Author Archives: National Review Online

Stephen: I think the word you’re looking for is “nihilistic.”

“Game on,” says Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, to National Review Online. “The Democrats are moving on reconciliation. They are revving up their machine, even though they don’t yet have the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House. This is their do-or-die moment. They know can’t let their members go home for Easter with this hanging out there.”

Ryan says that, come Monday, Democrats “will bring a shell piece of reconciliation legislation” to the budget committee. “The reconciliation process has to begin there,” he says. “Here’s what they’ll do: They will take the House health-care bill and mark it up so that it can become a reconciliation vehicle. Republicans will make runs at this via motions to instruct, but since we’re outnumbered, their package will get through the committee. Then they’ll send that shell of a bill to the House Rules Committee. The rules committee will then gut the budget committee’s reconciliation bill and drop in all of the deals that Speaker Pelosi arranges with members who vote for the Senate health-care bill in the House.” Those deals, he adds, “will be hard to scrutinize, and we may never know their full extent, since many of them will be orchestrated outside of health-care legislation.”

Regardless of how bad a reconciliation package looks, Ryan says it is the passage of the Senate bill in the House that troubles him the most. “The Senate parliamentarian made it clear today,” he says. “The Senate bill has to become law before reconciliation can be taken up in the Senate. Knowing this, the Democrats are doing whatever they can to convince House members to walk the plank. But let’s be very clear: If the Senate bill passes in the House, it’s not just some setup for reconciliation – it’s a huge, new federal entitlement that’ll be signed into law.”

“To get that, they need to make promises to members about what’ll come next, so look for them to thread the needle on policy changes and abortion in the budget and rules committees,” Ryan says. “Reconciliation is a distraction for the Democratic leadership – something to talk about with members while keeping their eye on the main prize, which is passing the Senate bill.”

Dahlia Lithwick writes that “the president has every right to criticize the court, and the justices have every right to appear annoyed.” So far, so good. What’s inappropriate, in her view, was not Obama’s conduct or Alito’s but rather Chief Justice Roberts’s. She faults Roberts for “lobbing long-distance partisan attacks at Congress and the president” and lacking “the courage to insult” Obama to his face. So it’s okay for justices to respond to criticism with facial expressions but not with words? How does that make any sense?

Ruth Marcus writes that Roberts is a “big crybaby” — either for preferring not to be criticized in a forum where he cannot respond, or for responding later. She concludes that for the conservative justices to stay away from future State of the Union addresses would be “a mistake” — although she identifies no reason for thinking that the justices have any duty to be there, nor even any good that their presence serves. She concludes, “If conservative justices boycott a Democratic president’s State of the Union address, who, then, will be politicizing the court?” If by “politicizing the court” she means making the Court the subject of political controversy, then the answer is that both the president and the justices will have done so — but by Marcus’s own (correct) argument, that’s alright, since “the court is and should be part of the conversation.” If, on the other hand, by “politicizing the court” she means joining that conversation in some improper way, then the answer is that nobody will have done so; and she doesn’t even try to explain why she holds otherwise.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more constitutional outcry over the so-called “Slaughter Solution.” As the Washington Examiner describes the proposal: 

Each bill that comes before the House for a vote on final passage must be given a rule that determines things like whether the minority would be able to offer amendments to it from the floor.  In the Slaughter Solution, the rule would declare that the House “deems” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed by the House. House members would still have to vote on whether to accept the rule, but they would then be able to say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself.

It seems that voting on a rule that deems a bill to be passed differs importantly from actually passing a bill. The difference is not just formalistic but deeply functional. A core purpose of the constitutional legislative process is to ensure that lawmakers are held accountable to the public. Their legislative voting record has to be clear, so that the electorate can make an informed decision on whether to reelect them. The Slaughter Solution is a piece of subterfuge designed specifically to short-circuit this purpose of electoral accountability, so that congressmen can “say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself.” The very attractiveness of the maneuver shows that it plays some role in insulating lawmakers from popular disapproval of their vote, and for that reason it is constitutionally noxious.

The Los Angeles Times has the breakdown of charities to which the president donated portions of his Nobel Prize winnings.

I can’t claim to have been following all of this parliamentary hootenany too closely. But I’ve tried to a bit lately. At first, the Democrats’ logic reminded me of Dewey Oxberger’s (John Candy in Stripes) explanation of why he doesn’t have to make his bunk:

   “What are you doing?  No, no… get off.  Get off.  See… you gotta make my bunk.  See, we’re in Italy.  The guy on the top bunk, he’s gotta make the guy on the bottom’s bunk… he’s gotta make his bed, all the time.  See, it’s in the regulations.  See, if we were in Germany, I’d have to make yours.  But we’re in Italy, so you gotta make mine.  [Shrugs] Regulations.”

But I actually think that’s too logical. I think the Democrats are going for what might be called the Fizzbin maneuver. It’s all crystal clear:

I can’t claim to have been following all of this parliamentary hootenanny too closely. But I’ve tried to a bit lately. At first, the Democrats’ logic reminded me of Dewey Oxberger’s (John Candy in Stripes) explanation of why he doesn’t have to make his bunk:

“What are you doing?  No, no… get off.  Get off.  See… you gotta make my bunk.  See, we’re in Italy.  The guy on the top bunk, he’s gotta make the guy on the bottom’s bunk… he’s gotta make his bed, all the time.  See, it’s in the regulations.  See, if we were in Germany, I’d have to make yours.  But we’re in Italy, so you gotta make mine.  [Shrugs] Regulations.”

But I actually think that’s too logical. I think the Democrats are going for what might be called the Fizzbin maneuver. It’s all crystal clear:

Assuming the abortion language can’t be fixed through reconciliation, the only reason the process is necessary is because the unions don’t want to pay higher taxes on their “Cadillac” health plans. It really is that simple. If the Senate bill had exempted collectively bargained plans from the Cadillac tax the way Democrats wanted it to, then I think — again, assuming they found a separate way to fix the abortion issue — House Democrats would have rubber-stamped the Senate bill, the president would have signed it, and reconciliation would not now be necessary. So if Leader Reid does pursue reconciliation, let’s not obscure the reasons in a blizzard of euphemistic talk about “fixes” and “tweaks”: It’s because the unions didn’t want to pay higher taxes, and the Democrats obeyed their command.

Last year, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) put forward a plan to balance the budget by overhauling the tax code and cutting entitlement spending. It attracted virtually no attention — the Democrats had not yet descended into their current morass. Now the political landscape has changed. Obamacare’s unpopularity, combined with frighteningly large deficits projected into the foreseeable future and no forthcoming plan from the administration to fix them, have the Democratic party reeling. So this year, when Ryan released version 2.0 of his Roadmap, liberals started bashing it immediately in order to distract attention from their own quagmires and failures of imagination when it comes to addressing spiraling entitlement costs.

First they went after Ryan’s proposed entitlement reforms (I’ve written about these attacks here and here). Liberals have every right to criticize Ryan’s ideas, involving as they do a complete re-imagining of the Democrats’ New Deal and Great Society defined-benefit social insurance programs. But only the most tendentious left-wing commentators would deny that these programs are going broke, and most of Ryan’s critics had to admit that he had offered a real plan to fix the entitlement crisis. By contrast, the Obama administration’s plan to balance the budget involves punting to a bipartisan commission.

Then Ryan embarrassed the president on national television, and now liberals have adopted a more aggressive strategy which involves denying that Ryan’s plan would balance the budget after all. Two left-leaning think tanks have issued reports on Ryan’s plan, each claiming that Ryan essentially fudged the revenue side of his Roadmap. Ryan has offered responses here and here, which I encourage you to read. I’ll sum up the key points below:

1. Ryan did not “fudge” the revenue side of his Roadmap, unless you consider all long-term estimates of economic growth to be inherently fudged due to the uncertainties involved (which they kind of are). For reasons that had nothing to do with fudging the numbers, Ryan relied on revenue estimates from Treasury Department experts instead of the CBO or the Joint Committee on Taxation. CBO didn’t want to step on the latter’s toes, and the latter informed Ryan’s office that it was not able to perform an estimate given the time frame of Ryan’s proposal. Treasury’s estimates do not get the same level of respect that CBO’s and JCT’s get, but there’s no reason to think Ryan fudged the numbers when it’s more likely that his estimates simply made different assumptions about future GDP growth than the two left-leaning think tanks.

2. With his Roadmap, Ryan has offered a starting point for debate, not a finished product. “Congressman Ryan stands by his numbers,” his office states, “and of course would be open to adjustments in the specified rates under his tax reforms if in fact [the Tax Policy Center’s] estimates are closer to reality than Ryan’s estimates.” But the point, his office states, is that “We clearly cannot chase our unsustainable growth in spending with ever-higher levels of taxes — and the purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue — not the other way around.”

3. Certain of Ryan’s liberal critics have stated that, compared to Obama’s tax plan, Ryan’s tax plan would involve tax increases for 90 percent of Americans while — again, compared to Obama’s plan — the rich would pay less. First of all, according to the very same Tax Policy Center whose work these critics are citing, Obama’s tax plan leaves gaping holes in the budget that, again, he has proposed no way to fill, save for his blue-ribbon panel (and we all know how effective that’s going to be). To pretend that we can close these gaps simply by increasing taxes on the rich is not realistic. Second, the policy change that has the biggest effect on the distribution of the tax burden under Ryan’s plan vs. Obama’s is that Ryan would replace the corporate income tax with a value-added tax. This is hardly as controversial as Ryan’s critics have made it sound, and there is a near-consensus among economists that VATs cause fewer economic distortions than corporate income taxes. Also, the changes to the tax burden are not as straightforward as Ryan’s critics allege. The share of the corporate income tax that is borne by lower-income Americans is obscured by the fact that corporations act as tax collectors, not taxpayers, and often pass the costs of the tax onto their employees and customers.   

I don’t agree with every single thing in Ryan’s Roadmap. Few would look at it and find nothing they would change, and the revenue provisions are probably where conservatives would disagree the most. But it is far more substantial than anything the other side has offered. Yet, rather than taking it as a starting point for debate, which is the spirit in which it is offered, Democrats are attacking it to distract from their political problems and to distract from the fact that they don’t have a plan. That’s a roadmap to bankruptcy.

It’s fair to say this ruling from the Senate parliamentarian today will put a serious damper on the Democrats’ “dual bill” approach to passing their health-care plan.

Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it. Surely it’s time to start over.

Via Philip Klein over at AmSpec, Roll Call is reporting from GOP sources that the Senate Parliamentarian has ruled the House must first pass the Senate bill — and the president must sign that bill into law — before reconciliation fixes to it can be considered.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate’s original health care bill.

Information Republicans say they have received from the Senate Parliamentarian’s Office eliminates that option. House Democratic leaders last week began looking at crafting a legislative rule that would allow the House to approve the Senate health care bill, but not forward it to Obama for his signature until the Senate clears the reconciliation package.

“Game Changer” is quickly replacing the various iterations of “under the bus” as the most overused political cliche of our age, but this certainly qualifies as one. And it leaves House Democrats with little but the fig leaf of the “Slaughter Rule” as political coverage.

UPDATE: From The Hill:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told colleagues about the ruling Thursday afternoon, according to a Democratic source familiar with the meeting.

[. . .]

Democrats acknowledged the parliamentarian’s ruling was a setback but argued that it does not deliver a fatal blow.
 
“It’s just going to require a little more trust from the House that the Senate is going to do its job,” said a Democratic strategist.
 
Democratic lawmakers such as Conrad had thought the Senate could pass the sidecar bill under reconciliation after the House had passed the Senate version of healthcare reform.

“The Senate Parliamentarian’s office has informed Senate Republicans that reconciliation instructions require the measure to make changes in law,” said a senior GOP aide.
 
The Congressional Budget Office could give the broader healthcare bill an official cost estimate once the Senate and House acted.

I am amazed to learn from a reader that in-the-pit commodity futures trading has been rendered as a card game. Just in case you can’t afford one of those university courses.

Pit has no turns, and everyone plays at once.

Yeah, that sounds right.

ACORN, R.I.P., in Ohio? The Columbus Dispatch reports:

ACORN, the liberal group notorious for allegedly trying to inflate voter rolls through fraudulent practices, has seen its last election in Ohio.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now will permanently surrender its Ohio business license by June1 as part of a legal settlement with the conservative Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, both sides said yesterday.

ACORN was active in Ohio in the 2006 and 2008 elections, working to register thousands of low-income people to vote and get them to the polls. The group’s efforts were marred by irregularities, including one case in which ACORN workers allegedly induced a Cleveland man to register to vote 72 times, offering cigarettes as an incentive.

Many readers have responded with sympathetic, er, vigor to my Tuesday posting about Assistant Professor Katynka Z. Martínez.

Several of these outraged readers have directed me to the wbsite for SFSU’s Raza Studies Department. Prof. Martínez is not toiling away there alone: there are thirteen profs and assistant profs on the faculty.

What goes on in a Raza Studies Department? Let them tell us.

Roberto [Rivera] is presently finishing a book on Liberation Discourse which examines the semantics of counter-hegemony in the philosophies of Gustavo Gutierrez and Paulo Freire

[Prof. Tomas Almaguer] is currently completing work on a book manuscript entitled Border Men: Gender and Sexuality in the Life Histories of Chicano Gay Men, which will be published by the University of California Press.

[Prof. Teresa Carrillo]’s teaching and research interests reflect her fascination with Latinos as political actors in a constant interaction with local, national and transnational political forces …

In Systems of Elections, Latino Representation, and Student Outcomes in Central California and Faculty, Managers, and Administrators in the University of California, 1996 to 2002, [Assistant Professor Belinda] Reyes explores ethnic diversity in higher ed and k-12 and the potential consequences of under-representation.

[Writing Specialist Alejandro Murguia]’s memoir The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, University of Texas Press, has been nominated for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.

[Dr. Nancy Raquel Mirabal] teaches courses in the history of Latina/os, Caribbean diasporas, Afro-Latina/o diasporas, theory and methods, gender and sexuality, and oral history.

Publications by [the aforementioned Asst. Prof.] Martínez include:  … “Real Women and Their Curves: Letters to the Editor and a Magazine’s Celebration of the ‘Latina body’” in Latina/o Communication Studies Today, Ed. Angharad N. Valdivia (2008) …

Felix [Kury] is Program Director and Faculty Advisor for Clinica Martin-Baro SFSU-UCSF … a student-organized free clinic operating Saturdays out of CARECEN (Centro de Recursos Centroamericanos) in the Mission District of San Francisco … Clinica’s model is based on Liberation Theology …

[Velia Garcia] teaches Raza 485 — Criminalize Raza Youth, Introduction to Raza Studies, La Raza Women, Issues in Political Economy, Race, Crime and Justice, Sociological Perspectives and Step-to-College …

Currently, [Brigitte Davila's] area of focus is law and public policy, with an emphasis on community activism.

[Jose Cuellar's] recent publications include: “Chicanismo” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures (2001); “El Saxofón in Tejano and Norteño Music” in ¡Puro Conjunto! An Album in Words and Pictures. U of Texas Press (2001); “Cesar E. Chavez” and “Farm Labor” in Pollution — A toZ …

[Prof. Carlos Cordova] presently teaches Raza 280 Acculturation Issues of La Raza; Raza 320 Raza Art History; Raza 460: Central Americans in the U.S.; Raza 450: Indigenismo: Indigenous Cultures and Personality; and Raza 440: Caribbean Cultures and Spirituality.

This is a public university, part-funded by the taxpayers of California . . . a state that is currently in the throes of one of the worst state-level fiscal crises in U.S. history.

Why do I feel perfectly certain that, whatever measures are taken to resolve California’s budgetary crisis, however many extra burdens are placed on state businesses and taxpayers, Professors Carrillo, Almaguer, Cordova, Cuellar, Davila, Duncan-Andrade, Garcia, Kury, Martínez, Mirabal, Murguia, Reyes, and Rivera need not fear any interruption to the vital pedagogical and scholarly work they are doing over there in the Department of Raza (”race, breed, strain” — Collin’s Spanish Gem Dictionary) Studies. The departments of Medicine, Business, and Engineering will be closed down first.

Doomed! Doomed!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has made it official in a letter to Republican leadership today. The Democrats will pursue reconciliation:

An excerpt:

To address these problems, 60 Senators voted to pass historic reform that will make health insurance more affordable, make health insurance companies more accountable and reduce our deficit by roughly a trillion dollars.  The House passed a similar bill.  However, many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we’ve made, the extensive debate and negotiations we’ve held, the amendments we’ve added (including more than 100 from Republicans) and the votes of a supermajority in favor of a bill whose contents the American people unambiguously support.***  We will not.  We will finish the job.  We will do so by revising individual elements of the bills both Houses of Congress passed last year, and we plan to use the regular budget reconciliation process that the Republican caucus has used many times.

I know that many Republicans have expressed concerns with our use of the existing Senate rules, but their argument is unjustified.  There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about the use of reconciliation.  As one of the most senior Senators in your caucus, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said in explaining the use of this very same option, “Is there something wrong with majority rules?  I don’t think so.”  Similarly, as non-partisan congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said in this Sunday’s New York Times, our proposal is “compatible with the law, Senate rules and the framers’ intent.”

Reconciliation is designed to deal with budget-related matters, and some have expressed doubt that it could be used for comprehensive health care reform that includes many policies with no budget implications.  But the reconciliation bill now under consideration would not be the vehicle for comprehensive reform – that bill already passed outside of reconciliation with 60 votes.  Instead, reconciliation would be used to make a modest number of changes to the original legislation, all of which would be budget-related.  There is nothing inappropriate about this.  Reconciliation has been used many times for a variety of health-related matters, including the establishment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and COBRA benefits, and many changes to Medicare and Medicaid.

***!!!!!!!

Matthew Continetti, in the course of defending Rep. Paul Ryan’s “roadmap,” links to a report by the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice. CTJ says that the roadmap would raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans. Continetti writes:

That’s a swipe at Ryan’s zeroing out the stimulus and replacing the corporate income tax with a business consumption tax. You see, Ryan says the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit in Obama’s stimulus bill is spending, not tax cutting. He’d eliminate it. And CTJ counts a reduction in that spending as a tax hike. The business consumption tax would be passed on to the consumer, making it regressive. But Ryan notes that Americans indirectly feel the consequences of the above-average U.S. corporate tax rate today, through lost wages and higher prices. And these effects are regressive, too. Unlike the current situation, Ryan goes on, the business consumption tax “is cleaner, simpler, and it’s on paper.” It would also make American exports more competitive than they are today.

Reining in the EITC and child credit raises two issues. First, is it right to consider those credits “spending” rather than “tax cuts”? Republicans have generally said that “refundable” tax credits — credits that you get even when your income tax liability is already zero — should count as spending. But payroll taxes are taxes too, and there’s a reasonable case that people should be able to use either the EITC or the child credit to offset payroll taxes as well as income taxes. (It’s not as though Representative Ryan is a purist on this issue, either: His plan creates a refundable tax credit for health care.) Second: Even if it is right to consider the scaling back of the credits as a spending cut, will it fly politically? Conservatives probably don’t want to be in the position of telling people who are surrendering more of their paychecks to the federal government that it only looks like their taxes are going up.

I think that Representative Ryan is right that moving from a corporate income tax to a business VAT might not do much to change the distribution of taxes. The argument that a business VAT would make exports more competitive, though, is deeply flawed. First of all, there is considerable reason to think that any gain in the trade balance would be wiped out by changes to the exchange rate. Second, there’s no good reason for the government to favor exports over imports. Adam Smith taught us that a while ago; you’d think Representative Ryan, of all people, would know better than to lapse into mercantilism.

Acorn screwed up and now can’t sue Giles and O’Keefe.

UPDATE: From a reader:

Not so much, Jonah, unfortunately.

 

The dismissal was procedural, meaning without prejudice.  They can reload immediately.

This afternoon, by a vote of 402 to one, the U.S. House approved a resolution calling for the House Ethics Committee to investigate House Democratic leaders and their handling of ethical allegations concerning former Rep. Eric Massa (D., N.Y.). House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) offered the privileged resolution.

In the resolution, Republicans urge the ethics committee, based on recent media reports, to probe into allegations of sexual harassment made by Massa’s former congressional staffers. Inaction by House Democratic leaders “may have exposed employees and interns of Rep. Massa to continued harassment,” the resolution reads. The resolution also asks the committee to investigate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), and their staffs:

(1)    The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is directed to investigate fully, pursuant to clause 3(a)(2) of House Rule XI, which House Democratic leaders and members of their respective staffs had knowledge prior to March 3, 2010 of the aforementioned allegations concerning Mr. Massa, and what actions each leader and staffer having any such knowledge took after learning of the allegations;

(2)    Within ten days following adoption of this resolution, and pursuant to Committee on Standards of Official Conduct rule 19, the committee shall establish an Investigative Subcommittee in the aforementioned matter, or report to the House no later than the final day of that period the reasons for its failure to do so;

(3)    All Members and staff are instructed to cooperate fully in the committee’s investigation and to preserve all records, electronic or otherwise, that may bear on the subject of this investigation;

(4)    The Chief Administrative Officer shall immediately take all steps necessary to secure and prevent the alteration or deletion of any e-mails, text messages, voicemails and other electronic records resident on House equipment that have been sent or received by the Members and staff who are the subjects of the investigation authorized under this resolution until advised by the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct that it has no need of any portion of said records; and,

(5)    The Committee shall issue a final report of its findings and recommendations in this matter no later than June 30, 2010.

Republican aides tell National Review Online that this issue is far from over. (Aides asked to remain anonymous due to this being an ongoing ethics investigation.)

“There is a fine line between acting on public information that continues to bear itself out versus taking a political opportunity, and we’re very mindful of that,” says one senior GOP House staffer. “The key here is to make sure, be it through political pressure or a formal resolution, that the American people, and other members, know about the who-what-when-where-why of the Pelosi-Massa case. It’s a disturbing, horrible situation.”

“The ethics committee’s decision to end the Massa investigation after he resigned does not mean that this is over,” adds another House GOP aide. “It is unacceptable to end the investigation of this case without knowing when Pelosi and her staff knew, what they did, and why. We’re going to make sure they live up to their promise to be the most ethical Congress in history. A privileged resolution raising questions is probably the most responsible course to take at this point, especially when we hear more and more about the speaker’s staff knowing about this for months on end.”

A third senior Republican aide says that the ethics committee’s recent ruling against Rep. Charlie Rangel (D., N.Y.), which blamed his staff for any wrongdoing, has led Republicans to believe that “clearly members are going to be held responsible for their staff’s work and actions.”

A senior Republican party official tells NRO that the 2006 ethics case of former Rep. Mark Foley (R., Fla.) could also serve as a crucial precedent in any Pelosi investigation. “All one has to do is look at the Foley report to see how the Democrats have not held themselves to the standard they set four years ago. They criticized the Republican leadership then for not confronting the situation in a member-to-member fashion. They said that reporting allegations to the ethics committee is an important step, but it does not mitigate the situation in the interim. We need to know if Pelosi made any effort to confront Massa about these charges. Saying you punted it to Steny Hoyer won’t cut it.”

Another GOP official says the Foley case could present many months of problems for Pelosi. “The speaker may have thought that this would be over after Massa resigned, but let’s remember that the ethics committee ruled it germane to continue to investigate Foley long after he left office, issuing their report months later.”

Here are some snippets from the Foley report that could trip up Pelosi:

“As a general matter, the Subcommittee observed a disconcerting unwillingness to take responsibility for resolving issues regarding Rep. Foley’s conduct. Rather than addressing the issue fully, some witnesses did far too little, while attempting to pass the responsibility for acting to others. Some relied on unreasonably fine distinctions regarding their defined responsibilities. Almost no one followed up adequately on the limited actions they did take.” (p. 70)

“While some did fulfill their responsibilities, the Investigative Subcommittee finds that too many exhibited insufficient diligence or willingness to take the steps necessary to ensure that the matter was being appropriately handled.” (p. 70)

“Several people were told about the emails and were asked to take action regarding them, including confronting Rep. Foley and telling him to stop communications with the former page, but none of those people saw – or insisted on seeing – the emails prior to taking such action.” (pp. 70-71)

“Almost no one followed up to make sure that the action they had taken had been successful.” (p. 71)

“Some or all of these factors (as well as others) may have played a role in decisions that were made about how this matter should have been handled, but in the Investigative Subcommittee’s view none of these factors mitigated the need for those involved to learn all the relevant facts and communicate those facts candidly and freely to those with authority to address the issues raised by the emails.” (p. 71)

“The Investigative Subcommittee finds that the weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that Speaker Hastert was told, at least in passing, about the e-mails by both Majority Leader Boehner and Rep. Reynolds in spring 2006.” (p. 85)

“All Members, officers, and employees of the House must pursue specific and non-specific allegations of improper interaction between a Member or House employee and a participant in the House Page Program – even if the allegations are not readily verifiable or involve the sensitive subject of a Member’s personal relationship with a young person. This obligation applies regardless of whether the Member and page are of the same or opposite sex.” (p. 89)

Still, even though the House has approved further investigation into the Massa affair, that doesn’t mean an investigation is guaranteed. The ethics committee, controlled by Democrats and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.), a Pelosi ally, will ultimately make the decision on how to move forward – if at all – on their own. That distinction, the AP points out, could “kill any further investigation.”

From ABC News:

“March 18th is a very interesting date,” Pelosi said, referring to the White House’s preferred deadline — the date President Obama leaves for a foreign trip. “We will take up the bill when we are ready to take up the bill.”

Good news from the Ninth Circuit: A divided panel has ruled that teacher-led recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, with its reference to “one Nation under God,” is constitutionally permissible. Judge Carlos T. Bea wrote the majority opinion, which Judge Dorothy W. Nelson joined. Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote a 133-page dissent.

For what it’s worth, Judge Bea is a Bush 43 appointee, and Judges Nelson and Reinhardt are both Carter appointees.

Via e-mail

WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the following statement today after it was discovered that Attorney General Holder failed to disclose to the Judiciary Committee that he joined an amicus brief challenging the Bush administration’s authority to place domestic al Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla in military custody, a disclosure required as part of his confirmation:

“I am deeply concerned by Attorney General Holder’s failure to disclose to the Senate Judiciary Committee his third-party brief in support of Jose Padilla’s Supreme Court case. Not only was the Attorney General required to provide the brief as part of his confirmation, but the opinions expressed in it go to the heart of his responsibilities in matters of national security. This is an extremely serious matter and the Attorney General will have to address it immediately. It is essential that we have full confidence, and receive full candor, from the official leading the Department of Justice.”

House Progressive Caucus co-chair Lynn Woolsey (D., Calif.) told ABC’s Top Line today that she finds the Slaughter Rule attractive because she doesn’t think the House should be “forced” to vote on the Senate bill:

“I don’t need to see my colleagues vote for the Senate bill in the House. We don’t like the Senate bill. Why should we be forced to do that?” said Woolsey, D-Calif. “But what we need to know, before any Senate bill is passed, that we have enough of the fixes that we’ve asked for, that we will be satisfied with the final product as a beginning for health care [reform].”

Asked if she would be comfortable with the House voting to deem the bill passed, rather than actually taking a recorded vote on the Senate-passed bill, Woolsey said: “I would be OK with that.”

Somehow this reminds me of absurdist comedian Zach Galifianakis’s opinion of audiences at his stand-up comedy shows: “the nerve of people showing up at a place to sit there and you have to make them laugh. You can’t find stuff that’s humorous? You have to go watch people do it for a living? It’s pathetic.”

Have you considered applying for a Buckley fellowship?

AP:

WASHINGTON — A top House Democrat says the leadership may be able to pass President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul without resolving a dispute over abortion.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said Thursday that the leadership will try to secure the necessary 216 votes to pass the bill without reworking the divisive abortion provision.

Michigan Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak has said that he has about a dozen votes against the bill unless the language is toughened in restricting federal dollars for abortion. But leaders question whether the members of his group will stick together.

Waxman, a California Democrat, said that “many of the pro-life members are going to support passage of the health care bill.”

From my most recent NRO article, on the views of Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru on American exceptionalism:

Of course the authors are right that the Howard Zinn-Noam Chomsky view of U.S. history is an almost complete fraud, but it was made plausible only by the Washington’s-cherry-tree school of myth-making. The United States is still much the world’s greatest power, and its military is very efficient. The people are hard-working and productive; not demotivated and pretentiously world-weary like Europeans, nor encumbered by hundreds of millions of primitive peasants like the Chinese. But half the horses of American exceptionalism have already fled. Where I agree emphatically with Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru is that President Obama is aggravating the problem. It is not nearly too late and can certainly wait for another president. But the problem will not be improved by the time-worn mantra about American virtue and superiority, as if they were entirely intact.

Whether you agree or disagree, your comments are, as always, most welcome.

A Republican resolution calling for a formal investigation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t the only bad news Pelosi’s office received this week.

Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D., Mich.) has been subpoenaed before a federal grand jury in Detroit:

Kilpatrick, a Detroit Democrat and the mother of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office know about the summons on Wednesday, as required by House rules. Her spokeswoman, Tracy Walker, would not confirm the subpoena or comment on it when reached Wednesday night.

On Tuesday, Kilpatrick’s office manager in Detroit, Andrea Bragg, let the Speaker’s office know she had been subpoenaed as well before a grand jury. She and Kilpatrick sent the letters to the Speaker’s office on Monday, March 1, but they were not made part of the Congressional Record until this week.

The topic of the subpoenas is not known. Kwame Kilpatrick has been fighting in state court over restitution to be paid on a perjury plea. The Free Press also has reported that a contractor who pleaded guilty in a federal corruption probe has told investigators he handed over bribes to the former mayor in 2002.

Cheeks Kilpatrick – Michigan’s only member of the powerful Appropriations Committee – has not been publicly implicated in any of those probes but has been a loyal defender of her son.

Her office issued a statement last night – in response to the subpoena of Bragg – saying only that officials “do not have any comment beyond the official notification” in the Congressional Record.

Kwame Kilpatrick’s spokesman, Mike Paul, declined to comment this morning about the subpoena for the ex-mayor’s mother.

UPDATE: A reader sends along this video of Cheeks Kilpatrick at her, um, finest:

I have a piece up for the Washington Post explaining why the al-Qaeda lawyers are wrong to wrap themselves in the mantle of John Adams. Thanks to the spade work of Bill Burck and Dana Perino, we now know why Holder was stonewalling on the identities of the “Al Qaeda 7” — he was one of them! If Holder and co. are simply carrying on the traditions of John Adams, why were they hiding their roles in seeking the release of enemy combatants? If they are proud of their work, why don’t they stand up and say so? 

On Chief Justice John Roberts’s response to President Obama’s attack on the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address:

The chief justice as usual — I would almost say, as always — is right. A president can attack the Supreme Court over its decisions, but that’s not the place to do it. It was a breach of protocol and decorum, and it was an insult.

The reason that the justices show up — it’s a dull evening, there is nothing in it if you are a justice. David Souter, the liberal who [recently] retired, never attended a single one because it is a waste of — it’s simply a way to pay respect to the presidency and the Congress. And you sit there and you don’t expect you are going to be attacked gratuitously, as the court was.

First of all, if you are going to attack the court in a setting like that, you should get it right. It was not a century-old precedent. That is the 1907 Tillman law which outlawed the direct giving of money by a corporation to a candidate. That was never in dispute. It wasn’t in this decision at all. It was left standing.

What the court overturned in the Citizens United case is the indirect expenditures of corporations and unions. So when Alito said “not true,” he was right as well.

I hope that next year there are nine empty seats in the State of the Union address. That would be the appropriate rebuke. . . .

I like the delayed response, the leaving of a decent period between the attack and counterattack. It had the right judicial touch. It was slightly robed.

On the hearings before the Texas State Board of Education on Texas’s social studies curriculum:

I know about the culture wars on textbooks. I was on my son’s curriculum committee in his schools in middle school and high school, and I had to fight for five years to get American history introduced by eighth grade and to get European [history] introduced as a requirement [at] any time.

I had to give long disquisitions on why European history — which gave us, for example, English, the common law, Western science — was slightly more important than Inca history in which my son had been marinated for many years. In fact, he could almost speak Inca by seventh grade.

And this goes on everywhere. It is political correctness. There is no way to solve it ultimately. But I think it’s good if you get some pushback from the parents, particularly since the teachers, who generally are the ones who have sway over this, are left-leaning and you get a lot of liberal slant in the textbooks.

We’ve been called war criminals by left-wing bloggers because we worked in the Bush administration and believe that President’s Bush’s national security policies kept the nation safe after 9/11. We don’t think we are, and we hope our friends and family don’t either, but we’re grownups and can handle name-calling. We’ve chosen to enter the political realm and the public debate, so that kind of thing sort of comes with the territory.

That’s one reason why we are having a hard time sympathizing with the lawyers at Justice who represented Guantanamo detainees or other suspected terrorists. They are not in cahoots with al-Qaeda. They should be allowed to work at the Department of Justice and advise Attorney General Eric Holder on detainee issues, assuming they comply with their ethical obligations to avoid conflicts of interest.

But they are political appointees hired in large measure because of their political viewpoints and policy preferences; they are not career officials for whom such considerations would be prohibited. So, forgive us if we think they should have a bit thicker skin. Like us, they chose to enter the fray. They are trained advocates who can defend themselves, and we are sure they are more than capable of withstanding a little bit of political heat.

Not to mention that many of them were more than happy to be identified by name in more friendly settings. Go online and you can find numerous press releases from their law firms, law schools, and advocacy centers celebrating the lawyers for their work on behalf of detainees.

Congress is entirely within its rights to know who advises the attorney general on matters of national security — not so these people can be driven out of government or to shut them up, but so the public knows who is helping shape policy. What legitimate grounds could there be in a democracy to hide from the public the identities or responsibilities of political appointees? Because Keep America Safe might put up another ad? Please.

We wrote a piece yesterday about Supreme Court briefs Holder signed onto in 2004 and 2005 supporting Jose Padilla. Holder failed to disclose these briefs as he was required to during his confirmation hearings, and the Department of Justice has admitted this. As we discussed, the briefs provide a roadmap to many of Holder’s current policies, but one of them is also notable for admitting there might be trade-offs between protecting the individual rights of suspected terrorists and protecting national security, which Holder denies (as does the president) now that he’s atop the Justice Department.

We expect most people would agree that Holder’s policy views are very relevant to how he operates as a public official. So are those of the political appointees he chooses to surround himself with. We suspect many of them believe, as Holder did in his brief, that there is some level of risk we should be willing to bear to protect the rights of suspected terrorists. There’s no reason to think that this is anything other than an honestly held view. But how much risk they are willing to take is a legitimate topic for public debate.

House Republicans are seeking a formal House Ethics Committee investigation of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). This afternoon, GOP Leader John Boehner (Ohio) offered a privileged resolution on the House floor, raising numerous questions about how Pelosi and her staff handled ethical allegations concerning former Rep. Eric Massa (D., N.Y.).

Here is the resolution:

H. Resolution ______

RESOLUTION

 

Raising a question of the privileges of the House.

Whereas, on March 8, 2010, Representative Eric Massa resigned from the House;

Whereas, numerous newspapers and other media organizations reported in the days before and after Mr. Massa’s resignation that the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct was investigating allegations that Mr. Massa sexually harassed Members of his congressional staff;

Whereas, on March 3, 2010, Majority Leader Hoyer’s office issued a statement saying, “The week of February 8^th, a member of Rep. Massa’s staff brought to the attention of Mr. Hoyer’s staff allegations of misconduct that had been made against Mr. Massa.  Mr. Hoyer’s staff immediately informed him of what they had been told”;

Whereas, on Thursday, March 4, Roll Call newspaper reported, “Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she only learned Wednesday of misconduct allegations against freshman Rep. Eric Massa, though her staff had learned of it earlier and decided against briefing her.  ‘There had been a rumor, but just that,’ Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference.  ‘A one-, two-, three-person rumor that had been reported to Mr. Hoyer’s office and reported to my staff which they did not report to me because you know what?  This is rumor city.  There are rumors.’”;

Whereas, on March 11, 2010, The Washington Post reported, “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was notified in October by then-Rep. Eric Massa’s top aide [Joe Racalto] of concerns about the New York Democrat’s behavior”;

Whereas, on March 11, 2010, Politico newspaper reported, “Democratic insiders say Pelosi’s office took no action after Racalto expressed his concerns about his then-boss in October”;

Whereas, on March 9, 2010, The Corning Leader newspaper reported, “Hoyer said last week he told Massa to inform the House Ethics Committee of the charges within 48 hours. ‘Steny Hoyer has never said a single word to me, never, not once, not a word,’ Massa said Sunday.  ‘This is a lie.  It is a blatant false statement.’”;

Whereas, numerous confusing and conflicting media reports that House Democratic leaders knew about, and may have failed to handle appropriately, allegations that Rep. Massa was sexually harassing his own employees have raised serious and legitimate questions about what Speaker Pelosi as well as other Democratic leaders and their respective staffs were told, and what those individuals did with the information in their possession;

Whereas, the aforementioned media accounts have held the House up to public ridicule;

Whereas, the possibility that House Democratic leaders may have failed to immediately confront Rep. Massa about allegations of sexual harassment may have exposed employees and interns of Rep. Massa to continued harassment;

Whereas, clause one of Rule XXXIII of the Rules of the House of Representatives, titled “Code of Conduct,” states “A Member, Delegate, Resident Commission, officer, or employee of the House shall conduct himself at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House”;

Whereas, the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is charged under House Rules with enforcing the Code of Conduct;

Therefore, be it RESOLVED,

 

(1)    The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is directed to investigate fully, pursuant to clause 3(a)(2) of House Rule XI, which House Democratic leaders and members of their respective staffs had knowledge prior to March 3, 2010 of the aforementioned allegations concerning Mr. Massa, and what actions each leader and staffer having any such knowledge took after learning of the allegations;

(2)    Within ten days following adoption of this resolution, and pursuant to Committee on Standards of Official Conduct rule 19, the committee shall establish an Investigative Subcommittee in the aforementioned matter, or report to the House no later than the final day of that period the reasons for its failure to do so;

(3)    All Members and staff are instructed to cooperate fully in the committee’s investigation and to preserve all records, electronic or otherwise, that may bear on the subject of this investigation;

(4)    The Chief Administrative Officer shall immediately take all steps necessary to secure and prevent the alteration or deletion of any e-mails, text messages, voicemails and other electronic records resident on House equipment that have been sent or received by the Members and staff who are the subjects of the investigation authorized under this resolution until advised by the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct that it has no need of any portion of said records; and,

(5)    The Committee shall issue a final report of its findings and recommendations in this matter no later than June 30, 2010.

Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the Slaughter Rule is evidence that Democrats cannot pass their bill “while playing by the rules.”

“With the Slaughter Solution, House Democrats have exposed themselves as willing to abandon the most fundamental element of legislating – a transparent, up-or-down vote— in order to achieve a unpopular partisan objective.  This is highly disturbing and in some ways, dangerous.  The American people do not want this health care bill and they certainly don’t want the democratic process turned on its head in an effort to pass it over their objections.”

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are mounting a two-pronged attack to counter the increasingly byzantine procedural gambit the Democrats are developing to pass the health-care bill.

On the Senate side, Republicans have been remarkably forthright that their strategy is to show wavering House Democrats unhappy with the Senate bill that they cannot trust the upper house to fix it.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) told HuffPo today, “that his role now is to make skeptical House Democrats even more doubtful that the Senate can change the bill it passes using reconciliation. He insisted that tough votes on non-health care related topics are bound to come up,” and much as he did in conversation with NRO, “raised the specter that the reconciliation process will shut the Senate down.”

Asked by the Huffington Post if he was trying to stir uncertainty among Democrats, the New Hampshire Republican replied: “Absolutely. We are trying to open the eyes of our colleagues on the Democratic side who are being solicited with goodies that the boat into which all these goodies are being put may not ever come to dock.”

[. . .]

Should Democrats get beyond the starting gate, Gregg added, the Republican Party has a whole host of procedural hurdles that they will throw in the way. The senator told the gathering of reporters at the National Press Club that he and his colleagues will use arcane parliamentary processes to essentially force Senate Democrats to vote on controversial legislative topics, even if their relevance to the health care bill is ambiguous. Arguing that “everything in the jurisdiction” of the two Senate committees that handle health care — Finance and HELP — will be ruled “germane” to debate, he all but pledged to bring up “hot-button topics” like immigration, gun rights and certainly abortion as a means of forcing uncomfortable votes.

“Now you ask yourself, if you are a senator from the Democratic side of the aisle, do you really need to put yourself through this just to help out the president and the Democrats’ side of the aisle in the House when you already have gotten what you want…” he said.

“I think that’s a reach and it should cause questions for Democrats in the House.”

And Sens. Thune, DeMint, Coburn, and Wicker — all former House members — hit the “you can’t trust the Senate” theme over and over in a press conference yesterday:

For their part, House Republicans are raising hell about the Democrats’ last-ditch gambit to defuse the situation via the Slaughter Rule, warning undecided House Democrats that the procedural ploy won’t protect them.

Here’s part of the statement Republicans on the House Rules Committee released on the matter:

Not only would this be an astoundingly byzantine and cynical attempt to advance a bill that no one, including House Democrats, wants or likes, it could very well backfire.

The Slaughter Solution depends upon the Senate’s acting to pass a package of fixes to a bill that can’t garner sufficient support in the House.  But the likelihood a clean “fix-it” bill passing the Senate is slim.  There will be challenges to some proposed fixes, and therefore changes to the package.  There are also questions as to whether or not a bill can be “fixed” under the Budget Act before it is signed into law by the President.  And then there is the question of abortion.  If an abortion change cannot be made through reconciliation, would the Slaughter Solution be further expanded to implement an abortion fix, too?  How would that fix make its way through the Senate?

With serious unanswered questions like these, why would any wavering Democrat take the bait and support the Slaughter Solution?  There is a high probability that House Democrats ultimately will be forced into taking the tough votes they tried so hard to avoid, after putting themselves on record as supporting an end-run around a real, transparent vote.  In the end, rank-and-file Democrats would be making themselves all the more vulnerable for having supported their Leadership’s egregious tactics.

We’ll have to wait and see if rank-and-file Democrats buy the Republican argument, but at least one prominent supporter of Obamacare, The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, seems to. He blogged this morning that “complication and delay seem dangerous. Given the widespread revulsion with legislative deal-making at this point–and the apparent success of Obama’s appeal for a “straight, up-or-down vote” on reform–crafting the rule to spare House members a certain vote seems quite likely to muddle the message.”

With the way forward for Democrats unclear and frought with peril, is it any wonder Harry Reid told reporters today that “We’re not done yet – and that’s an understatement”?

And on what basis do we think the Obama administration selected these seven lawyers (there may be more) from 1 million other lawyers to serve in top political positions at Justice? Is it a coincidence that they had roles (direct or related) in defending detainees? Is it a coincidence that the administration has, in fact, reversed course on a number of settled issues of procedural and substantive law respecting these detainees and other matters involving national security? Personnel makes policy, and that includes lawyers in policy positions. So, while the selection of these lawyers clearly has some relationship to their private practices, the attempt to identify who they are and what they’re doing since being appointed is said to be off limits, unless, of course, you appointed them. Preposterous. 

that the Senate health-care bill covers abortion.

that the Senate health-care bill covers abortion.

Awesome story:

Newly Discovered Wasp Species Enslaves Spiders

Spiders spend a lot of time crafting their webs in hopes of making a meal out of all manner of winged insect–but a recently discovered species of wasp is found to use the spider’s engineering prowess to it’s own advantage. Through a not yet understood chemical process, the wasps are able to, quite literally, enslave the unsuspecting spiders to build a nest for their larva, and after all that hard work, become their first meal. Sure, it seems pretty dastardly, but researchers say it’s evolution.

Please choose your own ObamaCare analogy.

Awesome story:

Newly Discovered Wasp Species Enslaves Spiders

Spiders spend a lot of time crafting their webs in hopes of making a meal out of all manner of winged insect–but a recently discovered species of wasp is found to use the spider’s engineering prowess to it’s own advantage. Through a not yet understood chemical process, the wasps are able to, quite literally, enslave the unsuspecting spiders to build a nest for their larva, and after all that hard work, become their first meal. Sure, it seems pretty dastardly, but researchers say it’s evolution.

Please choose your own Obamacare analogy.

This lawyer issue re DOJ appointees has taken an odd turn. No one is saying or has said that lawyers are not free to represent whomever they wish or that anyone should be denied counsel because of their unpopularity. These are straw men, which made the letter signed by some of my friends all the more specious. The fact is that the lawyers who have represented the enemy have been, for the most part, true believers. They were not picked from a list by a judge. They sought out their clients and several of them have spoken in the past about how the ”principles” they were litigating were, in essence, bigger than the individuals they represented. Some of them were part of a strategic group of lawyers who sought out clients for the purpose of fundamentally altering the course of the war. Hence, the identity of the lawyers is certainly relevant not because anyone questions their right to practice law as they choose, but because they are not private-sector attorneys anymore. They are public-policy makers. And as public-policy makers, they are, indeed, answerable to us. The idea that we should not know their identities, their backgrounds, and their agendas is absurd. The lawyers who signed that letter should renounce it as a matter of personal and professional credibility.

The new National Review Book Service offers hundreds of conservative titles, DVDs, and unique gift ideas. Click here.

From CongressDaily:

Language for a health reconciliation bill will go to the House Budget Committee Monday or Tuesday, according to a timeline presented by Speaker Pelosi to members this morning. Under House rules, the committee then would give 24 hours notice before taking up the reconciliation bill. After that, there would be a 48-hour wait before action by the House Rules Committee. Technically, the Rules Committee would write the bill, while the Budget Committee is to report the language by law “without substantive revision.”

From CongressDaily:

Language for a health reconciliation bill will go to the House Budget Committee Monday or Tuesday, according to a timeline presented by Speaker Pelosi to members this morning. Under House rules, the committee then would give 24 hours notice before taking up the reconciliation bill. After that, there would be a 48-hour wait before action by the House Rules Committee. Technically, the Rules Committee would write the bill, while the Budget Committee is to report the language by law “without substantive revision.”

As it stands, the House Democratic caucus has reportedly not seen any legislative language from the leadership.

The House Republican Conference has just adopted a unilateral moratorium on all earmarks, effective immediately.

The House Republican Conference has just adopted a unilateral moratorium on all earmarks, effective immediately.

Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the Slaughter Rule is evidence that Democrats cannot pass their bill “while playing by the rules.”

“With the Slaughter Solution, House Democrats have exposed themselves as willing to abandon the most fundamental element of legislating – a transparent, up-or-down vote— in order to achieve a unpopular partisan objective.  This is highly disturbing and in some ways, dangerous.  The American people do not want this health care bill and they certainly don’t want the democratic process turned on its head in an effort to pass it over their objections.”

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are mounting a two-pronged attack to counter the increasingly byzantine procedural gambit the Democrats are developing to pass the health-care bill.

On the Senate side, Republicans have been remarkably forthright that their strategy is to show wavering House Democrats unhappy with the Senate bill that they cannot trust the upper house to fix it.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) told HuffPo today, “that his role now is to make skeptical House Democrats even more doubtful that the Senate can change the bill it passes using reconciliation. He insisted that tough votes on non-health care related topics are bound to come up,” and much as he did in conversation with NRO, “raised the specter that the reconciliation process will shut the Senate down.”

Asked by the Huffington Post if he was trying to stir uncertainty among Democrats, the New Hampshire Republican replied: “Absolutely. We are trying to open the eyes of our colleagues on the Democratic side who are being solicited with goodies that the boat into which all these goodies are being put may not ever come to dock.”

[. . .]

Should Democrats get beyond the starting gate, Gregg added, the Republican Party has a whole host of procedural hurdles that they will throw in the way. The senator told the gathering of reporters at the National Press Club that he and his colleagues will use arcane parliamentary processes to essentially force Senate Democrats to vote on controversial legislative topics, even if their relevance to the health care bill is ambiguous. Arguing that “everything in the jurisdiction” of the two Senate committees that handle health care — Finance and HELP — will be ruled “germane” to debate, he all but pledged to bring up “hot-button topics” like immigration, gun rights and certainly abortion as a means of forcing uncomfortable votes.

“Now you ask yourself, if you are a senator from the Democratic side of the aisle, do you really need to put yourself through this just to help out the president and the Democrats’ side of the aisle in the House when you already have gotten what you want…” he said.

“I think that’s a reach and it should cause questions for Democrats in the House.”

And Sens. Thune, DeMint, Coburn, and Wicker — all former House members — hit the “you can’t trust the Senate” theme over and over in a press conference yesterday:

For their part, House Republicans are raising hell about the Democrats’ last-ditch gambit to defuse the situation via the Slaughter Rule, warning undecided House Democrats that the procedural ploy won’t protect them.

Here’s part of the statement Republicans on the House Rules Committee released on the matter:

Not only would this be an astoundingly byzantine and cynical attempt to advance a bill that no one, including House Democrats, wants or likes, it could very well backfire.

The Slaughter Solution depends upon the Senate’s acting to pass a package of fixes to a bill that can’t garner sufficient support in the House.  But the likelihood a clean “fix-it” bill passing the Senate is slim.  There will be challenges to some proposed fixes, and therefore changes to the package.  There are also questions as to whether or not a bill can be “fixed” under the Budget Act before it is signed into law by the President.  And then there is the question of abortion.  If an abortion change cannot be made through reconciliation, would the Slaughter Solution be further expanded to implement an abortion fix, too?  How would that fix make its way through the Senate?

With serious unanswered questions like these, why would any wavering Democrat take the bait and support the Slaughter Solution?  There is a high probability that House Democrats ultimately will be forced into taking the tough votes they tried so hard to avoid, after putting themselves on record as supporting an end-run around a real, transparent vote.  In the end, rank-and-file Democrats would be making themselves all the more vulnerable for having supported their Leadership’s egregious tactics.

House Republicans just voted for an earmark moratorium.

House Republicans just voted for an earmark moratorium.

My daughter and I had a very instructive morning yesterday. A friend at NYMEX (the New York Mercantile Exchange, now under a different official name) got us visitor passes, with a view to Nellie possibly getting an internship at the exchange in her summer vacation. My friend showed us round.

What a thing to see! This is one of the last of the real floor-action exchanges, with traders in the pits shouting and shoving and making hand signals. I didn’t actually see any yellow suspenders, but that’s still the ambience.

It’s some heck of a job, too, requiring very special talents, rather like high-level athletics. When you see the amount of data these guys process in their heads minute by minute, making dozens of judgment calls every working day, with hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on every call, it makes you feel very dumb and slow. It’s not just the data pouring in from the phones and the screens, either, it’s reading people too. You watch the traders from other firms. If one of them, from a certain rival firm, at a certain point in the day, with the numbers moving a certain way, stepped back to talk on the phone for a while, you know which major client he’s talking to. Or if you don’t, you should probably be in some other line of work.

You can see the argument for keeping pit-trading alive. It seems to be a losing argument, though. Most trading now is done sitting at desks watching PC monitors. There’s still some yelling, but it’s desk-to-desk.

Trading in actual commodity futures all seems to have gone this way; the remaining pit action, to judge from what we saw, is all in options trading (options on the futures, that is). Some of the NYMEX pits were pretty much empty but for a handful of tube jockeys tapping away on keyboards. More efficient, I guess, but another little bit of color and energy gone from the world.

We were royally received, I must say. There are a lot of National Review fans on the trading floor. They actually had my name up on the big board when I walked in. Many, many thanks to all the NYMEX staff who gave us their time. I promise to never again tell a heartless-trader joke.

One thing I learned is that our colleges and universities now offer courses in trading. (Here’s one from Northwestern.) While it’s good to see this amazing skill set getting some academic reinforcement, I suspect that book learning will only get you so far in the trading pit. My experience of traders is that successful ones belong to a small number of not-very-common personality types; and personality is a thing that can’t be learned or faked.

After the NYMEX visit, I took Nellie to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which I wrote up for NRO when it opened back in 2002. Still a moving experience; and the complaints of eco-nags at the time — that (if I remember this correctly) the imported Irish heather would swarm all over lower Manhattan like kudzu — seem to have been alarmist.

My daughter and I had a very instructive morning yesterday. A friend at NYMEX (the New York Mercantile Exchange, now under a different official name) got us visitor passes, with a view to Nellie possibly getting an internship at the exchange in her summer vacation. My friend showed us round.

What a thing to see! This is one of the last of the real floor-action exchanges, with traders in the pits shouting and shoving and making hand signals. I didn’t actually see any yellow suspenders, but that’s still the ambience.

It’s some heck of a job, too, requiring very special talents, rather like high-level athletics. When you see the amount of data these guys process in their heads minute by minute, making dozens of judgment calls every working day, with hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on every call, it makes you feel very dumb and slow. It’s not just the data pouring in from the phones and the screens, either, it’s reading people too. You watch the traders from other firms. If one of them, from a certain rival firm, at a certain point in the day, with the numbers moving a certain way, stepped back to talk on the phone for a while, you know which major client he’s talking to. Or if you don’t, you should probably be in some other line of work.

You can see the argument for keeping pit-trading alive. It seems to be a losing argument, though. Most trading now is done sitting at desks watching PC monitors. There’s still some yelling, but it’s desk-to-desk.

Trading in actual commodity futures all seems to have gone this way; the remaining pit action, to judge from what we saw, is all in options trading (options on the futures, that is). Some of the NYMEX pits were pretty much empty but for a handful of tube jockeys tapping away on keyboards. More efficient, I guess, but another little bit of color and energy gone from the world.

We were royally received, I must say. There are a lot of National Review fans on the trading floor. They actually had my name up on the big board when I walked in. Many, many thanks to all the NYMEX staff who gave us their time. I promise to never again tell a heartless-trader joke.

One thing I learned is that our colleges and universities now offer courses in trading. (Here’s one from Northwestern.) While it’s good to see this amazing skill set getting some academic reinforcement, I suspect that book learning will only get you so far in the trading pit. My experience of traders is that successful ones belong to a small number of not-very-common personality types; and personality is a thing that can’t be learned or faked.

After the NYMEX visit, I took Nellie to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which I wrote up for NRO when it opened back in 2002. Still a moving experience; and the complaints of eco-nags at the time — that (if I remember this correctly) the imported Irish heather would swarm all over lower Manhattan like kudzu — seem to have been alarmist.

Here’s the lede from the New York Times story on Texas textbook wars:

AUSTIN, Tex. — Even as a panel of educators laid out a vision Wednesday for national standards for public schools, the Texas school board was going in a different direction, holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasize the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.

Here’s the lede from the New York Times story on Texas textbook wars:

AUSTIN, Tex. — Even as a panel of educators laid out a vision Wednesday for national standards for public schools, the Texas school board was going in a different direction, holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasize the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.

Here’s the lede from the New York Times story on Texas textbook wars:

AUSTIN, Tex. — Even as a panel of educators laid out a vision Wednesday for national standards for public schools, the Texas school board was going in a different direction, holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasize the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.

One objection from a reader to my piece today on tax-dodging government employees: “Why stop with firing tax-delinquent government workers?” the reader asks. “Why not require that private-sector workers be fired for not paying their taxes, too?”

I think that government workers ought to be paying their taxes for the same reason that psychoanalysts are required to undergo psychoanalysis: to make sure that they experience the practice from both ends.

Here’s the part of the story that makes my head spin all the way around like that little girl in The Exorcist:

And it’s not like Joe Bureaucrat can’t afford to pay his share of the taxes that support the governing caste. Federal workers receive salaries about 20 percent higher than those of private-sector workers in comparable jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers analyzed by USA Today. But it’s the benefits that really tell the story: The average private-sector worker receives health-care and retirement benefits worth $9,882 per year. The number for government workers? Try $40,785.

Derb is right: Get a government job.

Any guesses on how long it will take Ezra Klein to write a post defending it?

From my piece over on the homepage:

There is a disconnect between the White House and congressional leaders. The former wants to pass a bill by the end of next week. The latter says a vote in late March or early April is more likely. Interpretations of the fierce urgency of now change daily. And if this squabbling continues, the question will not be when, but if.

More on the Obamacare countdown here.

He just put out this statement:

“I am deeply concerned by Attorney General Holder’s failure to disclose to the Judiciary Committee his third-party brief in support of Jose Padilla’s Supreme Court case.  Not only was the Attorney General required to provide the brief as part of his confirmation but the opinions expressed in it go to the heart of his responsibilities in matters of national security.  This is an extremely serious matter and the Attorney general will have to address it.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the following statement on the news of Attorney General Eric Holder’s non-disclosure:

“I am deeply concerned by Attorney General Holder’s failure to disclose to the Judiciary Committee his third-party brief in support of Jose Padilla’s Supreme Court case.  Not only was the Attorney General required to provide the brief as part of his confirmation but the opinions expressed in it go to the heart of his responsibilities in matters of national security.  This is an extremely serious matter and the Attorney general will have to address it.”

K-Lo, I think this crusade against the attorney general that you and Bill and Dana are on is just shameful, and if I were a GOP Beltway Barrister, why I’d be pulling the gang together this very minute for a group preen, a quick letter, and maybe a few guest spots on MSNBC’s Countdown — you know, to raise the tone of our public discourse.

Look, I don’t know if John Adams ever accidentally forgot to remember one of his briefs in the Boston Massacre case, but Mr. Holder was clearly acting in the proud tradition of lawyers who zealously represent their unpopular clients themselves by accidentally, mistakenly omitting, inadvertently of course, to include, er, unpopular information in response to a document demand.

And what’s the big whup anyway? Padilla was an obscure case — it’s not like anyone in the country was talking about an American citizen dispatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a second wave of post-9/11 mass-murder attacks on U.S. soil. It’s not as if Holder’s predecessor as attorney general had written a 100-page legal opinion as a district judge presiding over Padilla’s case. And it’s not as though we’re in a situation where, only two months ago, the attorney general’s memory might have been jogged by, say, writing a five-page letter discussing the Padilla case at length and in a manner strikingly similar to the arguments in the missing brief — and it’s certainly not as if such a letter was prompted by the fact that the attorney general had ordered that the Christmas bomber be Mirandized and charged in the criminal justice system . . . just like he argued in the brief should have happened to Padilla.

Furthermore, you know full well that if this sort of inadvertent accidental totally innocent oversight had happened to, say, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, or Michael Mukasey, the Senate Judiciary Committee would have completely understood that these very unfortunate accidental honest mistakes happen all the time.

You guys need to get with the program. So the attorney general, while he was in private practice at a firm that openly bragged about its “pro bono” representation of numerous Gitmo detainees, chose during our war with al-Qaeda to file a brief on behalf of an al-Qaeda operative who tried to kill lots of Americans. So he argued that such people ought to be treated as criminal defendants swaddled in the Bill of Rights rather than enemy combatants detained for interrogation and war-crimes commissions. So what? What, are you, like, saying that the positions Holder voluntarily took as a private lawyer zealously representing unpopular clients might shed some light on the policies he would implement in the completely unrelated role of top Justice Department official.

That’s the most shameful, over the top, outrageous, and, frankly, disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. Somebody call Keith Olbermann!

Conrad Black has a friendly critique up on the homepage of the American exceptionalism piece Ramesh and I wrote. I’ll have a few comments by way of response later.

Conrad Black has a friendly critique up on the homepage of the American exceptionalism piece Ramesh and I wrote. I’ll have a few comments by way of response later.

Conrad Black has a friendly critique up on the homepage of the American exceptionalism piece Ramesh and I wrote. I’ll have a few comments by way of response later.

Conrad Black has a friendly critique up on the homepage of the American exceptionalism piece Ramesh and I wrote. I’ll have a few comments by way of response later.

Fixed! Do e-mail!

Fixed! Do e-mail!

I dunno what’s going on at NRHQ, but just for the record I have not taken down the link to my e-mail address. It is JonahNRO-at-Gmail.com.

According to the Treasury monthly report, in February the federal government recorded a deficit of $220.9 billion. It is the highest in history (it isn’t in real terms) and the first time ever it has climbed above $200 billion.

For the entire fiscal year, CBO projects the government will run a deficit of $1.36 trillion, just below the $1.41 trillion deficit incurred last year. However, if the president’s policies are enacted, the deficit will be $1.5 trillion.

If that’s the new era of responsibility that the president is talking about, I would like my money back.

From a Facebooker: “Mr. Buckley’s work must have had more of an effect on me than I realized. I saw “magnum pi” in an K-lo post and it immediately sent me scrambling to Google to find out what the Latin phrase magnum pi (mag-noom pie) meant.”

As anyone who’s read my book knows, I am a member in good standing of the Woodrow Wilson Haters Club. The exciting news is that almost everyone wants to be a member these days. Glenn Beck — partly influenced by my book — has been on a jihad against Wilson for a while now. At CPAC, he pretty much opened with “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.” (If you want to read a pretty unpersuasive rejoinder to Beck’s Wilson hatred, see Thomas Frank’s latest weird column.)

This is a fascinating (to me) turn of events, because it’s been a long time in coming. If you go back and look through the archives of National Review, there really isn’t all that much anti-Wilson sentiment outside the topic of Versailles. This, I think, can be partly explained by the prism of  Cold War anti-Communism (we can discuss that more later if you want!). Ditto if you search through WFB’s columns for stuff about Wilson. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was no fan of Wilson’s and the Rothbardian libertarians had him, and the progressive era, pegged better than most.

But it was really the work of what I would call the Claremont crowd that pushed the anti-Wilson noodle across the carpet. Modern conservatism is largely a reaction to the Soviet threat abroad and the New Deal at home. But the Claremonsters (as my wife endearingly calls them) understood that starting with the New Deal amounted to a critic reviewing a play he only attended after intermission. It all goes back to the Progressive Era. They have done the bulk of the intellectual heavy lifting on this score. I don’t want to list them all (in part because I don’t have a great sense of where they all rank viz a viz each other), but some of the better known (and among my favorites) include Charles Kesler, R. J. Pestritto, Steve Hayward, Peter Schramm, Ken Masugi, and others. They can be found, among other places, at the Claremont Institute (and in the pages of the Claremont Review of Books), Hillsdale, and the Ashbrook Center. For years they did the serious intellectual spadework on the Progressive Era and it is finally paying off. (Perhaps the best, or at least my favorite, introduction to their project can be found in The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science).

Anyway, I’ve been spotting Wilson hatred all over the place for the last year or so. But I found today’s George Will column particularly edifying. He writes, in part:

Of course, there now is a commission of experts to recommend cures for this. It should be called the Philip Dru Memorial Commission.

In a scintillating book coming in June (”The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris”), Peter Beinart dissects the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. Edward House, Wilson’s closest adviser, wrote an awful but indicative novel, “Philip Dru: Administrator.” With the nation in crisis, Dru seizes power, declares himself “Administrator of the Republic” and replaces Congress with a commission of five experts who decree reforms that selfish interests had prevented.

Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be “reduced to science.” Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

How gripped was Wilson by what Beinart calls “the hubris of reason”? Beinart writes:

“He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let’s write down the basic rules, he suggested; ‘then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.’ It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn’t get you very far, where reason could never be king.”

Professor Obama, who will seek reelection on the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said:

“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”

Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity….

Not only is it delightful to see George Will getting in on the act, but it turns out that my friend Peter Beinart has signed up to be a Wilson basher as well. This is a little surprising because Peter and I have argued about Wilson before, and he’s always come to Wilson’s defense. So it’s interesting to learn that he takes a new turn in his forthcoming book (I haven’t seen it yet). Indeed, When Peter was still the editor of The New Republic he put Wilson on the cover for the 90th anniversary issue  — and had him looming over FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, JFK, and Harry Truman:

I should have seen some of this coming when my book came out. I had expected my Wilson chapter to attract some very pointed and defensive attacks from his defenders and from liberals generally. But most reviewers simply ignored or conceded the bulk of my anti-Wilsonism. If memory serves, Matt Yglesias tried to disown Wilson, going so far as to whine that you can’t even call Wilson a liberal (tell that to TNR). Meanwhile, even as this was going on, the Left was proving itself much more eager to fully embrace the Progressive Era. During the Democratic primaries, both Obama and Hillary Clinton explicitly, boldly, and proudly associated themselves with Wilson-era Progressivism.

This is all very exciting because it suggests that after a very, very, long postponement a real argument about the Progressive Revolution might actually commence.

A glaring question I continue to have is: If there were complaints over a year ago about Massa (as the Washington Post mentioned yesterday, groping allegations were made in January 2009), was someone sitting on them for a year before (we’re told) Hoyer and Pelosi knew? Could it be that no one in the leadership knew they had a freshman who was being accused of groping staffers, in a culture where we are trained to be hypersensitive about sexual harassment in the workplace?

I wonder, even as I wish this story would go away.

As predicted, the European Parliament has voted for a tax on financial transactions, to be levied directly by Brussels. The vote went through by 536 to 80: only my own group, the European Conservatives and Reformists, voted solidly against the measure, although we had some support from UKIP and its allies as well as two Danish liberals and two Portuguese conservatives…The Tobin Tax might well be vetoed by one or other of the national governments. But the campaign for pan-European taxation is only just beginning. 

Anyone wondering why David Cameron broke with the palaeo-federalist EPP need only look at its automatic support for such measures as this. With a handful of exceptions… the Christian Democrats invariably vote for higher taxes, greater state intervention and Euro-corporatism. I do wish British journalists would stop lazily refering to the EPP as “Centre-Right”; the EPP itself angrily insists that it is “a party of the Centre”. 

As predicted, the European Parliament has voted for a tax on financial transactions, to be levied directly by Brussels. The vote went through by 536 to 80: only my own group, the European Conservatives and Reformists, voted solidly against the measure, although we had some support from UKIP and its allies as well as two Danish liberals and two Portuguese conservatives…The Tobin Tax might well be vetoed by one or other of the national governments. But the campaign for pan-European taxation is only just beginning. 

Anyone wondering why David Cameron broke with the palaeo-federalist EPP need only look at its automatic support for such measures as this. With a handful of exceptions… the Christian Democrats invariably vote for higher taxes, greater state intervention and Euro-corporatism. I do wish British journalists would stop lazily refering to the EPP as “Centre-Right”; the EPP itself angrily insists that it is “a party of the Centre”. 

As predicted, the European Parliament has voted for a tax on financial transactions, to be levied directly by Brussels. The vote went through by 536 to 80: only my own group, the European Conservatives and Reformists, voted solidly against the measure, although we had some support from UKIP and its allies as well as two Danish liberals and two Portuguese conservatives…The Tobin Tax might well be vetoed by one or other of the national governments. But the campaign for pan-European taxation is only just beginning. 

Anyone wondering why David Cameron broke with the palaeo-federalist EPP need only look at its automatic support for such measures as this. With a handful of exceptions… the Christian Democrats invariably vote for higher taxes, greater state intervention and Euro-corporatism. I do wish British journalists would stop lazily refering to the EPP as “Centre-Right”; the EPP itself angrily insists that it is “a party of the Centre”. 

Here’s what I love about my local paper, and I don’t mean the Washington Post. Today’s front-page feature story in the News & Messenger (of Prince William County, Va.) is about a couple of tombstones found in the basement of a rental property. They apparently once marked the graves of a woman who died in 1935 and a man who died in 1980. The property owner has no idea what they were doing there. The last renters split town in a hurry and didn’t leave forwarding information. A guy who does odd jobs in the house insists that a light bulb recently turned on when the power was shut off. Cue the Twilight Zone music. If I were a writer of ghost stories, I’d have my next idea.

After not responding to NRO for comment, the Department of Justice did respond to Fox News yesterday about our Burck/Perino piece on Eric Holder’s non-disclosure of his Jose Padilla amicus briefs during his confirmation hearings.

It’s not like these were dental records Eric Holder left out. It’s a little more than “unfortunate.” It’s disingenuous. And it just happens to be about our national security. And he just happens to be attorney general now.

We were just talking about masculinity on the radio and during the conversation happened upon a Magnum, P.I. tangent. Which brought me to this nostalgic classic:

The Internet is a many-splendored thing.

Today’s my last day co-guest-hosting Bill Bennett’s Morning in America with Seth Leibsohn (we’re going live in about ten — we’ll have Mona Charen, Rep. (Dr.) Tom Price, and more this morning). Thanks to all Corner readers who have tuned in. And welcome to all MIA listeners who are newcomers to NRO this week! Please do stay around here. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

An appetite for conservative books seems to be the air (authors: time to call your agents!). Karl Rove is at the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Mitt Romney is at the top of the March 21st (Jonah’s birthday) New York Times list.

(Bob Costa talked to Romney here. Some audio from semi-K-Lo-ed radio here. My Rove NRO interview here, and additional radio time here.)

Here’s yesterday’s roll call on pulling troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end, for your morning reference. Thought you might like to read the 65 yeas.

A House ethics panel has dropped its probe of former congressman Eric Massa, but the story isn’t quite over. It now appears that members of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff knew about concerns with Massa’s behavior toward his staff as early as October 2009, months before Majority Leader Steny Hoyer set an ethics investigation in motion.

From Politico:

A Pelosi aide told POLITICO on Wednesday evening that Massa’s chief of staff, Joe Racalto, informed a member of Pelosi’s “member services” operation in October that Massa was living with several aides, had hired too many staff members and used foul language around his staff.

Racalto also raised concerns about “the way Massa ran his office” and informed Pelosi’s member-services staffer that he had asked Massa to move out of the group house on Capitol Hill, the Pelosi aide said.

Democratic insiders say Pelosi’s office took no action after Racalto expressed his concerns about his then-boss in October.

Hoyer’s aides say he was informed of sexual-harassment allegations against Massa by Ron Hikel, another Massa aide, Feb. 8 and gave the New York Democrat’s office an ultimatum: Take the charges to the ethics committee within 48 hours, or Hoyer would.

Pelosi’s aide said that Hoyer’s office shared those allegations with a senior Pelosi staffer in February and that “the staff concurred that an ethics investigation was the proper course of action and were assured one would be initiated.”

When the allegations about Massa became widely known last week, Pelosi told reporters that her staff was aware only of isolated “rumors.”

“I asked my staff, I said, ‘Have there been any rumors about any of this before?’” Pelosi said last week. “There had been a rumor, but just that, no formal notification to our office that anything — a one-, two-, three-person-removed rumor that had been reported to Mr. Hoyer’s office that had been reported to my staff, which they didn’t report to me, because, you know what? This is rumor city. Every single day there are rumors. I have a job to do and not to be the receiver of rumors.” 

House Republicans are considering bringing a resolution to the floor calling for the Massa inquiry to be reopened, and to include investigation of what House leadership knew and when they knew it.

On Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy”:

It’s getting wild and wacky when you hear the statement from the Speaker of the House. If I can give her the benefit of the doubt, what she probably intended — didn’t actually say (I’m not sure why I’m defending her here) — is that once you enact the bill people will see all the good stuff in it and then they’ll appreciate it and the negative public opinion on it will change.

I think that is the only argument the president and Pelosi have to persuade Democrats in the House who will get slaughtered in November over this bill.

What I see actually happening now is some of the House members who appear to be staunchly opposed might be wavering. If you take Bart Stupak, who is leading the anti-abortion faction — he is running up a white flag. He said there is a compromise that is reachable. I think in principle it is. You could find compromise language.

The problem is the procedure, because if you find compromise language it has to be done by the Senate after the House has accepted the bill that doesn’t have the compromise language. As we heard Senator Alexander explain, that means that House Democrats have to have complete trust in Harry Reid and in the Senate Democrats.

And that, I think, is the issue — the procedural labyrinth here.

On the unpopularity of Obamacare despite the popularity of various individual provisions:

If you say to people, do you like this goodie, for example, no pre-existing conditions? Everybody will say, of course. If they say in principle do you want to insure the uninsured, who is going to oppose that? So all of that stuff separately will poll well.

But then if you actually invoke the cost, which is what we heard here with all of these questions — [poll] questions about cost and deficits, people understand that this is going to be overwhelmingly expensive. We are in a huge debt already now. We’re going over a cliff in terms of fiscal sanity. Medicare is going broke — and we are adding a new entitlement?

And that’s why when you put all the elements together and you ask as a package are you opposed or in favor, you get overwhelmingly negative results. Americans are able to add up the cost and the benefits and decide in this particular proposal and package, it’s not worth it.

On developments in Afghanistan:

What is so interesting is how counter-intuitive their announcement is, the strategy is. Normally you don’t announce months in advance we’ll take x, y, z because you want the element of surprise. Here they announce the initial offensive and then Kandahar is next.

And I think it fits with the interesting strategy that McChrystal has because the objective is not the killing of the Taliban. The objective is to gain the confidence of the civilians.

If you announce in advance you will do Kandahar, the capital [of the Taliban], the prize here, you hope that the small bands of the enemy roaming around will think twice about hanging around and facing the U.S. Marines, because they will lose.

And you are doing is appealing to the less fanatical and less ideological and the less suicidal enemy who will sneak around and join the population and give up the fight and become civilians. And we aren’t against that.

The idea is once they get integrated in society, that’s OK. You don’t want a victory where you have to surrender on the battleship Missouri. What you want is to win the confidence of the population.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in a speech today to progressive media in Nevada:

“The filibuster has been abused. I believe that the Senate should be different than the House and will continue to be different than the House,” Reid said. “But we’re going to take a look at the filibuster. Next Congress, we’re going to take a look at it. We are likely to have to make some changes in it, because the Republicans have abused that just like the spitball was abused in baseball and the four-corner offense was abused in basketball.”

President Obama has made disarmament the centerpiece of his foreign policy. He has done this while simultaneously trying to argue that he supports robust missile defenses. As the administration struggles to conclude a new arms-control agreement with the Russians, he is finding that striking a balance between these two positions can be very difficult.

There is a powerful group of disarmament advocates in Washington that has been opposed to missile defense for years and now includes some of the chief proponents of the president’s disarmament agenda. Currently leading this group is missile-defense skeptic Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund, which is bankrolling a media offensive using other organizations — such as the Glover Park Group, Think Progress, and the National Security Network — to advance the administration’s agenda on Capitol Hill and in the press. It seems that “getting to zero” isn’t cheap.

Another prominent missile-defense skeptic is Philip E. Coyle, III, a former Pentagon official who has criticized just about every aspect of U.S. missile-defense policy over the last decade. Mr. Coyle has been nominated by President Obama to serve as associate director for National Security and International Affairs in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House.

Coyle made a name for himself by questioning whether missile defense is technically possible, contradicting a proven track record of repeated successes by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency. In a 2009 Arms Control Association presentation, he described the agency’s tests as being “scripted for success.” He has also questioned whether rogue regimes are even interested, let alone capable, of attacking the United States and its allies. In testimony last year in front of the House Armed Services Committee, he stated, “In my view, Iran is not so suicidal as to attack Europe or the United States with missiles.” Given Iran’s recent tests of missiles with increasing ranges and its successful launch of a satellite into orbit, Mr. Coyle’s questioning of the intentions of rogues such as Iran is incredibly naïve.

There is enough concern on Capitol Hill about Coyle’s views that a hold has been placed on his nomination. Some will argue that a position in the Office of Science and Technology Policy shouldn’t deserve much attention, let alone concern. It is true that this is a part of the White House that traditionally has not played a key role in major policy decisions. However, it is likely that an individual like Mr. Coyle would be unable to resist the urge to use his position to attempt to influence policy debates about issues, such as missile defense, that he has worked on for years.

This administration has tried to make the case that it supports effective missile defenses. It is thus surprising that the administration has chosen to nominate someone such as Philip Coyle to a White House position.

– Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

UPDATED: 5:47 P.M.

As I noted below, Democrats on the House Rules Committee are considering adopting a special rule that would allow the House to “deem” the Senate health-care bill to have been passed by the very act of voting on reconciliation fixes to it.

This is all a bit obscure, so let me try to put it as clearly as I can. This move would solve for House Democrats the problem of acting first. It would allow the House to pass a reconciliation measure on the health-care bill (complete with fixes to the Cadillac Tax etc.) without first passing the Senate version. It would thus defuse mitigate the threat — ingeniously pounded into the heads of rank-and-file House Democrats by Senate Republican leadership — that the House could pass the Senate bill only to be double-crossed by the Senate on the sidecar. And, worse, that the president could sign the Senate bill into law, leaving wavering House members on the hook for supporting it.

That’s the rub on the politics of this thing, and I wouldn’t blame you for stopping right here. But those of you who are procedural masochists might be wondering how the process itself would work.

Well, each bill brought to the floor of the House is debated under its own “rule” setting the length and structure of debate, including which if any amendments can be considered. A given bill’s rule is created by the — you guessed it — Rules Committee and presented to the whole House for a simple majority vote prior to consideration of the bill itself. In this case, the Democrats would bring a “self-executing rule” to the floor that allowed for the adoption of the Senate bill when, and only when, the reconciliation sidecar is passed, thereby avoiding the need to bring the Senate bill to the floor for a separate up-or-down vote.

What exactly is a self-executing rule? CRS gets into the nitty gritty, calling it a “two-for-one” procedure:

This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete policy proposal is deemed to have passed the House and been incorporated in the bill to be taken up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the “self-executed” provision. It was automatically agreed to when the House passed the rule.

Last year, House Democrats used a “self-executing rule” to push through the controversial Waxman Amendment to the cap-and-trade bill. In that case, after weeks of committee mark-up and debate on one version of the bill, a special rule was brought to the House at 3:47 A.M. on the morning of the final vote, which in effect scrapped the existing bill and replaced it with a new version from Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), including a never-before-seen 309-page amendment, the adoption of which was self-executed by the narrow (217-205) adoption of the rule.

Remember, House rules aren’t supposed to set policy, they are supposed to set the terms for debate. But the rule on the Waxman proposal guaranteed its passage, without debate or opportunity for amendment.

Here’s how former House Rules Committee staff director DonWolfensberger described that process:

Despite the fact that few Members had a clue as to what was in the new bill as modified by Waxman’s amendment, the rule was called up just six hours after it had been reported. The rule squeaked by, 217-205, and the bill subsequently passed later that day by an even slimmer margin, 219-212.

Nor was the Waxman Amendment a lone case. Indeed, a similar trick has been used to increase the national debt for years, under the so-called “Gephardt Rule” (House Rule XXVII) adopted by the last House Democratic majority. The rule states that upon passage of each year’s budget resolution, a concurrent resolution raising the debt limit by the amount required in that budget is automatically considered passed, thus sparing members separate, potentially embarrassing votes on increasing government borrowing.

Unlike in the Senate, where individual Senators have broad discretion to steer debate and introduce amendments, the legislative process in the House is rigidly governed by the Rules Committee. This limits the Republicans’ options in fighting a self-executing rule for Obamacare. As one Republican House staffer put it to me today, “the Committee can do just about anything if they can get the votes to pass the rule.”

And the Senate was supposed to be undemocratic, right?

UPDATE: Ramesh points me to John Dickerson at Slate, who argues that the Slaughter Rule could also be used to take pressure off the Stu-packers:

. . .Democrats who think the Senate bill doesn’t sufficiently limit abortion rights would never have to be on record as having voted for it. (Because the Senate abortion language can’t be fixed in [the reconciliation bill] for procedural reasons, some Democratic aides say there is talk about a later bill that would handle these issues.) 

UPDATE II: I think I was slightly too bold in suggesting that a self-executing rule would defuse the threat of a Senate double-cross. If the House still has to go first for technical reasons (e.g. Senator Conrad’s comments that you can’t reconcile the budget with a law that hasn’t passed both houses yet), then there is still the structural possibility of the sidecar dying in the Senate, and of the president signing the Senate bill without amendment.

But the move could still be bandied about as a show of bicameral good faith, while providing enough cover to wavering rank-and-filers for House leadership to get to 216 votes.

From the Nov. 11, 1977 issue of NR (back when the Man from Plains was running the show) — three great essays by Clare Boothe Luce, Rick Brookhiser, and Russell Kirk. Now if that ain’t a blast from the past, what is?! Make sure you get your copy — and Morning Jolt, The Goldberg File, and NRO Digest — by signing up now at NRO Newsletters.

From the Nov. 11, 1977 issue of NR (back when the Man from Plains was running the show) — three great essays by Clare Boothe Luce, Rick Brookhiser, and Russell Kirk. Now if that ain’t a blast from the past, what is?! Make sure you get your copy — and Morning Jolt, The Goldberg File, and NRO Digest — by signing up now at NRO Newsletters.

From the Nov. 11, 1977 issue of NR (back when the Man from Plains was running the show) — three great essays by Clare Boothe Luce, Rick Brookhiser, and Russell Kirk. Now if that ain’t a blast from the past, what is?! Make sure you get your copy — and Morning Jolt, The Goldberg File, and NRO Digest — by signing up now at NRO Newsletters.

The president’s recent budget proposal would raise taxes by $3 trillion over the next decade. Yet the president would put most of these new revenues into new spending rather than deficit reduction. Overall, the national debt would double over the next decade — a total of $74,000 per household in additional debt dumped into the laps of our children and grandchildren.

My new paper, “Obama Budget Raises Taxes and Doubles the National Debt,” details the president’s tax-and-spend spree. It also details President Obama’s numerous budget gimmicks, such as:

·         Rosy Economic Scenario. The White House projects that in 2020 the economy will be nearly $1 trillion larger (adjusted for inflation) than the CBO estimates. If the economy performs closer to the CBO projections, it will raise budget deficits even higher.

·         Excluding Cap-and-Trade Costs. The President’s budget simply removed the costs of the House-passed $800 billion cap-and-trade plan that he endorsed.

·         A $132 Billion “Magic Asterisk.” The President’s budget vaguely claims $132 billion in “program integrity” savings. The White House says this includes cleaning up waste in entitlement programs and increasing IRS enforcement of tax laws. Of course, government waste is easy to identify and difficult to eliminate. The federal government’s track record on rooting out waste is abysmal, and promises to close the “tax gap” of unpaid taxes have not translated into progress.

·         $23 Billion Terminations and Cuts? President Obama also hypes up his $23 billion in proposed spending cuts and terminations (less than 1 percent of all spending). He doesn’t mention that last year, every dollar saved from his $7 billion in spending cuts went into new government spending. Not a dollar went towards deficit reduction. And this year he proposes more of the same.

·         The Baseline Assumes War Spending Rises Forever. Repeating his much-maligned gimmick from last year’s budget, the president first creates a fantasy baseline that assumes the Iraq surge continues forever (which was never U.S. policy), and then “saves” $728 billion against that baseline by ending the surge as scheduled under his policies. It is like a family “saving” $10,000 by first assuming an expensive vacation and then not taking it.

·         Low-balling Discretionary Spending. The President’s budget assumes that non-war, non-emergency discretionary spending will expand by just 30 percent over the next decade, just slightly faster than inflation. But in reality, discretionary spending surged by 104 percent during the past decade. This free-spending Democratic Congress provides no reason to expect sudden austerity. If discretionary spending instead grows at the same rate as the economy (about 5 percent nominally per year), it would add about $400 billion to the 2020 budget deficit.

·         PAYGO. The President bases much of his budget restraint on Pay-as-You-Go rules that purportedly guarantee that all new spending must be offset. Except that PAYGO exempts all discretionary spending (40 percent of the budget). It exempts the automatic annual growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which threatens Washington’s long-run solvency. It exempts the endless stream of emergency “stimulus” bills. The few places it does apply, Congress waives the law. PAYGO is designed to serve more as a talking point than as a tool for deficit reduction.

·         Deficit Commission. Rather than take the lead and propose entitlement reforms that would reduce the deficit, the president has appointed a commission to devise a plan. While some commissions may be useful, this one likely will not. The deficit commission currently plans to write its recommendations in a back room without public hearings or public buy-in. These recommendations won’t be unveiled until after the election, where they would be voted on by a lame-duck Congress — if they are even voted on at all (there is no “fast-track” procedure guaranteeing a vote). The American people will be unlikely to embrace major tax and spending changes thrust upon them with so little transparency and voted on by an unaccountable lame-duck Congress.

Again, this and more can be found here.

– Brian Riedl is Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary affairs at the Heritage Foundation.

The president’s recent budget proposal would raise taxes by $3 trillion over the next decade. Yet the president would put most of these new revenues into new spending rather than deficit reduction. Overall, the national debt would double over the next decade — a total of $74,000 per household in additional debt dumped into the laps of our children and grandchildren.

My new paper, “Obama Budget Raises Taxes and Doubles the National Debt,” details the president’s tax-and-spend spree. It also details President Obama’s numerous budget gimmicks, such as:

·         Rosy Economic Scenario. The White House projects that in 2020 the economy will be nearly $1 trillion larger (adjusted for inflation) than the CBO estimates. If the economy performs closer to the CBO projections, it will raise budget deficits even higher.

·         Excluding Cap-and-Trade Costs. The President’s budget simply removed the costs of the House-passed $800 billion cap-and-trade plan that he endorsed.

·         A $132 Billion “Magic Asterisk.” The President’s budget vaguely claims $132 billion in “program integrity” savings. The White House says this includes cleaning up waste in entitlement programs and increasing IRS enforcement of tax laws. Of course, government waste is easy to identify and difficult to eliminate. The federal government’s track record on rooting out waste is abysmal, and promises to close the “tax gap” of unpaid taxes have not translated into progress.

·         $23 Billion Terminations and Cuts? President Obama also hypes up his $23 billion in proposed spending cuts and terminations (less than 1 percent of all spending). He doesn’t mention that last year, every dollar saved from his $7 billion in spending cuts went into new government spending. Not a dollar went towards deficit reduction. And this year he proposes more of the same.

·         The Baseline Assumes War Spending Rises Forever. Repeating his much-maligned gimmick from last year’s budget, the president first creates a fantasy baseline that assumes the Iraq surge continues forever (which was never U.S. policy), and then “saves” $728 billion against that baseline by ending the surge as scheduled under his policies. It is like a family “saving” $10,000 by first assuming an expensive vacation and then not taking it.

·         Low-balling Discretionary Spending. The President’s budget assumes that non-war, non-emergency discretionary spending will expand by just 30 percent over the next decade, just slightly faster than inflation. But in reality, discretionary spending surged by 104 percent during the past decade. This free-spending Democratic Congress provides no reason to expect sudden austerity. If discretionary spending instead grows at the same rate as the economy (about 5 percent nominally per year), it would add about $400 billion to the 2020 budget deficit.

·         PAYGO. The President bases much of his budget restraint on Pay-as-You-Go rules that purportedly guarantee that all new spending must be offset. Except that PAYGO exempts all discretionary spending (40 percent of the budget). It exempts the automatic annual growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which threatens Washington’s long-run solvency. It exempts the endless stream of emergency “stimulus” bills. The few places it does apply, Congress waives the law. PAYGO is designed to serve more as a talking point than as a tool for deficit reduction.

·         Deficit Commission. Rather than take the lead and propose entitlement reforms that would reduce the deficit, the president has appointed a commission to devise a plan. While some commissions may be useful, this one likely will not. The deficit commission currently plans to write its recommendations in a back room without public hearings or public buy-in. These recommendations won’t be unveiled until after the election, where they would be voted on by a lame-duck Congress — if they are even voted on at all (there is no “fast-track” procedure guaranteeing a vote). The American people will be unlikely to embrace major tax and spending changes thrust upon them with so little transparency and voted on by an unaccountable lame-duck Congress.

Again, this and more can be found here.

– Brian Riedl is Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary affairs at the Heritage Foundation.

Joe Biden’s trip to Israel fits neatly into the context of the Obama administration’s internal struggle over Israel policy. Since January 2009, two factions have promoted alternate mechanisms for getting Jerusalem to do Washington’s will: The far left seeks to achieve this through confrontation, while the center left seeks to reassure the Israelis through close cooperation.

The far left prevailed initially, as evidenced by Hillary Clinton’s May 2009 declaration that Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.” But this approach bombed, permitting the center left to take over in about September 2009.

The center left still rules the roost, as Biden’s twin statements yesterday indicate. First, he offered his administration’s “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.” Then he slammed an Israeli decision to build new housing units in Jerusalem as a step that “undermines the trust we need right now.”

The center-left approach is better than the far-left approach, but neither has a chance of succeeding. What Israel needs is not hectoring about its residential housing policies but an American ally that encourages it to win its war against the irredentist Palestinians of both Fatah and Hamas.

Banquo’s Ghosts, the heart-pounding thriller, is now out in a tiny, airport-worthy paperback edition. As it happens, The Weekly Standard has just run a review that might have seemed in most circumstances exceptionally late (although it meets the wedding-gift standards of within the year). But it’s actually perfectly timed and a rave by the very gifted Noemie Emery. Here’s the beginning:

Imagine a Christopher Buckley novel set in the world of 24 and Jack Bauer, and you have Banquo’s Ghosts, the fiction debut of National Review’s Rich Lowry (along with Keith Korman) — which is really two genres in one. A Buckley novel takes political life and tweaks it ever so slightly so that it comes out just like itself — if not more so — and Ghosts, by this standard, does not disappoint.

Read the whole thing here, and please pick up Banquo on the way to your flight or, in a few months, the beach.

New Hampshire town meetings yesterday gave voters the chance to vote for a nonbinding resolution favoring putting a marriage amendment on the ballot. Bishop John McCormack of the Diocese of Manchester encouraged a yes vote in an op-ed that ran in the Union-Leader Tuesday. 

Of the vote results reported by the Union-Leader, along with a couple from the Concord Monitor, seventeen towns approved and three rejected the article.

Voting for a marriage amendment were: Charlestown (620-305), Kingston (719-346), Milton (385-285), Littleton (912-627), Wakefield (504-242), Dunbarton (77-58), Kingston (719-346), Windham (1,428-832), Epsom (422-225), Bedford (2,783-1,040), Hampstead (1,190-499), Allenstown (383-198), Auburn, Swanzey (542-422), Stark (unanimously), Pittsburg (64-4), and Belmont.

 Rejecting were Newhampton, Salisbury (30-27), and Northumberland (57-104).

This is a partial list; still looking for full electoral info. 

The sense around here for the last week or so has been that “only the House vote matters” in deciding the fate of Obamacare. But what if the Democrats can pass the bill with no House vote at all?

Astoundingly, House Democrats appear to be preparing to do just that:

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.

Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

Slaughter has not taken the plan to Speaker Pelosi as Democrats await CBO scores on the corrections bill. “Once the CBO gives us the score we’ll spring right on it,” she said. . . .

House members are concerned the Senate could fail to approve the corrections bill, making them nervous about passing the Senate bill with its much-maligned sweetheart deals for certain states.
“We’re well beyond that,” Pelosi said Tuesday, though she did not clarify.

That the Democrats could take this extraordinary step to avoid passing the Senate bill tells you that they have zero trust in the Senate to pass reconciliation “fixes,” and zero trust in the president not to sign the Senate bill should it reach his desk and a reconciliation effort collapse. But most crucially, it gives the lie — in a big, big way — to the Democratic narrative that health-care reform should and will be finished via simple “majority rule,” and not bound up in the arcane rules of the United States Senate.

This morning, I wrote about an interview given by free-marketeer and glamor queen Virginia Postrel about health-care reform. In the interview, Postrel talks about the fact that she donated a kidney. This afternoon I got this e-mail in response by a very faithful Corner reader.

Enjoyed this; I agree with every word. I donated 3 yrs ago and would do it again, but it’s crazy that 7 people/day die waiting.

The kindness and benevolence of some people is quite remarkable.

In Slate, Daniel Gross purports to argue that Republican warnings of a government “takeover” of health care are “bogus,” in a piece headlined: “What ‘Government Takeover’? The bogus Republican claim that Obamacare is a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.”

But then he writes:

We’re already halfway toward socialized medicine, but not because of Obamacare. … as the population has aged, and as the government created new health care entitlements, the government has been slowly assuming a higher portion of health care spending in the United States—or “taking it over.” … in the 1990s, a period in which Republicans controlled the House for six years, the share of health spending controlled by the government rose by 10 percent. The trend continued in the period from 2000 to 2008, when Republicans controlled the White House and largely controlled Congress.

But a Democratic accelleration of a takeover that proceeded under Republican Congresses is still a takeover. If we go by Gross’s own words, warnings about a “takeover” and about “socialized medicine” are not “bogus” — they are rooted in the agreed-upon facts. And a takeover that amounts to one-sixth of the economy is a more objectionable takeover than one that amounts to one-twelfth of the economy — by my back-of-the-envelope, English-major calculation, roughly twice as objectionable.

So where’s the bogusity?

In Slate, Daniel Gross purports to argue that Republican warnings of a government “takeover” of health care are “bogus,” in a piece headlined: “What ‘Government Takeover’? The bogus Republican claim that Obamacare is a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.”

But then he writes:

We’re already halfway toward socialized medicine, but not because of Obamacare. … as the population has aged, and as the government created new health care entitlements, the government has been slowly assuming a higher portion of health care spending in the United States—or “taking it over.” … in the 1990s, a period in which Republicans controlled the House for six years, the share of health spending controlled by the government rose by 10 percent. The trend continued in the period from 2000 to 2008, when Republicans controlled the White House and largely controlled Congress.

But a Democratic accelleration of a takeover that proceeded under Republican Congresses is still a takeover. If we go by Gross’s own words, warnings about a “takeover” and about “socialized medicine” are not “bogus” — they are rooted in the agreed-upon facts. And a takeover that amounts to one-sixth of the economy is a more objectionable takeover than one that amounts to one-twelfth of the economy — by my back-of-the-envelope, English-major calculation, roughly twice as objectionable.

So where’s the bogusity?

In Slate, Daniel Gross purports to argue that Republican warnings of a government “takeover” of health care are “bogus,” in a piece headlined: “What ‘Government Takeover’? The bogus Republican claim that Obamacare is a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.”

But then he writes:

We’re already halfway toward socialized medicine, but not because of Obamacare. . . . as the population has aged, and as the government created new health care entitlements, the government has been slowly assuming a higher portion of health care spending in the United States—or “taking it over.” . . . in the 1990s, a period in which Republicans controlled the House for six years, the share of health spending controlled by the government rose by 10 percent. The trend continued in the period from 2000 to 2008, when Republicans controlled the White House and largely controlled Congress.

But a Democratic acceleration of a takeover that proceeded under Republican Congresses is still a takeover. If we go by Gross’s own words, warnings about a “takeover” and about “socialized medicine” are not “bogus” — they are rooted in the agreed-upon facts. And a takeover that amounts to one-sixth of the economy is a more objectionable takeover than one that amounts to one-twelfth of the economy — by my back-of-the-envelope, English-major calculation, roughly twice as objectionable.

So where’s the bogosity?

Ominousness exudes with regularity from the federal Department of Education.

The latest emission comes with Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement this week that his department’s Office of Civil Rights will “reinvigorate civil rights enforcement” in the nation’s schools in an effort “to make Dr. King’s dream of a colorblind society a reality.” There is an obvious contradiction in trying to create a colorblind society through an inherently hyper-color-aware approach. And there’s a panoply of problems with a big, brash federal office opening “equity” investigations into the discipline decisions, course allotments, teacher assignments, etc. of individual schools. Here’s just one:  

Duncan said that the country must ensure “that low-income Latino and African American students” have the same access to AP (Advanced Placement) classes as do other students. This assumes that black and Latino pupils are mostly denied access to AP courses because of their ethnicities; the reality is that black and Latino high-school students are simply less likely than their white and Asian counterparts to have attained the requisite academic skills that would enable them to handle AP assignments. The solution is not to police the AP roll; the solution is to worry about the lousy elementary schools and middle schools where so many black and Latino kids are permitted to sit through years of classes while learning next to nothing in them.

Packing into AP courses students unprepared for AP coursework can have only deleterious results: Either an unprepared pupil will grow frustrated and fail, or his teacher will accommodate him by making the class easier. The first outcome is unfair to one group of students, the second outcome is unfair to another. This is not civil rights.

– Liam Julian, a Hoover Institution fellow, is managing editor of Policy Review.