Jay Reding.com

Chuck Norris has endorsed Mike Huckabee. I think a Huckabee/Norris ticket would give a roundhouse kick to Clinton’s chances in 2008…

In all seriousness, Huckabee has done very well in this campaign. Not enough to necessarily challenge the front-runners, but well enough that I’d give good money that he’ll be the winner of the VP race. Especially if Giuliani were to be the nominee, he’d need someone who could appeal to a) Southern voters and b) social conservatives. Mike Huckabee is exactly the sort of person who could help him with those important Republican voting blocs.

Huckabee won’t get the nomination this year unless Giuliani, Thompson and Romney all collapse—but that doesn’t mean that he won’t be a rising star in the Republican Party for some time to come.

Independent journalist Michael Yon has some pointed criticisms of the way in which the reality of life in Iraq is unrecognizably twisted by the media, meaning that the American people rarely get the real story of what is going on over there:

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

Today I am in Iraq, back in a war of such strategic consequence that it will affect generations yet unborn—whether or not they want it to. Hiding under the covers will not work, because whether it is good news or bad, whether it is true or untrue, once information is widely circulated, it has such formidable inertia that public opinion seems impervious to the corrective balm of simple and clear facts.

There are a couple of factors which seem to be at play here. The first is that the media is simply lazy. Iraqi politics, Middle Eastern culture, the interplay between Sunni and Shi’ite, the tortured history of the region, all of these factors are important to a full understanding of the war, and all of them are incredibly complex. How does one distill all of that down to a 3 minute news piece? The simple answer is that it’s impossible. So the media “dumbs it down”—the media portrays the situation in Iraq as being about Shi’ites and Sunnis who hate each other and can’t get along, and the US is stuck in the middle. Of course, that’s an incredibly simplistic picture. For example, it clashes with the fact that many Iraqi tribes and families are mixed Sunni and Shi’ia. But reporting on that would confuse people, and the media constantly panders to the lowest common denominator. So the story is simplified beyond recognition to fit with our soundbite culture.

However, that’s not the only problem. The biggest problem is that the media is largely unified in their political views. More than 90 percent of American reporters are liberal Democrats. The media narrative on the war is that it was unnecessary, a waste, a failure, and everything about it is wrong. That media narrative colors nearly every view of the war. Had a President Gore done the exact same thing with the exact same results, the media would be clamoring for him to win a Nobel Peace Prize. (And by corollary Fox News would undoubtedly be trying to argue that Iraq was a distraction from the real war in Afghanistan.) They’d then have political reason to explore the humanitarian mission in Iraq, one of the most audacious exercises in national benevolence since the Marshall Plan.

Yon is right: America lives in a self-absorbed glass bubble. The media has little interest in breaking that bubble, and it’s up to independent journalists and others to try to get the real story out.

The problem is that societies who are that self-absorbed tend not to live very long. America seems firmly lodged in our >panem et circenses stage. We care more about Britney Spears’ custody battles than the bravery of men like 1st Sgt. Paul Ray Smith. Ultimately, our culture continues to slide because we seem unable to pay more than lip service to the values upon which our culture was founded. Those of us who read Edward Gibbon in school know what happens when a society abandon its values to a kind of social hedonism.

What happens in Iraq, like it or not, will have profound effects on the lives of not only the children of Iraq, but our children as well. By trying to sweep Iraq under the rug, by subordinating the real issues for crude and childish political battles, and by living in deep ignorance of what is really going on, we threaten to let other define our future. Our ignorance and our self-obsession is the greatest weapon groups like al-Qaeda has. In 1993, bin Laden looked at the carnage in Mogadishu and saw a paper tiger, a superpower so risk-averse and so unwilling to fight that a few body bags and a public show of depravity could change its course. Al-Qaeda flourished on that weakness. We dare not prove them right again.

Glenn Reynolds shows why the bill to give retroactive immunity to telecom companies involved who turned over data to the government as part of anti-terrorism investigations is not an ex post facto law. He also has another interesting follow-up post on how the idea of strong Executive powers under the Constitution is nothing new—using an example from the Ninth Circuit, probably the nation’s most liberal that allow President Ford to essentially extend a lapsed statute by Executive Order.

The idea that the “unitary executive” theory is some novel and dangerous departure from Constitutional principles doesn’t have much to it. The principle of separation of powers as always given the Executive Branch wide discretion in managing national affairs under its constitutional scheme of powers—especially in the President’s law enforcement and national security powers.

Those who have taken a course in Constitutional Law know of the famous case of Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer 343 U.S. 579 (1952), a case coming out of the Korean War in which President Truman tried to seize a Pennsylvania steel mill that was about to be shut down because of striking workers. Justice Hugo Black gave a wonderfully formalist majority decision holding that the seizure was unconstitutional, but the opinion that ended up being the most crucial to understanding Presidential powers is Justice Jackson’s concurrence. (Here is an edited version of the decision which highlights the essential parts of each opinion.)

Justice Jackson came up with three “categories” of Presidential power, each of which should receive different levels of deference from the courts:

1. When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate. In these circumstances, and in these only, may he be said (for what it may be worth) to personify the federal sovereignty. If his act is held unconstitutional under these circumstances, it usually means that the Federal Government as an undivided whole lacks power. A seizure executed by the President pursuant to an Act of Congress would be supported by the strongest of presumptions and the widest latitude of judicial interpretation, and the burden of persuasion would rest heavily upon any who might attack it.

2. When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain. Therefore, congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence may sometimes, at least as a practical matter, enable, if not invite, measures on independent presidential responsibility. In this area, any actual test of power is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law.

3. When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter….

Justice Jackson agreed that the seizure of the steel mills was in that third category—President Truman had asked for such powers before but Congress had specifically denied him the right to make such seizures.

Why does Youngstown Steel matter today? Because it gives us a very clear way of determining when a Presidential action is unconstitutional and when it is not. As Justice Jackson notes, if Congress authorizes the President to do something and the President does it, virtually the only way that could be unconstitutional is if the federal government itself doesn’t have power to take that action under the Constitution. (For instance, if Congress passed a law allowing for the quartering of troops and the President ordered the military to carry that law out, it would still violate the Constitution.).

In the case that Prof. Reynolds mentions above, the Court seems to take the argument that the Executive Order extending the export law is a Youngstown Category I circumstance:

Former section 5(b) of the TWEA delegated to the President broad and extensive powers; “it could not have been otherwise if the President were to have, within constitutional boundaries, the flexibility required to meet problems surrounding a national emergency with the success desired by Congress.” United States v. Yoshida International, Inc., 526 F.2d 560, 573 (Cust. & Pat.App.1975) (footnote omitted). Wary of impairing the flexibility necessary to such a broad delegation, courts have not normally reviewed “the essentially political questions surrounding the declaration or continuance of a national emergency” under former s 5(b). Id. at 579. The statute contained no standards by which to determine whether a national emergency existed or continued; in fact, Congress had delegated to the President the authority to define all of the terms in that subsection of the TWEA including “national emergency,” as long as the definitions were consistent with the purposes of the TWEA. 50 U.S.C. app. s 5(b)(3). In the absence of a compelling reason to address the difficult questions concerning the declaration and duration of a national emergency under former s 5(b), we decline to do so.

Moreover, the EAA apparently was allowed to lapse only because Congress could not resolve questions relating to the antiboycott provisions. See Arab Boycott Hearings on S. 69 and S. 92, Before the Subcommittee on International Finance of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, 95th Congress, 1st Sess. 1 (Senator Stevenson) (1977). The Spawrs have offered no evidence that Congress intended to dismantle the export controls.

In conclusion, even under the demanding scrutiny the Spawrs argue is appropriate because of the criminal nature of this case, it is unmistakable that Congress intended to permit the President to use the TWEA to employ the same regulatory tools during a national emergency as it had employed under the EAA. We, therefore, conclude that the President had the authority during the nine-month lapse in the EAA to maintain the export regulations.

U.S. v. Spawr Optical Research, 685 F.2d 1076, 1981 (9th Cir. 1982). Because Congress had intended for the President to have these powers, and the lapse of the statute didn’t necessarily change that intent, the President still had the power to enforce a similar policy. Now, the Ninth Circuit didn’t cite Youngstown here, but the basic principle still applies.

All this talk about “new” and “sweeping” executive powers ignores the long-standing legal and historical traditions of executive power under the Constitution. The Presidency is the only part of the US Government that is controlled by a single individual, and the Founders rightly believed that there were some tasks which required a single individual. While the Presidency is a strong office, that office does have constraints that distinguish it from that of the King of England. See The Federalist #69.

I suspect that most of the clamor about how terrible the Bush Presidency is and how much of the Constitution is being “swept under the rug” or “shredded” or whatever is just more political bluster. If in January 20, 2009 Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office and becomes President (perish the thought!), she isn’t going to suddenly change the balance of executive power in this country. (In fact, I’d argue she’d go much farther than Bush has.) All those people who argue that Bush is somehow violating the Constitution never seem to be able to explain what specific part of the Constitution is being violated, and even when they point to one, the supposed violation is rarely real.

The New Yorker has a scathing review of Brian DePalma’s anti-war, anti-American film Redacted. DePalma’s motivation in making this film is made quite clear:

De Palma has announced that his intention in making “Redacted” is to end the war. “The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he said after a press screening in Venice. “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.” It seems unlikely to me that “Redacted” will have that effect, or even that De Palma is serious about wanting it to. The movie encourages you to abandon the very powers of analysis and discrimination that might lead you to write your congressman. De Palma presents soldiers as psychopaths and Iraqis as their nameless victims. The dialogue in the rape scene, with the ringleader babbling about weapons of mass destruction and supporting the troops, is so heavy-handed that it has the opposite effect of making the war’s violence real; instead, it makes you think that you’re watching a highly stylized cinematic rape scene. The same is true of all the “realistic” camera devices: they are so many frames around a director’s incurious and unconvincing fantasy. Every scene, down to the checkpoint where there are mysteriously no Iraqi soldiers, betrays its creator’s indifference to “the reality of what is happening in Iraq.”

This shouldn’t be surprising. The Hollywood community’s ham-handed attempts to portray the Iraq War have almost nothing to do with the actual war and everything to do with the simpleminded caricature that Hollywood wants to push upon the American people. The days in which Hollywood felt allegiance to this country and tried to support the democratic culture that supports them have long since past. The days of great American filmmakers who felt that they could be both Americans and filmmakers—men and women of vision such as Elia Kazan, George Capra and John Wayne have long since passed. Instead, the Hollywood elite have become aligned with the radical left, with only a few exceptions, many of whom keep their beliefs hidden to avoid recrimination.

DePalma’s crude smear against the troops is as patently ridiculous as the racism of Birth of a Nation, except the latter had some cinematic talent behind it. Instead of trying to understand the depth of the Iraq conflict, Hollywood is presenting a series of dumbed-down morality plays that treat American soldiers as brainwashed killbots. From Redacted to In The Valley of Elah to Rendition, Hollywood demostrates that the only worldview they care about is the one they create—and not only that, but they have the sheer audacity to think that the American people will be swayed by their propagandizing.

If one wants to truly understand the complexities of the war in Iraq, on all sides, documentaries like Gunner Palace, Voices of Iraq and The War Tapes present a balanced and realistic view of the war in Iraq—because they were made in Iraq, rather than cooked up in the fevered mind of a Hollywood radical.

There are plenty of incredible stories of human bravery and human depravity in Iraq—stories that not only need to be told, but would get people in the theaters. Instead, Hollywood is interested in producing only more crudely-made propaganda that fits their particular anti-American worldview. The real story of the war in Iraq remains that told in documentary films and by the men and women who have seen the reality of this conflict first-hand. Brian DePalma and the rest want to portray American soldiers in the most negative light possible—and in so doing they only demonstrate the contempt they feel for this country.

As expected, the House failed to override the President’s veto of the SCHIP legislation that would have extended government child health care benefits to families making over $80,000 per year. The bill would have eroded the health care market, raising premiums for everyone, while providing benefits to families that don’t need government-paid child health care. A family with an annual income of over $80,000 is not “poor” by any stretch of the means. The government has no business providing benefits to those who don’t have any need for them.

Politically, this move will probably hurt the GOP, but given that the election is a year out, the effects will be minimal. What the GOP needs to be doing on the political front is strongly pushing for a compromise bill that preserves the current SCHIP program while encouraging responsible solutions at a state level. That way, the Republicans can claim that they helped the poor without compromising the rest of America’s healthcare system.

The SCHIP expansion is part of an incremental strategy advancing this country towards the failed policies of universal government-run healthcare. The last thing this country needs is a bureaucratic system like the NHS in Britain or the Canadian healthcare system. The smaller populations of those countries have helped slow the inevitable collapse of those systems. If tried in the United States, such a system would collapse with even greater speed and lead to the same widespread rationing of care that already exists in the UK and Canada. Government price controls lead to shortages—the economic evidence is virtually irrefutable. Yet the Democrats in Congress, ever desirous of more and more power in the hands of the state, are perfectly willing to sacrifice the quality and accessibility of American healthcare to to achieve their political ends.

The SCHIP veto holds the line against this back-door attempt at socialized medicine, but in order to avoid political consequences, the Republicans need to be able to push out a better solution. There are viable policy proposals that keep the essential mission of SCHIP alive without expanding it into yet another runaway entitlement. The Republicans need to be able to spearhead these initiatives in order to demonstrate that they can get things done—unlike the party across the political aisle.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has returned home to throngs of cheering supporters after eight years of self-imposed exile. She has an editorial in the Boston Globe on her intention of creating a new and democratic Pakistan, and she may just have the political power to do that. She writes:

As I board the plane that takes me home to Pakistan today, I carry with me a manuscript of a book I am writing that will be published shortly. It is a treatise on the reconciliation of the values of Islam and the West, and a prescription for a moderate and modern Islam that marginalizes religious extremists, returns the military from politics to their barracks, treats all citizens and especially women with full and equal rights, selects its leaders by free and fair elections, and provides for transparent, democratic governance that addresses the social and economic needs of the people as its highest priority.

To me this is not just a book but a campaign manifesto, a guide to governing. If the people of Pakistan honor me again with an opportunity to lead, I intend to practice what I preach, to have my actions match my rhetoric and to make Pakistan a positive model to 1 billion Muslims around the world.

It’s certainly a noble goal. The question is whether Bhutto can pull it off, and whether her return presages a brighter future for Pakistan or whether it will simply return that country to the pre-Musharraf status quo.

Ralph Peters makes a pointed argument that Bhutto will only take Pakistan backwards:

Nonetheless, we blind ourselves to the forces in play when we caricature all coup-makers. For all his faults, Musharraf views himself as a Pakistani patriot - not as a political party boss in the fashion of Bhutto, nor as a Punjabi or Pashtun, Baluch or Sindhi first. Indeed, only the military holds the fractured state of Pakistan together.

Now Benazir Bhutto - one of the figures who did so much to destroy the fabric of society and the economy - is back in Pakistan. It appears that she and Musharraf have worked out a power-sharing arrangement. We may hope for the best, but we also need to be prepared for the worst: a new era of hyper-corruption, as Bhutto’s grab-all gang replaces the relative moral rigor of the military in the public sphere.

And let’s not forget those nukes.

While Bhutto is saying all the right things, her record in Pakistan is hardly stellar. During her tenure as the country’s leader, the Pakistani government openly helped the Taliban gain power in Afghanistan. She was kicked out of office twice for massive corruption. She has nearly $1.5 billion that had previously been locked away in a Swiss bank account and is now accessible due to the deal with the Musharraf regime.

Peters is quite correct to point out that behind all the flowery rhetoric about peace and democracy is a politician who has repeatedly let her people down. One of the most corrosive problems faced by developing nations is corruption, which eats away at the foundations of good government. The last thing Pakistan needs to replace a flawed by honest patriot with a corrupt sectarian who will continue her policy of getting rich off lucrative foreign contracts while Pakistan crumbles around her and falls into extremism.

Perhaps Benazir Bhutto has changed her spots. Perhaps she really believes in democracy and establishing a democratic future for Pakistan. Yet the West should not blindly trust her to do so. The worst thing that could happen in the region is a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the hands of those who would use those weapons for either religious terrorism or national conflict. A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would devastate the entire region and throw the world economy into panic.

The stakes are too high in this matter to trust blindly. Bhutto must be held to her word, and that means that should she return to her own ways the West must be willing to look past Musharraf’s military background and work with him on ensuring that Pakistan does not fall into anarchy or worse.

Megan McArdle observes that the national budget will be nearly balanced by the time George W. Bush leaves office, provided that current trends continue:

Thanks to George Bush’s amazing deficit reduction plan, the budget deficit is now only 1.2% of GDP. If this trend continues, by the time George Bush leaves office, the budget will be within a hair’s breath of being balanced. I can only hope that Democrats don’t squander this precious legacy of fiscal responsibility.

Just kidding! Not about the budget deficit, I mean, but about the reason for it. The reason the budget deficit has closed is a combination of economic growth and increasing inequality, which has allowed the government to collect more revenue on a smaller base. The rich really are different–they pay higher tax rates.

McArdle argues that it’s not Presidential policy that drives these changes, but larger macroeconomic factors. While that’s certainly true to a point, I don’t think that one can dismiss the role of Bush’s tax policies in driving those two factors of economic growth and income. The economic growth of the past few years has come in spite of the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, in spite of the aftereffects of the September 11 attacks and in spite of high oil prices. There’s a very strong argument to be made that the last few years of economic growth are attributable to a national policy of low taxes encouraging productive investment. That isn’t the whole story, but it is a very crucial part of why these last few years have seen solid levels of economic growth.

It’s also interesting that the standard Democratic argument against the Bush tax cuts is that they reduce the tax burdens on the rich. Yet the empirical evidence suggests that the tax burden is shifting the opposite way. Ms. McArdle is correct: the tax base is shrinking, and more is being gathered from a smaller subset of the population. From an economic perspective, that’s helping fuel the reductions in the deficit. Politically, such a thing can foster a sense of entitlement and dependence which is unhealthy over the long term.

The evidence indicates that the Bush tax cuts did what they were supposed to do: increase economic growth and tax revenue. The fact is that in 2003 the Congressional Budget Office predicted $2,421 billion in income tax revenues for 2007. The predicted tax revenue for 2007 now is $2,574 billion. The deficit has decreased to 1.5% of GDP, which is lower than it has been for 24 of the last 30 years. Economic growth remains strong despite the sub-prime mortgage scare and the unemployment outlook for the last few quarters has been revised upwards to show continued job growth.

All the fundamentals are working, but the real problems are spending and entitlements. It won’t matter whether we’re running a deficit or a surplus when the bill for Social Security and Medicare comes due. None of the reduction in the deficit came from cuts in spending, with spending still increasing far above the rate of inflation. The looming entitlement crisis guarantees that any advances made in the next few years will be nothing compared to the liabilities incurred when the Baby Boomers start hitting retirement age. The priorities for the next administration must be in reigning in both the out-of-control levels of spending and the equally out-of-control levels of mandatory entitlement spending. If those problems aren’t fixed, none of the progress of the last few years will matter much.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru notes that tax cuts do lower overall revenue. I would argue that it is possible to have a tax cut that pays for itself, but that would require a much higher marginal rate than we’ve had in decades. The reason why the Bush tax cuts should get some credit for the surge in revenues is because of their collateral effects. One of the biggest sources of increased revenue was on strong corporate profits, and those can be attributed to a combination of low interest rates and tax policy that is conducive to new investment.

Ultimately, federal revenues are much more dependent on the overall health of the economy than on tax policy. Worrying about maximizing federal revenue is the wrong approach; the primary concern should be in maximizing overall economic growth. The Democrats tend to obsess over the former, while the Republicans look to the latter. Tax cuts won’t necessarily bring an economy out of recession by themselves like some Republicans claim, nor will they cause one as some Democrats claim. Monetary policy has a big impact, as does productivity, the balance of trade and other factors large and small.

That doesn’t mean that tax cuts aren’t sound policy—they most certainly are, but the case that tax cuts by necessity pay for themselves isn’t the strongest.