On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail:
A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202).
Seriously.
I enjoy as much as the next chap all those Hollywood conspiracy thrillers about the all-powerful security state — you know the kind of thing, where the guy’s on the lam and he stops at a diner at a windswept one-stoplight hick burg in the middle of nowhere and decides to take the risk of making one 15-second call from the payphone, and as he dials the last digit there’s a click in a basement in Langley, and even as he’s saying hello the black helicopters are already descending on him.
It’s heartening to know that, if I ever get taken out at a payphone, it will be because some slapdash time-serving pen-pusher mistyped the code for Malaysia (60) as that of New Hampshire (603).
The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo.
On the global scene, America has imploded: its leaders have no grasp of its national interests, never mind any sense of how to achieve them. The assumption that we are in the early stages of “the post-American world” is now shared by everyone from Gen. Sisi to Vladimir Putin. Sisi, I should add, is Egypt’s new strongman, not Putin’s characterization of Obama. Meanwhile, in contrast to its accelerating irrelevance overseas, at home Washington’s big bloated blundering bureaucratic security state expands daily. It’s easier to crack down on 47 Elm Street than Benghazi.
Perhaps this is unavoidable. A couple of months back, I quoted Tocqueville’s prescient words from almost two centuries ago: Although absolute monarchy theoretically “clothed kings with a power almost without limits,” in practice “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.”
In other words, the king couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social life and of individual existence” within His Majesty’s oversight? That world is now upon us. Today, the king concedes he certainly can do it, but assures us not to worry, he doesn’t really want to. …
Reminding us of Candy Crowley’s interference in one of last season’s debates, John Fund celebrates the GOP’s willingness to take control back from the media.
… It’s not controversial to note that presidential debates have long displayed real problems with fairness on the part of moderators and panelists. PBS anchor Jim Lehrer notes in a recent book, Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, that the panelists in one of the 1988 presidential debates between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis pressured CNN moderator Bernard Shaw to withdraw or alter what became his famous question to Dukakis: Would he favor the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered? Now-MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and ABC’s Ann Compton confirmed to Lehrer that they had put pressure on Shaw, who is still peeved over the incident. “I’ve never confronted any of the three panelists,” Shaw said. “But I was outraged at the time that a journalist would try to talk a fellow journalist out of asking a question. I think you can tell I am still doing a burn over it. I just wouldn’t think of doing that.”
Old-school journalists such as Shaw would no doubt have wondered at the shenanigans of the 2012 campaign. During the final debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, CNN moderator Candy Crowley stepped out of her role and took Obama’s side in a heated moment in the debate, attempting to correct Romney on a factual question about the Benghazi terrorist attack. She later had to admit that Romney had been more right than wrong in his answer. …
Last week’s NY Times’ report of chaos in the Clinton Foundation gets a déjà vu reaction from Maureen Dowd.
CLINTON nostalgia is being replaced by Clinton neuralgia.
Why is it that America’s roil family always seems better in abstract than in concrete? The closer it gets to running the world once more, the more you are reminded of all the things that bugged you the last time around.
The Clintons’ neediness, their sense of what they are owed in material terms for their public service, their assumption that they’re entitled to everyone’s money.
Are we about to put the “For Rent” sign back on the Lincoln Bedroom?
If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.
They have a Wile E. Coyote problem; something is always blowing up. Just when the Clintons are supposed to be floating above it all, on a dignified cloud of do-gooding leading into 2016, pop-pop-pop, little explosions go off everywhere, reminding us of the troubling connections and values they drag around.
There’s the continuing grotesque spectacle of Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. And there’s the sketchy involvement of the Clintons’ most prolific fund-raiser, Terry McAuliffe, and Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham in a venture, GreenTech Automotive; it’s under federal investigation and causing fireworks in Virginia, where McAuliffe is running for governor. …
Last week was the 10th anniversary of the great blackout in the NorthEast. Popular Mechanics explains why we haven’t had a repeat.
… So why haven’t we had a major power outage since then? For one thing, power companies are now forced to prune their trees thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. But the other major factor is a technological advance. According to Matt Wakefield of the Electric Power Research Institute, most power transmission companies have now installed high-tech synchrophasors, which allow them to detect problems in transmission lines and reroute electricity around trouble spots. The synchophasors work by giving real-time feedback on power flows and voltage and transmitting the data back to power companies.
“While we will always have local and regional power outrages because of things like weather,” Wakefield says, “these synchrophasors mean that these rolling blackouts that can affect large regions of the country at once are much less likely.” …