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Mark Steyn comments on the Chicago Thug’s week.
… Headlines in which the executive “warns” the courts are usually the province of places like Balochistan, where powerful Cabinet ministers are currently fuming at the Chief Justice’s determination to stop them kidnapping citizens and holding them for ransom – literally, that is, not merely figuratively, as in America. But, here as there, when Obama “warns” the Supreme Court “over health law,” it’s their health prospects he has in mind. He cautioned the justices – “an unelected group of people” – not to take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on: as the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an “unprecedented” step so unprecedented there are two centuries’ worth of precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging “the Court’s legitimacy.”
All that’s unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of the United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his tire iron and saying, “Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”
A nation can have formal “checks and balances,” but in the end free societies depend on a certain deference to the proprieties. If you’re willing to disdain those, you can drive a coach and horses through accepted norms very easily. The bit about “a democratically elected Congress” was an especially exquisite touch given Obama’s recently professed respect for the democratic process: as he assured Vladimir Putin’s sock puppet the other day, he’ll have “more flexibility” to accommodate foreign interests after he’s got his “last election” and all that tedious democracy business out of the way. His “last election,” I hasten to add, not America’s.
Aside from his contempt for judicial review and those rube voters, what other checks and balances doesn’t he have time for? Well, he makes “recess appointments” when the Senate isn’t in recess, thus circumventing the dreary business of confirmation by that “democratically elected” legislature he likes so much. But, hey, it’s only members of the National Labor Relations Board and the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so why get hung up on constitutional niceties?
By the way, have you heard of this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? No? Don’t worry, no big deal, it’s just a new federal agency. Because we can always use another of those, right? What’s one more acronym jostling in the ever more crowded alphabet soup of federal regulation? CFTC, CPSC, CNPP and now CFPB. Not to be confused with CFPB-FM, the Inuit radio station just south of the Arctic Circle in the Nunavut village of Kugaaruk, where in 1975 the world’s all-time coldest wind chill was recorded: minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit.
Where was I? Oh, yes: the world’s all-time coldest wind chill. That’s what you’re going to be feeling at this point in an Obama second term. If you like his contempt for judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny and representative democracy now, wait’ll you see how “flexible” he’ll get starting in January 2013. …
David Harsanyi makes a point about the courts.
… Democrats have fought hard to undo safeguards against direct democracy, attaching a morality to a process that can do both good and bad. They have created ballot measures to do away with the Electoral College. They’d like Washington, rather than localities, to dictate nearly everything. The mere mention of states’ rights puts you in league with the Ku Klux Klan.
Why not? Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking — so it’s no wonder so many politicians thrive in it. The Supreme Court, however, should rise above democracy, not give in to it. That’s the point.
George Will has some VP ideas for Mitt.
… Faux realists will belabor Romney with unhistorical cleverness, urging him to choose a running mate who supposedly will sway this or that demographic cohort or carry a particular state. But are, for example, Hispanics nationwide such a homogeneous cohort that, say, those who came to Colorado from Mexico will identify with a son of Cuban immigrants to Florida (Sen. Marco Rubio)? Do these realists know that, according to exit polls, Nevada’s Hispanic Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, won only about a third of the Hispanic vote in 2010?
Furthermore, in the 16 elections since World War II, 10 presidential candidates have failed to carry the home state of their vice presidential running mates. Gov. Earl Warren could not carry California for Tom Dewey in 1948; Sen. Estes Kefauver could not carry Tennessee for Adlai Stevenson in 1956; former senator Henry Cabot Lodge could not carry Massachusetts for Richard Nixon in 1960; Rep. Bill Miller could not carry New York for Barry Goldwater in 1964; Gov. Spiro Agnew could not carry Maryland for Nixon in 1968; Sargent Shriver could not carry Maryland for George McGovern in 1972; Rep. Geraldine Ferraro could not carry New York (or women, or even her congressional district) for Walter Mondale in 1984; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen could not carry Texas for Michael Dukakis in 1988; Jack Kemp could not carry New York for Bob Dole in 1996; Sen. John Edwards could not carry North Carolina for John Kerry in 2004.
For the next decade, American politics will turn on this truth: Slowing the growth of the entitlement state is absolutely necessary and intensely unpopular. In this situation, which is ripe for a demagogue such as the Huey Long from Chicago’s Hyde Park, Romney’s choice of running mate should promise something Washington now lacks — adult supervision.
In NR James Pethokoukis reviews some books that try to figure why Obama has done so poorly.
You are not alone. Some of President Barack Obama’s own crackerjack advisers are surely as surprised and dismayed as anyone by America’s persistently weak economic recovery. Back in the spring of 2010 — just before the White House launched its ill-timed “Recovery Summer” publicity offensive right smack into a summer swoon — I visited a top White House economist. I asked if the nascent recovery had any real momentum. After giving me a lengthy and thorough survey of the major macroeconomic indicators, the economist concluded that “all the lights on the dashboard are flashing green.” Let the Obama boom begin.
A similarly rosy sentiment was expressed to me by another member of the Obama economic team at roughly the same time. This adviser, since returned to academia, had little patience for any suggestion that the anemic rebound evidenced a sluggish, “new normal” economy burdened by too much government debt. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have found that financial crises are usually followed by sharply higher government debt and significantly lower economic growth; but this White House economist was having none of it, arguing that no economy in history is comparable to America’s due to its global dominance and control of the world’s reserve currency. Past poor results do not guarantee future underperformance. And besides, the president’s 2009 stimulus package was really beginning to work its magic. America was going to be okay.
But sitting there, listening to all that West Wing optimism, I was reminded of Richard Nixon’s famous observation that the U.S. economy was so strong “it would take a genius” to wreck it. Indeed, the Obama administration was filled with geniuses, a veritable all-star team, no, dream team of superstar liberal economists: Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Alan Krueger, Jared Bernstein. And don’t forget Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Indispensable Man of the financial crisis, a figure so highly regarded back in the fall of 2008 that he just might have led President John McCain’s Treasury Department had the election gone the other way.
Just how Team Obama’s economic policies went so wrong — and how its optimism was so misplaced — despite such accumulated brainpower and supposed expertise is the subject of two books covering much the same ground and reaching similar conclusions: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Harper, 528 pp., $29.99), by Ron Suskind, which came out last September, and The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $28), by Noam Scheiber, published in February. The liberal-talking-point regurgitators on CNN and MSNBC would no doubt dispute such a negative characterization of Obama’s economic record — as would, of course, the Obama White House. But the Obama Recovery after the Great Recession pales when contrasted against the Reagan Recovery after the Long Recession of 1980–82.
In the first ten quarters of the Obama Recovery, real GDP is up a total of 6 percent, versus 16 percent in the Reagan Recovery. Or to put it another way, after ten quarters of recovery, the Reagan annual GDP-growth rate was 6 percent versus Obama’s 2.4 percent (versus 4.6 percent for the average post–World War II expansion). In the 32 months of the Obama Recovery, the economy has added about 2 million net new jobs, versus 9 million during the first 32 months of the Reagan Recovery. …