Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Charles Krauthammer makes excellent points about the consent of the governed and separation of powers. And he gives examples of how disregard for these constitutional principles leads to government agencies governing citizens as they choose, rather than enforcing existing law. This disregard of constitutional principles also produces a menacing executive branch, where the Bully-In-Chief will get his way through subtle threat of how the government will make life difficult for those who do not bow to his will.
…How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country’s nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.
So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.
Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was) and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That’s bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.
That’s called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people’s representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.
The Obami are considering mortgage debt forgiveness to improve the Dems political situation, writes the Investor’s Business Daily editors, instead of looking at measures that would help all Americans. Perhaps someone should remind the creeps that a similar initiative started the Tea Party.
It appears that Democrats will receive a severe beating in the fall elections. What can save them? How about the administration wiping out large swaths of debt for underwater mortgage holders?
James Pethokoukis, a Reuters columnist who once wrote for IBD, reported Thursday that the White House might have an August Surprise in the works. …
…It would be irresponsible for the administration to order the forgiveness of so much debt. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee more than $5 trillion in mortgages, or roughly half the U.S. total, are now wards of the federal government. They’ve needed $145 billion from Washington just to keep their heads above water.
Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that “The operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added $291 billion to CBO’s August 2009 baseline estimate of the federal deficit for fiscal year 2009 and $99 billion to the total deficit projected for the 2010—2019 period.”
Clearly, writing off parts of mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will put an even greater burden on taxpayers who have helped keep the sick enterprises alive. …
In Foreign Policy, Peter Feaver comments on the classless administration Iraq policy
President Obama’s speech on Iraq was a disappointment. Not a surprise, but a disappointment.
It was disappointing because it was yet another missed opportunity. He could have shown real statesmanship by acknowledging he was wrong about the surge. He could have reached across the aisle and credited Republicans who backed the policy he vigorously opposed and tried to thwart, a policy that has made it possible (but by no means certain) to hope for a responsible end to the Iraq war. He could have told the truth about his Iraq strategy, that what he has pursued thus far has not been what he was arguing for in the campaign — that would have involved the departure of all U.S. troops by mid 2008 — but rather he has followed, in a more or less desultory fashion, a script written in the status of forces agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki.
Instead of giving such a speech, Obama gave a campaign address trying to claim credit for anything that is going well in Iraq and trying to avoid blame for anything that is going poorly. That may be shrewd campaign politics, but it is not the statesmanship the occasion warranted. The commander-in-chief missed an opportunity, and I worry that it will come back to haunt us. …
Ralph Peters has a perceptive piece in the NY Post about Obama’s neglect of Iraq.
…Ignoring his own opposition to the liberation of Iraq, supporting our troops and the surge, Obama spoke as if all’s well in Baghdad — thanks to him.
As part of his weird victory lap, the president rightfully praised the way “our troops adapted and adjusted” to the insurgency in Iraq, then stressed that 90,000 service members have come home during his administration. …
…While that country has passed its military crisis, it’s now in political turmoil — from which our government has utterly disengaged. We won that war, but we still can lose the peace. Obama shunned the fact that, almost half a year after its last national election, Iraq doesn’t have a new government. Determined to abandon “Bush’s war,” Obama’s been AWOL in Baghdad.
His neglect may prove disastrous. And the saddest aspect is that the Iraqis wanted us to step in and act as referees, to press them to get past their political differences.
The Iraqi elections were so close that both main camps claimed victory. In the macho atmosphere of Iraq, neither side could back down or compromise after that without an excuse (“Those mean Americans made me do it!”). Our essential and dirt-cheap role would have been to hand the posturing parties a fig leaf. …
Roger Simon comments on Michelle Obama’s lavish vacation outside the US.
Several weeks ago I wrote I thought Barack Obama didn’t really want to be president. The post generated a fair amount of discussion, pro and con.
Michelle’s $375,000 Spanish vacation — with the Daily Mail dubbing her a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” — is further proof of my thesis. What man who wanted to be re-elected (or see his party do well in November) would let his wife go off on such an “excellent adventure” in these economic times? Of course no one denies the right of people to have vacations – I’m coming to the end of one myself on my beloved Bainbridge Island — but closing Mediterranean beaches while booking 60-plus rooms in a five star Marbella hotel for her entourage? It is beyond tone deaf, perhaps to the level of subconscious (or even deliberate) self-sabotage. …
David Harsanyi has an unusual view on the gay marriage debate.
In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made “state registration and church consecration” a dual requirement of matrimony.
We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn’t it about time we freed marriage from the state?
Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman — or no one at all — and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives. …
NPR posted a transcript of Talk of the Nation featuring an interview with Andrew Hacker, author of Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It. We had a WSJ review of this last Tuesday.
…COX: We also have another couple of emails. They’re really coming in. People are very interested in this topic. This comes from Keith… in Boston, Massachusetts. Keith writes: Higher ed is not broken, but it is in trouble because it attempts to follow a for-profit business model. It has become unaffordable, because starting with the Reagan administration the federal government has not supported education. Is Keith right or wrong?
Prof. HACKER: He’s right and wrong. Currently, as you indicated at the outset, Tony, at a private college, its going to cost you really up toward $50,000 a year. Imagine that, $50,000 a year. That’s over what the typical American worker makes. Now, why is that? Its because colleges know they can keep raising their prices as they’ve been doing, well ahead of inflation, and the students will come and take out loans. In other words, our colleges are being really built on the indebtedness that young people, starting at the age of 18, are signing papers that they are going to live with until they’re 38. We regard this as totally immoral. …