Politics, Government & Public Policy: August 2005 Archives

DeoDuce has a great quiz up at The Daily Spork: a list of anti-American quotes, and all you have to do is determine al Qaeda or the left? So far, none of her commenters has gotten more than 6 of the 10 correct... can you do better?

Republicans are worried about how to spin high gas prices, and they should be. Even though there isn't much the government can do to affect prices, the recent energy bill makes it look like they aren't even trying; plus, the public wants results from the party in power, not excuses. So what should the Republicans do? Why not take Larry Kudlow's perspective and point out that high oil prices will lead to technological advances, new production, and conservation.

Permit me to take a contrarian view on the oil price shock. I say three cheers for higher energy prices. Why? Because I believe in markets. When the price of something goes up, demand falls off (call it conservation) and supply increases (call it new production). We're seeing a tectonic shift.

As Dan Yergin has advised us, energy supplies in the next few years will explode. Now the public is even favoring nuclear power. And the government is stepping out of the way by giving FERC the authority to override localities who oppose nuclear power, liquefied natural gas or other forms of energy. ...

So supply will rise exponentially in the years ahead, demand will slow a bit and we'll all live happily ever after. The moral of this story: markets work if you let them.

Environmentalists should be ecstatic, and Republicans should point out that high prices are the best possible incentive for innovation. Long-time readers may remember that I've been making the same argument for years as I've written about the myth of depletion.

(HT: Instapundit, who thinks the Bush Administration agrees with Kudlow.)

I'd never heard of this questionable claim, but apparently some people believe that David Rice Atchison actually was President of the United States for one day.

Whatever his other accomplishments as a lawyer and statesman, David Rice Atchison will always be known as the guy who was President of the United States for just one day.

He served as a US senator from 1843 to 1855. As president pro tem of the Senate in 1849, Atchison was shoved into the highest office in the land in a constitutional cusp between James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor, because Polk's term ended on a Sunday at noon, and Taylor's inauguration wasn't until the next day.

Wikipedia attempts to debunk this claim, but I don't think it's successful.

While it is true that the offices of President and Vice President were vacant, Atchison in fact was not next in line. While the terms of James K. Polk and Vice President George Mifflin Dallas expired at noon on March 4, Atchison's tenure as President Pro Tempore did as well. He also never took the oath of office, although there is no constitutional requirement, then or now, for an Acting President to do so. No disability or lack of qualification prevented Taylor and Fillmore from taking office, and as they had been duly certified as President-elect and Vice-President elect, if Taylor was not President because he had not been sworn in as such, then Atchison, who hadn't been sworn in either, certainly wasn't.

That's somewhat confusing, but it appears that Wikipedia argument is that Atchison didn't take an oath, either to remain Senate President Pro Tempore or to assume the Presidency, and that if an oath was required for Taylor to be president, then an oath would have been required for Atchison as well. The Constitution does require that the President take an oath of office (Article II, Section 1):

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--``I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.''

However, before the 25th Amendment was passed, a preceding paragraph allowed that "the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death,
Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President", and at the time the law provided that the Senate President Pro Tempore was next in line; the law didn't mention an oath requirement. Atchison's term as President Pro Tempore expired at the same time as Polk's presidency, but seeing as how he immediately continued in the office it seems logical to conclude that there was no legal break; he didn't take the oath as Senate Pro Tempore again until the next day, but the Constitution doesn't require an oath for that office. Therefore, Atchison's oath deficiency need not have prevented him from being Senate President Pro Tempore, and consequently President.

Anyway, it appears that even if Mr. Atchison was president for a day, he spent it asleep in bed.

Update:
Snopes has more reasons Atchison shouldn't be considered to have been president, and they're all basically as convincing as you want them to be. They also make the mistake, though, of assuming that a person becoming president based on the provision of Congress would have to take an oath. However, they do rightfully point out that the Constitution only says that the person selected by law only acts as president, but doesn't necessarily become president.

Furthermore, the US Senate website dismisses the Atchison presidency -- though with an off-handed "of course" that seems unjustified to me.

Peggy Noonan has an interesting article in which she explains why she finds the public chumminess of ex-Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton creepy. After describing the benefits enjoyed by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush because of the association of their husband and father respectively, Ms. Noonan writes that the exaggerated friendship is disrespectful to all the hard workers who really do care about the issues at hand.

What bothers me about the fervid friendship of the Bushes and Mr. Clinton--and the media celebration of it--is the faint whiff of superiority, a sense they radiate that all those slightly icky little people running around wailing about issues--tax reform, the relation of the individual to the state, the necessary character of a president--and working the precincts are somehow . . . a little below them. There is an air of condescension toward that grubby thing, belief. Those who hold it are not elevated, don't quite fit into the high-minded nonpartisan brotherhood. When in fact the people doing the day-to-day work of democracy, and who are in it because they are impelled by deep belief and philosophy, are actually not below them at all, and perhaps above them. Not that they're on the cover of People hugging, but at least they're serious.

It is the suggestion, or the suspicion, that these men have grown close because they are not serious, were never quite serious, that grates. That makes one wonder. That leaves some Republicans, and I have to assume more than a few Democrats, scratching their heads when they see Newt smiling with Hillary, and John McCain giggling with Hillary. It leaves you wondering: Why are these people laughing?

I largely agree. If it's just "my team" against "your team", with nothing more at stake than a trophy and bragging rights, then of course we should leave the game on the field and be friends after the competition is over. But when real, substantial, life-or-death matters hang in the balance, should they be so easily set aside for the sake of comity? As Ms. Noonan indicates, maybe this attitude reveals that politics isn't more than a game for some of our leaders.

Manuel Miranda -- a columnist I've quickly come to enjoy -- has an article today about the problems that might be created by a Bush administration more interested in running up the score than in changing the judicial landscape for the long term.

Conservatives' greatest fear is that the White House is not thinking ahead to the next nomination and that the conduct of the Roberts fight will limit the President in his next pick. On Aug. 8, the Washington Post's Mike Allen riled up conservatives with this: "Some Republican strategists said they have calculated that support for Roberts among Republican senators is locked down and that Roberts' supporters want to try to attract Democrats by packaging him as more centrist and less doctrinaire than had originally been assumed." Yikes.

Whatever Senate liberals and their can't-everyone-get-along friends in the media may say, the Constitution defines a consensus nominee as someone who gets 51 votes in the Senate, or just to be filibuster-safe, let's say 60. A GOP groupthink that aims to get much more than that imperils this president's freedom. It may prevent him from nominating someone like a long-tenured circuit-court judge with a judicial record.

Political campaigners understandably define victory by the greatest number of votes obtained. In this case, that would be a mistake. Statecraft must be more farsighted. Each additional Democrat vote obtained for Judge Roberts by "message" pandering, has a higher marginal cost to President Bush's freedom in the next Supreme Court nomination.

Emphasis mine. Rather than try for 100 votes, 49 of which don't matter, I wish the administration would spend time defending the controversial positions John Roberts has taken and explaining why those positions are the correct ones.

It seems like Bill Clinton might end up being best remembered for two things: being the second president to be impeached, and doing nothing. He presided over a rising economy and did nothing to thwart it (and certainly nothing to cause it), and he did nothing to thwart the ascension of worldwide terror, particularly terror aimed at America. Drudge links to two New York Times articles from today that highlight exactly what the Clinton administration didn't do to prevent 9/11. The first article is about Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Able Danger's failed attempts to share information with the FBI.

A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly.

The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned. ...

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.

Does fault lie with the military lawyers, or the administration more concerned with appeasing "civil liberties" groups than with protecting Americans? I'm all for civil liberties (being nearly a libertarian myself), but the line between freedom and safety has to be drawn somewhere. The second article is about ignored State Department warnings about Osama Bin Laden.

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan. ...

Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990's while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to the Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure. But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."

The newly declassified documents do not directly address the question of whether Sudan ever offered to turn over Mr. bin Laden. But the documents go well beyond previous news and historical accounts in detailing the Clinton administration's active monitoring of Mr. bin Laden's movements and the realization that his move to Afghanistan could make him an even greater national security threat.

This isn't new news, but the revelations of these previously classified documents are yet more evidence of the Clinton administration's incompetence. If the Clinton administration had been less distracted by adultery, shipping children to Communist dictatorships, and incinerating religious weirdos, they could have prevented not only 9/11, but potentially the other dozen terrorist attacks against America in the 1990s that went essentially unanswered.

If only I had time to read Mark Steyn all day... or the ability to write like him. Alas. Anyway, his article from last week on "Democrats' new strategy: Almost winning" is rather hilarious.

"In nearly the biggest political upset in recent history, Democrat Paul Hackett came within just a few thousand votes of defeating Republican Jean Schmidt in Ohio's Second Congressional District."

Yes, indeed. It was "nearly the biggest political upset in recent history," which is another way of saying it was actually the smallest political non-upset in recent history. Hackett was like a fast-forward rerun of the Kerry campaign. He was a veteran of the Iraq war, but he was anti-war, but he made solemn dignified patriotic commercials featuring respectful footage of President Bush and artfully neglecting to mention the candidate was a Democrat, but in livelier campaign venues he dismissed Bush as a "sonofabitch" and a "chicken hawk" who was "un-American" for questioning his patriotism.

On the recent Bush-exercises-too-much meme:

Or as the DNC put it:

"While President Bush has made physical fitness a personal priority, his cuts to education funding have forced schools to roll back physical education classes and his administration's efforts to undermine Title IX sports programs have threatened thousands of women's college sports programs."

Wow. I noticed my gal had put on a few pounds but I had no idea it was Bush's fault. That sonofabitch chicken hawk. Just for the record, "his cuts to education funding" are cuts only in the sense that Hackett's performance in the Ohio election was a tremendous victory: that's to say, Bush's "cuts to education funding" are in fact an increase of roughly 50 percent in federal education funding.

Some of us wish he had cut education funding. By any rational measure, a good third of public school expenditures are completely wasted. But instead it's skyrocketed. And the idea that Bush is heartlessly pursuing an elite leisure activity denied to millions of American schoolchildren takes a bit of swallowing given that his preferred fitness activity is running. "Running" requires two things: you and ground. Short of buying every schoolkid some John Kerry thousand-dollar electric-yellow buttock-hugging lycra singlet, it's hard to see what there is about "running" that requires increasing federal funding.

And there's so much more, including a link between Air America and the UN's Oil-for-Palaces scheme.

Update:
Mr. Steyn also has a great article about Hillary running for President in 2008 titled "Last Man Standing" -- it's the second article on the page.

Almost two years ago I wrote about how abortion "rights" are more about money than freedom or women's health, and today Manuel Miranda has a great column in the WSJ today about how pro-abortion groups are opposing John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court to protect their profits.

Roe v. Wade is not just the source of a right; it's a business license for abortion clinics. This comes best into focus when we consider that in the next term the Supreme Court is likely to hear cases involving not the right to abortion but laws regulating parental consent and notice of abortions for minor girls. These are laws that, according to a Los Angeles Times poll, over 80% of Americans support.

In September 2002, when Democrats first blocked Justice Priscilla Owen from a circuit court nomination over a Texas Supreme Court ruling that upheld a parental notice law, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah put it this way:

I fear the opposition to Justice Owen from the abortion lobby is not at all about abortion rights, because abortion rights are not affected by a mere notice statute. The opposition to Justice Owen is not really about abortion rights, it is about abortion profits. Simply put, the abortion industry is opposed to parental notice laws because parental notice laws place a hurdle between them and the profits from the abortion clients--not the girls who come to them but the adult men who pay for these abortions. These adult men, whose average age rises the younger the girl is, are eager not to be disclosed to parents, sometimes living down the street. . . . At nearly one million abortions per year, the abortion industry is as big as any corporate interest that lobbies in Washington. They not only ignore the rights of parents, they also protect sexual offenders and statutory rapists.

As all good leftists know, corporations are about making money, and just about every time a corporation gets involved in politics its to enhance their bottom line. Abortion corporations are no exception. They profit from killing as many babies as possible, and any law or judge that would impede that goal is rightly seen as a threat.

It looks like at least 203 out of 319 funeral payments made by FEMA for hurricane deaths last year were fraudulent, and were for deaths totally unrelated to any hurricanes.

The federal government used hurricane aid money to pay funeral expenses for at least 203 Floridians whose deaths were not caused by last year's storms, the state's coroners have concluded.

The deaths include a Palm Beach Gardens millionaire recovering from heart surgery who died two days before Hurricane Frances; a Miami baby not yet born when the storm arrived; and a Port Charlotte man who died of cirrhosis and heart failure five months after Hurricane Charley.

In two other cases, coroners could find no record of the people dying.

"I can't begin to tell you what these people did to get some funding," said Rebecca Hamilton, medical examiner for Lee County, where hurricane funeral claims included a hospice patient and two people who died of cancer. "None of those cases were even remotely associated with any kind of a hurricane."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a total of 319 hurricane funeral claims in Florida for $1.3 million. But most of those people died from natural ailments, suicides or accidents unrelated to the storms, the coroners concluded.

Most. Most. And this is small-time fraud, only $1.3 million total. If you think the federal bureaucracy isn't absolutely rife with corruption then you're deluding yourself. The only solution is to drastically shrink the size and scope of the bureaucracy.

No one likes pork-barrel spending, except on themselves.

WASHINGTON -- When President Eisenhower proposed the first national highway bill, there were two projects singled out for funding. The latest version has, by one estimate, 6,371 of these special projects, a record that some say politicians should be ashamed of.

The projects in the six-year, $286.4 billion highway and mass transit bill passed by Congress last week range from $200,000 for a deer avoidance system in Weedsport, N.Y., to $330 million for a highway in Bakersfield., Calif.

Bringing home pork is how lawmakers get re-elected. On one hand, voters know the government wastes an enormous amount of money on projects that it shouldn't even be involved with, but on the other hand, as long as money is being handed out there's no point in refusing to take a cut.

"Nothing beats a ribbon-cutting ceremony on a new piece of pavement," said Peter Sepp, spokesman for National Taxpayers Union. "Road projects are regarded as a kind of government jobs program that Republicans can safely embrace."

Get it? Our elected officials tax money out of our pockets and then use it to bribe us to get re-elected. Ridiculous.

What are the arguments for and against regulation of the United States Postal Service by the federal government? There has been widespread concern about declining revenue, but the government continues to protect the USPS from competition and force the USPS to keep prices down. According to the Wikipedia entry linked to above, the monopoly protections enjoyed by the USPS include:

The USPS enjoys a government monopoly with respect to first-class and third-class letter delivery under the authority of the Private Express Statutes. The USPS says that these statutes were enacted by Congress "to provide for an economically sound postal system that could afford to deliver letters between any two locations, however remote." In effect, those who mail letters to a near location are subsidizing those who are mailing letters to distant locations.

The USPS further enjoys monopoly status in that it possesses the exclusive permission under federal law to deliver first and third class mail. However, an exception to private carriers is made with regard to "extremely urgent letters" as long as the private carrier charges at least $3 or twice the U.S. postage, whichever is greater (other stipulations, such as maximum delivery time, apply as well). The USPS also enjoys a monopoly privilege in placing mail into standardized mailboxes marked "U.S. Mail." Hence, private carriers must deliver packages directly to the recipient, leave them in the open near the recipient's front door, or place them in a special box dedicated solely to that carrier (a technique commonly used by small courier and messenger services).

Not only do mailers to near locations subsidize mailers to distant locations, but the USPS also receives subsidies directly from tax revenue collected by the federal government (though the amount was only $36 million in 2004).

Could postal service benefit from deregulation, or is regulation required to protect the declining industry in the face of email? I see no reason to believe that UPS and FedEx couldn't handle delivering first- and third-class mail if they were allowed to do so, and their pricing schedules might end up being more favorable to consumers. The recently passed Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act is intended to allow the USPS to be more competitive with some services (i.e., most likely by raising rates) but still limits increases in the first-class postage rate and juggles money around to keep prices down. Ultimately though, are these kinds of economic decisions we want our legislators making? Why not leave them to the market?

A bit of trivia you may not have been aware of: did you know that the President, Senators, and Representatives can send mail for free merely by signing their names in the place of a stamp? It's called franking, and the practice is intended to facilitate communication between elected officials and their constituents.