Politics, Government & Public Policy: November 2006 Archives

Jessica and I were talking yesterday about human nature and the inherent flaws of meritocratic organizations. People want power and recognition for its own sake, and those who tend to rise high within an organization are often hard workers not because they care about the organization or its goals, but because of their lust for power.

I doubt anyone would disagree with that simple observation, which is why our culture frowns on people who derive personal benefits from organizational power. The pastor of a megachurch shouldn't get a "company" limo, and the CEO of a corporation can't use his insider information to profit on the stock market. The salary and benefits paid by an organization should be high enough to align the powerful employees' goals with those of the organization, and most corporate structures are designed that way. However, such a structure was not envisioned when our Constitution was written, and so our legislators are preoccupied with power and prestige because their goals do not align with ours.

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. ...

It may seem like a minor matter, but members of the commission say Congress's failure to change itself is anything but inconsequential. In 2004, the commission urged Congress to grant the House and Senate intelligence committees the power not only to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies but also to fund them and shape intelligence policy. The intelligence committees' gains would come at the expense of the armed services committees and the appropriations panels' defense subcommittees. Powerful lawmakers on those panels would have to give up prized legislative turf.

But the commission was unequivocal about the need.

"Of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the most difficult and important," the panel wrote. "So long as oversight is governed by current congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American people will not get the security they want and need."

I'm certainly not a huge fan of the 9/11 Commission, but this recommendation appears eminently sensible. It's clear that the congresscritters who currently control the intelligence budget aren't eager to keep it because they think they're doing a better job than anyone else could, but rather because it pumps up their portfolio.

To the Sept. 11 commission, the call for congressional overhaul was vital, said former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), the commission's co-chairman. Because intelligence committee membership affords lawmakers access to classified information, only intelligence committee members can develop the expertise to watch over operations properly, he said. But because the panels do not control the budget, intelligence agencies tend to dismiss them.

"The person who controls your budget is the person you listen to," Kean said.

Those people, the appropriators, do not seem to care much, he said. The intelligence budget is a small fraction of the nearly $500 billion overseen by the armed services committees and the appropriations panels' defense subcommittees. Kean said that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an Armed Services Committee member, told the Sept. 11 commission that if his panel spends 10 minutes considering the intelligence budget, it has been a good year.

Professionally, people are motivated by only a few things: money, power, and prestige. It might make everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside to hope that our legislators are altruistic and only have our best interests at heart, but anyone who watched any campaign ads earlier this month knows that isn't true. Our Constitutional system is designed to reward successful congressmen with reelection -- power and prestige -- but that's a rather blunt instrument when applied every two years.

I'm not sure if there's an effective way to harness the power of money to force our politicians to align their goals more closely with those of the public, short of what many would consider to be outright bribery. Maybe the system we've got is the best possible, but given that it isn't based on capitalistic competitive principles I doubt that's the case.

Dick Morris argues that ultra-liberal Democrats don't have a mandate (as I've already claimed).

But how did it achieve these majorities? It did so lifted by the wings of moderate, centrist Democrats who mastered their GOP opponents throughout the country. It was not liberals who defeated Republican incumbents in the House and Senate. It was moderates, future members of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). ...

The irony is that the expressed will of the American people has been so radically ignored in the shaping of the 110th Congress. The fact is that the elevation of Nancy Pelosi to the speakership is no more a legitimate expression of the voters’ will than would be the retention of Dennis Hastert. The seniority system, rigidly applied by Pelosi in violation of the spirit of the Gingrich reforms of 1994, has ordained that a liberal establishment will run Congress, whatever the voters say.

Is there anyone who will sanely maintain that Rangel represents the broad middle of American views on tax reform, or that Levin speaks for most Americans on national security? All that has happened is that the ranking members have become the chairmen, regardless of their views or qualifications. It is a gesture of homage to seniority that would have the approval of the segregationists that used to run Congress by applying the same ground rules. Back then, no matter how loudly voters demanded integration and an end to racism, the Democratic majority kept apartheid firmly in place. The distortion of the electorate’s will taking place now on Capitol Hill is no more extreme.

Still, he thinks that Hillary will win the presidency in 2008 and that the Republicans will have to wait on her for their revival (again, as in 1994). I personally speculate that the Democrats will overreach in Congress over the next two years, and that the anyone-but-Bush party will falter once their nemesis is no longer running for office.

John Heilermann agrees:

Yet Biden also knows that the Democrats’ internal wrangling over Iraq has the potential to be explosively divisive, as the antiwar left and the Netroots make demands that party centrists may find extreme. And he knows that voters will be watching the party carefully to see which route it takes. There can be no doubt that the results of the 2006 midterms constitute a stinging and nearly total repudiation of Bush’s management of the war and his handling of foreign affairs more broadly. What they don’t amount to, though, is a ringing endorsement of Democratic leadership in those areas—not least because the party, by design, turned the campaign into a referendum on Bush and not into a choice between two competing visions of dealing with the world.

And I think that fighting Bush personally is just about all the Democrat party has been up for. That's been their organizing principle, and it's not at all clear that they'll be able to maintain their coalition once Bush is gone.

Here's an animated GIF I can across that illustrates the Republicans' performance over the past couple of years.

It sounds like the incoming Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, will be running the House like a school-girl clique -- maybe it's not surprising, but she could have tried a little harder to escape the stereotypes that will inevitably plague her as the first woman to hold the office.

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) yesterday as the next House majority leader, thereby stepping into a contentious intraparty fight between Murtha and her current deputy, Maryland's Steny H. Hoyer.

The unexpected move signaled the sizable value Pelosi gives to personal loyalty and personality preferences. Hoyer competed with her in 2001 for the post of House minority whip, while Murtha managed her winning campaign. Pelosi has also all but decided she will not name the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to chair that panel next year, a decision pregnant with personal animus.

Pelosi had been outspoken about her frustration with Murtha's declaration that he would challenge Hoyer, currently the House minority whip, for the majority leader post long before Democrats had secured the majority. Many believed she would remain on the sidelines, just as Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) did earlier this year when three Republicans vied for the post of House majority leader.

Maybe Nancy Pelosy should abort her personal animus (kudos to Jonathan Weisman for the gender-based pun) and instead base her decisions on what's best for the county.

Update:

Apparently even Congressional Democrats say Nancy Pelosi is running the House like a high school.

As she awaited her new grandchild after her election-night triumph, Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi was lauded as one of the most consequential Democrats in history and treated as a foreign head of state at the White House, where she got the big chair in front of the Oval Office fireplace. But the dour Republicans and worried Democrats have switched places, however momentarily, now that she has unexpectedly injected herself into the bitter race to be her underling, the House Majority Leader. "This is the first time I've ever seen a leader insert themselves like this," said a veteran of many Democratic leadership races. Pelosi's camp says it's like a high-school election and won't be a defining moment for her leadership. ...

Hoyer poses a competing power base to Pelosi, and they have not had warm relations. "She wants to purge the leadership of people who disagree with her," said a Democratic official with a front-row seat. "It's about people she can personally control. Hoyer is an excellent public face for the party. She's more a behind-the-scenes player."

The new political order in Washington is certain to generate plenty of corpses for us right-wing bloggers to circle over, and the potential appointment of Alcee Hastings to the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee may be the first. The committee oversees everything from the CIA to the NRO to the DIA, and the chairman plays a critical role in national security. So who has Speaker-to-Be Pelosi promised to put in that position?

With majority status in the "people's house" comes a share in responsibility for the security of the Republic. This is why we are so concerned about a shadow which darkens presumptive Speaker Pelosi's triumphant morning, a shadow which will only grow longer if she allows it to begin appearing prominently in the media coverage of the global war on terrorism, metastasizing into her first "intelligence failure" even before she takes the gavel from outgoing Speaker Hastert. That is the shadow of Alcee Lamar Hastings, the reelected Democratic Representative from Florida's 23rd District. ...

That Mr. Hastings is employed by the United States of America, and is not a guest a federal penitentiary, is itself cause for wonder.

Mr. Hastings's own website says this about his pre-Congressional background: "Known to many as 'Judge,' Congressman Hastings has distinguished himself as an attorney, civil rights activist, judge, and now Member of Congress. Appointed by President Carter in 1979, he became the first African-American Federal Judge in the state of Florida, and served in that position for ten years."

What this autobiography omits are the reasons Hastings' judicial tenure, normally a life appointment, was cut short after only a decade. Barely two years into office, "Judge" Hastings accepted a $150,000 bribe in exchange for giving a lenient sentence to two swindlers, then lied in subsequent sworn testimony about the incident. The case involved two brothers, Frank and Thomas Romano, who had been convicted in 1980 on 21 counts of racketeering. Together with attorney William Borders Jr., Hastings, who presided over the Romanos' case, hatched a plot to solicit a bribe from the brothers. In exchange for a $150,000 cash payment to him, Hastings would return some $845,000 of their $1.2 million in seized assets after they served their three-year jail terms.

Taped conversations between Hastings and Borders confirmed that the judge was a party to the plot. Hastings was also criminally prosecuted for bribery, but his accomplice Borders went to prison rather than testify against him. Hastings was acquitted thanks to Borders' silence. ...

"Be assured that I'm going to be a judge for life," Mr. Hastings told reporters in 1983 after his acquittal. But the arguments that swayed a Miami jury did not sway the Congress. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives impeached Hastings for bribery and perjury by a lopsided vote of 413 to 3. Then the Democrat-controlled Senate convicted him on eight articles of impeachment by well over the required two-thirds majority in 1989. Thus Mr. Hastings became only the sixth judge in the history of our Republic (and only the third in the 20th Century) to be removed by Congress. He was, and is, an utter disgrace to the nation and to the legal profession. Among those voting to impeach him were Ms. Pelosi herself, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip who is likely to become the new House majority leader, and Mr. Hastings' fellow African-American Congressman, Michigan's John Conyers, who took pains to deny that race had anything to do with the removal of the bribe-taking jurist.

And now Hastings is a member of the House that impeached him, and poised to be given oversight of national security matters. Utterly despicable. What do my Democrat/leftist readers think of this? How could such an appointment possibly be defended?

I sincerely hope that Speaker Pelosi decides to maintain Jane Harman's seniority on the House Intelligence Committee rather than sacrifice our national security on the altar of racial politics.

On the way to work this morning it struck me that the Democrats haven't yet had to govern in the Internet Age. Blogs were in their infancy when Bill Clinton left office, and few people even had web access the last time the Democrats controlled Congress. It will be very interesting to see how they perform with the spotlight on them in a way they've never experienced. Maybe they will have learned from some of the Republicans mistakes, but my intuition tells me that they'll make a few of their own before they begin to comprehend how much more difficult leading in the present is than was leading in the past.

Philip Klein has the take on the election results that I've seen so far.

In assessing last night's results it is important to note that it was not a defeat for conservatism; it was a defeat for Republicanism, or at least, what Republicanism has come to represent. In the past 12 years, Republicans went from the party that promised "the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money" to the party of the Bridge to Nowhere; it took control of Congress on a pledge to "end its cycle of scandal and disgrace" and went down in defeat as the party of Tom DeLay and Mark Foley.

Having abandoned its core principles, the Republican Party had nothing to run on this year, so its campaign strategy centered on attacking Nancy Pelosi -- a questionable tactic given that, according to some polls, more than half of the country had never even heard of her. ...

We will hear a lot of reasons for why Republicans lost this year. We will hear that they lost because of an unpopular war, an unpopular president, a culture of corruption, a traditional anti-incumbent six-year itch and a dispirited base. But one thing is for sure. Republicans did not lose on a platform of limiting the size and scope of government.

Quite right. Americans want smaller government, and they elected Republicans to give it to them. When their order wasn't delivered, they demanded a refund.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the GOP holds both houses of Congress. Why? Am I so used to winning that I am blinded to reality? Perhaps. I'm not incredibly confident in my prediction, but if I end up being right I'll look really smart!

Update:

I'm not alone in predicting that the GOP will hold on to power for another cycle.

Of course, Dick Morris is more pessimistic.

In the end, though, it was corruption that did the GOP in. In the '90s, Republican legislators were lean, ascetic and ideological - Reagan Republicans. Now they've grown self-indulgent and pecuniary.

Speaker Dennis Hastert's son left his music store in Illinois to move to Washington to become the lobbyist for Google. Hastert himself used his position to fund a highway project that had a lot to do with a big profit on a land deal nearby. Then-Majority Leader Tom Delay put his wife was on his PAC's payroll; she made $300,000. Voters may expect this kind of corruption from Democrats (Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has four lobbyist sons) but not from Republicans.

First the Republicans lost their virtue; now they'll lose their majority, at least in the House. What's ahead for the next two years? Not new legislation so much as investigations, subpoenas, hearings etc. Washington will be as effectively paralyzed as it was during President Clinton's impeachment trial. And, let us remember that it was in that incubator that Osama bin Laden was able to plan the 9/11 attacks.

If the Republicans lose it'll be because they've trumpeted themselves as the party of morality, but fallen far short.

The most important vote that any Representative makes is their first: who they select to lead their party in the House, either as Speaker or as Minority Leader. Considering who is positioned to take over as Speaker if the Democrats win a majority of the House, let's take a look at Nancy Pelosi, communist.

How much is this unassuming "grandma" worth? The Center for Responsive Politics puts her in the $55 million neighborhood. Pretty nice neighborhood, huh?

Despite her protestations about those "tax cuts for the rich," she has never mentioned returning them to the federal Treasury where they rightfully belong. Go figure.

As I have reported previously in this space, Pelosi, the winner of the 2003 Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers, hires only non-union workers on her $25 million Napa Valley vineyard.

Maybe this explains her firm opposition to any efforts to enhance border security and the flow of illegal cheap labor into the country from Mexico, speculates Investor's Business Daily.

According to Peter Schweizer's account in "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)," the luxury resort and restaurants she partly owns are also strictly non-union. The exclusive country club she partly owns failed to comply with existing environmental regulations for the past eight years – including a failure to protect endangered species.

So she's a hypocrite... not too surprising, but there's more.

As only WND has reported, Pelosi is a long-time member of the "Progressive Caucus" – or, as I call it, the Congressional Red Army Caucus. ...

In fact, she has even served on the executive committee of the socialist-leaning Progressive Caucus, a bloc of about 60 votes or nearly 30 percent of the minority vote in the lower chamber. Until 1999, the website of the Progressive Caucus was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America. ...

Nevertheless, the goal of the Democratic Socialists of America has never been deeply hidden. Prior to the cleanup of its website in 1999, the DSA included a song list featuring "The Internationale," the worldwide anthem of communism and socialism. Another song on the site was "Red Revolution" sung to the tune of "Red Robin." The lyrics went: "When the Red Revolution brings its solution along, along, there'll be no more lootin' when we start shootin' that Wall Street throng. ..." Another song removed after WorldNetDaily's expose was "Are You Sleeping, Bourgeoisie?" The lyrics went: "Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie. And when the revolution comes, We'll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie."

In the last six years, the Progressive Caucus has been careful to moderate its image for mainstream consumption.

Are these the values of mainstream Democrats, or even most American leftists? If not, take a close look at the party you're voting for and the leaders you'll be putting into power.

Update:

Author and Democrat Orson Scott Card rightly points out that the War on Terror is the most important issue facing us in this election, and the Democrats simply cannot be trusted to win it. (And, of course, they don't even claim to want to win.)

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it -- and in the most damaging possible way -- I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- the party I joined back in the 1970s -- is dead. Of suicide.

Card lays out exactly how disgraceful an American withdrawal would be:

You know: If America withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan and exposed everyone who had cooperated with us to reprisals.

As happened in South Vietnam. The negotiated peace was more or less holding after American withdrawal. But then a Democratic Congress refused to authorize any further support for the South Vietnamese government. No more armaments. No more budget.

In other words, we forcibly disarmed our allies, while their enemies continued to be supplied by the great Communist powers. The message was clear: Those who rely on America are fools. We didn't even have the decency to arrange for the evacuation of the people who had trusted us and risked the most in supporting what they thought was our mutual cause.

We did it again, this time in the Muslim world, in 1991, when Bush Senior encouraged a revolt against Saddam. He meant for the senior military officers to get rid of him in a coup; instead, the common people in the Shiite south rose up against Saddam.

Bush Senior did nothing as Saddam moved in and slaughtered them. The tragedy is that all it would have taken is a show of force on our part in support of the rebels, and Saddam's officers would have toppled him. Only when it became clear that we would do nothing did it become impossible for any high-ranking officials to take action. For the price of the relatively easy military action that would have made Saddam turn his troops around and leave the Shiite south, we could have gotten rid of him then -- and had grateful friends, perhaps, in the Shiite south.

That is part of our track record: Two times we persuaded people to commit themselves to action against oppressive enemies, only to abandon them. Do you think that would-be rebels in Iran and Syria and North Korea don't remember those lessons?

That's what the Democrats stand for. Don't let them win. If you have doubts about President Bush's strategy, read Card's whole piece; it is a brilliant defense that I wish the President would make for himself.

Update 2:

Thanks to WorldNetDaily for the link!

It seems like candidates are always dying before their election but after the filing deadline. The party can't put a different name on the ballot, but the deceased can't serve in office, which creates quite a dilemma. It seems wrong to continue campaigning for a dead candidate without even mentioning their passing, but there's no other politically satisfying option available.

A slick new campaign mailer shows a smiling Texas state representative and reminds voters of her many notable achievements in education, economics and politics. But what the ad doesn't say is that Republican Glenda Dawson died in September.

Dawson's campaign hopes she'll win re-election to avoid a shoo-in for the Democrats. There wasn't time to get another Republican on the ballot, but if Dawson wins, the governor would call a special election to fill the vacancy.

Backers say the new flier is a tribute to Dawson and did not attempt to conceal her death, although there's no mention of that on the mailed piece.

Someone needs to devise a better system, but I'm not sure what it should be.

Even though leftists decry questions over their patriotism and claim they aren't on the side of the terrorists, the terrorists always endorse the Democrats for some reason.

Together with the Islamic Jihad terror group, the Brigades has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing inside Israel the past two years, including an attack in Tel Aviv in April that killed American teenager Daniel Wultz and nine Israelis.

Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats' talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel "proud."

"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk," he told WND. "Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the policy of withdrawal "proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation."

"We warned the Americans that this will be their end in Iraq," said Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas' declared "resistance" department. "They did not succeed in stealing Iraq's oil, at least not at a level that covers their huge expenses. They did not bring stability. Their agents in the [Iraqi] regime seem to have no chance to survive if the Americans withdraw."

Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, said he is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam.

"[The mujahedeen fighters] brought the Americans to speak for the first time seriously and sincerely that Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam and that they should fix a schedule for their withdrawal from Iraq," boasted Abu Ayman.

So yes, the Democrat party is certainly emboldening our enemies with their talk of surrender. Remember that just about two years ago Osama Bin Laden endorsed the Democrats, too. America would be much stronger if Democrat politicians weren't continually dangling our nation over the precipice of defeat.

This article by Jacob Sullum exemplifies why, despite my libertarian sympathies, I wouldn't trust our country entirely to them because libertarians' priorities are all wrong. Sullum goes on at length about how the Republican domination of government has led to overspending and waste, and almost all of his points are correct except that he totally neglects to mention the single defining issue of our time: the War on Terror.

Hassett's specific topic is federal jobs, which shrank by 200,000 under Bill Clinton but have grown by 79,000 under George W. Bush. "Strange as it sounds," Hassett writes, "Clinton's record in this particular area is exemplary next to Bush's."

The new Department of Homeland Security probably accounts for all those 79,000 and more (at least 50,000 airport screeners alone). Should the federal government be screening luggage? I don't know if it's ideal, but the old system sure wasn't working.

I'm eagerly anticipating a Republican defeat because the party richly deserves it after failing so miserably to deliver on its promises of smaller (or even slightly less gargantuan) government. The combination of a Democratic Congress and a Republican president could not possibly be worse, and might very well be better, than the current arrangement, in which a Republican executive and a Republican legislature conspire to mulct our money and filch our freedoms.

Fine and good except for the fact that we're in a fight for our lives against Islamofascists who want to do more than waste our money -- they want to kill us. I believe that a divided government might be more stingy with my tax dollars, but I don't believe for a second that giving the Democrats another inch of power would help us defeat Islamofascism or make us any safer.

Bush and the Republican Congress turned Clinton's budget surpluses into deficits that peaked at $413 billion in fiscal year 2004. Federal spending as a share of GDP, which fell under Clinton to 18.5 percent, is again above 20 percent. Discretionary spending has increased faster under Bush than it did under Lyndon Johnson, no slouch in doling out taxpayer dollars. Earmarks have reached record levels, and the abuse of emergency spending bills is rampant.

No mention at all that "discretionary spending" includes military and homeland defense, which yes, have increased. I wonder why? True, there have been massive increases in addition to defense spending, but not all the deficit is due to pork.

Far from reforming entitlement programs, the Republicans compassionately created an exorbitant Medicare drug benefit that will add trillions of dollars to the program's long-term shortfall--the gift that keeps on taking. Far from reducing the federal government's scope, they have extended its reach into state and local matters such as education, abortion, marriage law, and end-of-life medical decisions.

Yes, the Medicare drug benefit is wasteful. As for the other "local matters" that Sullum claims Republicans have extended the federal government's reach into:

- Education: The federal government was already way too involved. The No Child Left Behind act is certainly flawed, but at least it attempts to require that federal dollars be spent usefully. However, I'd side with the libertarians and eliminate the Department of Education entirely.

- Abortion: The federal courts removed this issue from local or state control long before Republicans were in charge.

- Marriage law: Sullum is presumably referring to the issue of gay marriage. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage act in 1996. Federal involvement so far seems to be limited to making sure that states don't run roughshod over each other.

- End-of-life medical decisions: Again I'd agree with the libertarians. If states can handle murder, they can handle euthanasia.

Sullum tangentially refers to the War on Terror in these next paragraphs, but only to imply that he'd prefer that we didn't fight it so vigorously.

Bush has either actively sought bigger government, as with the Medicare bill and the No Child Left Behind Act, or acquiesced in it, as with transportation spending and farm subsidies. Returning the favor, the Republicans who control Congress have acquiesced in the expansion of executive power, behaving as if they expect their party to control the White House forever.

It takes no leap of faith to believe that a Congress run by Democrats would be more inclined to impose limits on the president's surveillance, detention, and war powers. Or to suggest that Bush might suddenly find his veto pen when confronted by free-spending Democrats instead of free-spending Republicans.

Executive power always expands during wars, and then tends to contract again later. It's a dynamic system. Yes, it would have been nice if the Republicans had stuck with the small-government principles that led to the Republican take-over of Congress in 1994, but they didn't. It was a huge missed opportunity. However, even though wasting money is bad it's not as bad as would be losing the War on Terror; as Sullum acknowledges, it appears that President Bush acquiesced to Congressional demands for spending in exchange for the power he needs to win the war. He would probably have had to have made the same compromises with a Democrat Congress, and if the Democrats win next week the only difference will be their reluctance to let him fight on our behalf.

I'm curious about what everyone else thinks, so don't hesitate to comment whether you agree with me or not. The recent Kerry debacle and his defense thereof has really crystalized my opinion that a history of military service should give a politician or pundit absolutely zero additional authority when opining on any matter, even national security. I pity John Kerry for how he wasted his potential over the course of his life, and his recent comments defending his "botched joke" illustrate why admiration for military service, though well-deserved, should not translate into the political realm.

The Massachusetts Democrat called the White House attack "a classic GOP textbook Republican campaign tactic" that reveals Republicans'"willingness to reduce anything in America to raw politics."

"I'm sick and tired of a bunch of despicable Republicans who will not debate real policy, who won't take responsibility for their own mistakes, standing up and trying to make other people the butt of those mistakes," he said. "It disgusts me that a bunch of these Republican hacks who've never worn the uniform of our country are willing to lie about those who did."

Kerry is of course free to be disgusted at whatever he pleases, and lies are generally to be condemned, but America is not Starship Troopers in which suffrage is reserved for soldiers. In fact, our Constitution expressly and purposefully puts the military under civilian control. Furthermore, why aren't any Democrats condemning the inherent sexism behind Kerry's comments? If none but soldiers are qualified to opine on military matters, where does that leave presidential-hopeful Hillary Clinton and other women who are biologically incapable of military service?

And so, while I have great admiration for our soldiers, marines, airmen, sailors, and all the rest who defend our country, and I am immensely thankful for the security they provide at great cost, I do not think their present service should later give their opinions any weight beyond the bare merits of their arguments.

Update:

Currently-serving troops apparently have some worthwhile contributions to the debate, however.

(HT: The Daily Spork.)

Check out Campaigns Wikia for a wiki-style approach to aggregating political information. They've got a decent amount of information about the upcoming 2006 elections, and I imagine everything will continue to get fleshed out over the next couple years.

(HT: Bernardo.)