Category Archives: Republicans

Warring, Torturing, Spying, Lying—Just Do It!

CNN Correspondent Jack Cafferty succinctly sums up the moral depravity of this administration. Readers (usually party Republicans, not true conservatives) who cannot get past partisan proclivities, despite my exhortations, should pay attention to Cafferty’s (“conservative”) quip about Harriet E. Miers. Altogether, Cafferty, who has also suggested sacking New York City’s transit workers should they strike, strikes me as a cross between John McLaughlin and Jon Stewart (A good combination, of course):

“Who cares about whether the Patriot Act gets renewed? Want to abuse our civil liberties? Just do it.

Who cares about the Geneva Conventions? Want to torture prisoners. Just do it.

Who cares about rules concerning the identity of CIA agents? Want to reveal the name of a covert operative? Just do it.

Who cares about whether the intelligence concerning WMDS is accurate? Want to invade Iraq? Just do it.

Who cares about qualifications to serve on the nation’s highest court? Want to nominate a personal friend with no qualifications? Just do it.

And the latest outrage, which I read about in “The New York Times” this morning: Who cares about needing a court order to eavesdrop on American citizens? Want to wiretap their phone conversations? Just do it. What a joke. A very cruel, very sad joke.”

Plamegate: A Storm In A Cesspool

Democrats, Republicans

Writes Dave Lester:

Hi Ilana, I am a bit surprised you have said nothing about the Valerie-Plame situation. I have found myself more and more irritated by the way the talking heads treat this as a sort of inside-the-Beltway joke with everyone betting on what will happen if Karl Rove is outed. [When do they ever address principle? This aspect of the talking twits’ thinking I addressed here, here, and in so many other essays.—ILANA] So little is said about the impact on those who work undercover in foreign countries—of their identities becoming a political football. As someone who spent a little time undercover 40 years ago in Europe with the Army, I can tell you that your sanity hangs on the notion that those in your chain of command regard your identity as essentially sacred. If those sent on such missions cannot have absolute confidence in those who sent them keeping the faith, there is no possibility that people will volunteer. I, for one, think that whoever okayed the release of this information should spend 20 years in the nastiest prison we have with much of it in solitary. Let them find out what it means to feel you have been utterly cut loose and deserted by those you trusted.

I did mention the affair, but only in passing: I celebrated the incarceration of Mrs. Judith Chalabi. But Dave is generally correct: this storm-in-a-cesspool doesn’t much interest me—and I suspect I speak for most classical liberals-cum-libertarians. To understand why, consider a fictitious, but true-to-life, criminal gang. To settle scores, its assassins regularly kill people. In one anomalous instance, these crooks confine themselves to merely kneecapping their victims. That’s how libertarians view Karl Rovegate in the grand scheme of government corruption: breaking the bones of a single foot soldier hardly stacks up against the War, Katrina, deficit spending, and so on. If anything, had this scandal been the government’s worst offense, libertarians would rejoice. Instead of killing, stealing, and counterfeiting currency, it has only outed one undercover agent. What restraint!
Libertarians are astounded when, irrespective of its unfailing treachery over the years, Americans continue to bawl about their government’s betrayals. Most of what government does is either unconstitutional, immoral, illegal, or all of the above. In this respect, Demopublicans, Republocrats; they’re interchangeable, although the current band of brigands has set a new Gold Standard for criminality and corruption. The Founding Fathers were classical liberals too. Their thinking was animated by the same understanding of the evils of unlimited power, which is why they sought to limit and delimit it. By all means, if he’s guilty, incarcerate Rove, but how about chocking these (and future) chickens for once and for all by going to the source, and repealing the 16th Amendment? Such a course of action would spell the difference between temporary and long-term solutions to government corruption.

The Bushies New Judicial Pick

Bush, Constitution, Justice, Law, Republicans, The Courts

Bush’s new Supreme Court nomination may turn out to be the cathartic event to push his loyalists over the edge. Yes, some still imagine Bush is a conservative rather than a radical, faithless to tradition, constitutional or other. After taking a handbagging from Laura Bush, the president appointed Harriet E. Miers to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The woman is a veteran administrator, and the president’s personal lawyer and confidante (cronyism? You don’t say!) As ominous: Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is also hot for Harriet. To say she hasn’t a discernible judicial philosophy is an understatement. But why would Bush care whether she can tell Blackstone from Bentham when he can’t? The president simply wants to ensure his appointees vote as he expects them to. Left-liberals, like Catharine Crier of Court TV, believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent. George Bush thinks a judicial activist is someone who disobeys the President.
P.S. Striking down unconstitutional laws is not judicial activism. Judicial activism means 1) minting new rights not in the Constitution 2) striking down laws to comport with these freshly minted unconstitutional rights.

Update: A must read today in The Walls Street Journal is Cronyism: Alexander Hamilton wouldn’t approve of Justice Harriet Miers by Randy Barnett. Smart-alecky comments about Hamilton being a centralizer are not germane to Randy’s argument, of course. I’m only preempting the perennial libertarian red-herring harangues.

Judge Roberts: Smooth Operator?

America, Bush, Justice, Law, Republicans, The Courts

It’s hard not to warm to Judge John G. Roberts Jr. His poised and humble demeanor accentuates the lack thereof in Charles Schumer and Joe Biden. He doesn’t display the two Democrats’ detestable uppityness. He’s also easy on the eye. (So he pancaked his face a bit. That’s nothing compared to Botox Babe, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.) I like that he never gets defensive.

Ditto for what he had to say about the case of Kelo v. the City of New London. As if the public-use clause was not bad enough, The Court, as I understood it (perhaps I didn’t), affirmed the transfer of private property from one invariably reluctant owner to another eager and well-connected one. All for the Common Good. In no way can this decision be framed as deference to Connecticut’s sovereignty. This might have been the case had The Court declined to consider the case. Kelo, to all intents and purposes, has nationalized such unjust takings. In any event, Roberts retorted by reminding Congress of its duty to step in and uphold rights. Not bad.

I liked the way he responded to Republican Arlen Specter’s petulant demand that Congress be coddled. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee asked that Roberts not consider his method of reasoning superior to that of Congress. (From where did that come? Specter’s Inner Child? Maybe it’s an inside joke.) Roberts reverted masterfully to the Constitution, and spoke about “institutional competence,” as opposed intellectual competence (neither of which the Congressional clowns possess).

The overweening Biden was knocked out nicely. He ventured that Roberts owed the electorate more than he was giving up. Roberts reminded blowhard Joe that he was not standing for an election. Rather, if confirmed, he’d be going on the bench to adhere to a judicial process—an impartial one, not predicated on promises made to special interests.
When asked about free speech, he quoted jurist Louis Brandeis’ “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Again, good move.
But, here’s the thing that unsettles: Roberts seems to be all about the moves. Is that good?
Some Senator, whose name I can’t recall, posed The Mother of All Questions (in my decidedly unmainstream opinion). This good fellow asked Roberts whether the Administrative State under which we strain comports with the Constitution and the Founders’ vision. The Managerial State—its endless rules and regulations—whence does it derive its legitimacy? It wasn’t that Roberts was flummoxed by this First-Principles quandary; it just seemed alien to him. It swooshed right by. He answered what was a philosophical question with a legalistic ramble about administrative law. I find it hard to believe such a gifted man would misconstrue so simple a question. So I worry.
William Rehnquist did not believe the procedures governing bureaucracy-stiffened administrative agencies encapsulated the Constitution’s original scheme. In a superb (and stylish) piece in The Wall Street Journal, Randy Barnett elaborated on the late Chief Justice’s “New Federalism.” Case by case Rehnquist had begun to resurrect the eternal verities of limited and delegated federal power and States’ Rights. Lo and behold: in attempting, piecemeal, to revive the notion of a constitutionally limited government, Rehnquist even deferred increasingly to the 10th Amendment, which has been mocked out of meaning. He also did a great deal to reverse “interstate commerce” judicial abominations.

As affable as he is, Roberts, regrettably, is no Janice Rogers Brown. Their devotion (and dotage) prevents President Bush’s lickspittles from realizing that he too considers Rogers Brown “outside the mainstream,” to use the Democrats’ demotic line. Let’s hope, at the very least, that Roberts is a Rehnquist.