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Jeff Jacoby reports on a Federalist Society debate.
… “This notion that presidents in our system of government don’t have to carry out laws authorized by Congress is absolutely preposterous,” the speaker said. “If that were the case — if Congress’s laws are merely advisory — why would you need a veto?” A president who disapproves of a bill should say so in a veto message — that’s why the Constitution gives him veto power in the first place. Bush’s hundreds of signing statements are an “open power grab” that Americans should find intolerable. “We ought to be adamantly opposed to any claim that the president doesn’t have to abide by laws that Congress has passed and he has signed.”
That may sound like Senator Hillary Clinton, who denounces the Bush administration’s “concerted effort . . . to create a more powerful executive at the expense of both branches of government and of the American people” and promises to sharply roll back the use of signing statements if she becomes president.
But the speaker wasn’t Clinton, nor any other liberal or Democrat. It was former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, a staunch conservative best known for his leading role in the 1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton. An outspoken defender of privacy rights and other civil liberties, Barr has long decried what he calls the “frightening erosion” of constitutional protections under Bush. At a forum hosted by the Boston chapter of the Federalist Society, he was debating another staunch conservative: John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official whose thinking strongly influenced the administration’s claims of presidential power after Sept. 11. …
… These debates began long before Bush arrived; they’ll continue after he leaves. We should welcome them as signs not just of factiousness, but of strength: Americans argue about fundamental freedoms because Americans are fundamentally free.
Claudia Rosett picks up on the idea, retailed in Canada, the UN should move to Montreal. She likes it. We do too.
David Warren likes the confrontation of Islamo-Fascist week.
This is “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week” in the USA. To Canadian eyes that will sound a little confrontational — we’ve always been better at walking the walk, than talking the talk. But let me assure my reader, that even if our media are not much reporting it, the thing is happening. On more than 100 university campuses across the United States, from U.C. Berkeley to George Washington in D.C., a large roster of speakers are directly confronting crowds of very loud and angry campus Leftists and Islamists, to make politically incorrect points about radical Islam, backed by a range of panel discussions, book stalls, and supporting exhibits. …
The Captain posts on the proposed mob move to whack Giuliani 20 years ago. And on the gambler stiffed by an Indian casino.
Samizdata post on the anti-war folks who make our warriors better.
Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls “civilian audit” of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.
Another Samizdata post on how softly insidious is the totalitarian state.
I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be ‘totalitarian’. …
… my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls ‘soft fascism’) in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws “for your own good” or “for the children” or “for the environment”.
And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent’s interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a ‘license to smoke‘. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised. …
A Corner post shows how William and Mary is helping soft totalitarianism get started.
If you find The Corner hard to believe, here’s the William & Mary site. Look at the last sentence below; “Confidentiality will be honored unless reporting individual provides contact information.”
In order to promote a diverse and respectful campus community, the College considers acts of hate and bias unacceptable and adversative to our commitment to a welcoming and inclusive community. The College’s diversity statement reads “the College of William and Mary strives to be a place where people of all backgrounds feel at home, where diversity is actively embraced, and where each individual takes responsibility for upholding the dignity of all members of the community.”
The Bias Reporting System was established to assist members of the William and Mary community who have been affected by incidents involving bias related to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other protected conditions. The system provides multiple modes of reporting to include personal contact, online form, or faxed form. Confidentiality will be honored unless reporting individual provides contact information.
There is hope. Students are anonymously operating a blog titled Free America’s Alma Mater.org.
Let’s Disband William and Mary’s new Schoolyard Tattletale System before the Lawsuits Commence and William and Mary again becomes the subject of national jokes …
Slate has interesting details from the new Howard Kurtz book.
Stunning book review from Contentions.
In God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, Walter Russell Mead coyly claims that the originality of his interpretation of the roots of Anglo-Saxon primacy rests in its focus on the meaning, as opposed to the mere dimensions, of American power. This is too modest: Mead’s achievement is larger than that. His real accomplishment is to restore religion to its rightful place in the history of Great Britain and the United States, and their roles in the world. This no small feat. It’s hard enough to explain why Britain—a small island in the North Sea lacking all natural resources except coal, potatoes, and herring—rose to be the first of the great powers by 1815, and equally hard to explain how the United States inherited and adapted the British system in the 20th century. Factoring the influence of religion into this dynamic is vastly more difficult, but Mead does an admirable job of it.
The historic grand strategy of Great Britain and the United States, as Mead understands it, is simply told: Britain was the world’s first enduringly liberal modern society, and the first practitioner of an open and dynamic economic system that traded throughout the world, relying on its navy to defend its trade routes. This system provided Britain the resources to fight and win its wars, and the power and self-confidence to promote liberal values and institutions. In the 20th century, the United States, shaped by its British inheritance, took over the role of protector of this maritime order from the totalitarian empires and enemies of modernity that continued to threaten it, of whom al Qaeda is merely the latest example. But the rise of Britain as a liberal capitalist power is only the better known half of the story. While capitalism generates resources and tax revenues on a scale unimaginable to early modern empires, it poses a big problem: the vast expansion of state power. Once the revenues begin to flow, in other words, the challenge becomes limiting the power of the state.