but apparently they’re just opposed to Republicans having power, judging by Barack Obama’s attempt to take over the U. S. Census. For a good rundown on why this is illegal and probably unconstitutional, check out Samizdata.Update: Marsha Blackburn’s on it.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
The new American revolution?
Most informed citizens know the Bill of Rights has ten amendments; nowadays, though, most people don’t remember the Tenth Amendment. If you’re one of them, here’s the text:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If you didn’t know that was in the Constitution, don’t kick yourself too hard—to all intents and purposes, our government doesn’t either. (The same is true of the Ninth Amendment, which declares, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”)Now, however, we have the first sign in a very long time that that might be about to change. If Congress won’t recognize the proper sphere of sovereignty of the states, some of the states are thinking about standing up to claim it for themselves.
Although Fox News and CNN are not telling you about it, a growing number of states are declaring sovereignty. Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California, and Georgia have all introduced bills and resolutions declaring sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment. Colorado, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Alaska, Kansas, Alabama, Nevada, Maine, and Illinois are considering such measures.
Here’s the payoff from the bill introduced in the state of Washington, which follows a number of “Whereas” clauses laying out the historical and constitutional justifications for the bill:
NOW, THEREFORE, Your Memorialists respectfully resolve:(1) That the State of Washington hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States; and(2) That this serve as a Notice and Demand to the federal government to maintain the balance of powers where the Constitution of the United States established it and to cease and desist, effective immediately, any and all mandates that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated powers.
That’s just one example; go to the article and you’ll find links to all the bills that are currently pending in state legislatures. Knowing my old home state as I do, I’ll be surprised if that one passes, but some of these will. Of course, I’m sure the initial response from the Obama administration will be to dismiss or ignore these bills; but if these states have the guts to act on this language and resist (or even seek to roll back) the federal usurpation of state power, we have a shot at reviving federalism. After all, the Tenth Amendment may be treated like a dead letter, but it’s still in the Constitution; the Obama administration may succeed in buying states off, but if any of them hang in there and refuse to give up their Tenth Amendment claim, as long as they pick an issue on which they’re on firm ground, it would be hard to make a constitutional case against them.It’s encouraging to see state governments asserting themselves as independent and responsible political entities, rather than as lapdogs of D.C.; here’s hoping it keeps up.HT: Shane Vander Hart
If you can fake that, you’ve got it made
Isn’t that what they say about sincerity? When it comes to getting on in the world, it’s a true statement, with one big “if”: it’s only true as long as nobody catches you faking it. Get caught, all bets are off.Unfortunately for Alex Rodriguez, he’s been caught faking it a few too many times by now for anyone to believe much of anything he says. It’s been revealed that he tested positive for steroids in ’03, and he’s trying to control the damage by admitting the positive test and spinning the circumstances—but why should anybody buy the line? After all, this is a guy who . . . well, I’ll let veteran Tacoma News-Tribune sportswriter Larry LaRue tell the story:
One day in the visiting clubhouse in Cleveland, Alex called me over to his locker. His grandmother had died a day earlier, and he wanted to tell me how hard losing her had been. He had been close to her, he said, and was devastated by her loss.Alex told me all this without showing emotion. I thought he might be trying not to, so I nodded and listened.“The funeral is Sunday,” he said.“Are you going?” I asked.Alex looked genuinely surprised.“No,” he said. After a pause, he told me he’d had a long talk with Lou Piniella, who’d asked him to play through the pain.It occurred to me that day that Rodriguez might not be feeling anguish so much as wanting me to know he was—and to write about it. I didn’t, in part because I thought it sent too mixed a message and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.I still do, but it has gotten harder.Alex Rodriguez never said a spontaneous thing to the media. Ever. On one level, that could be seen as caution. But over the years around Alex, it became apparent he was that way with teammates, coaches, everyone. . . .I don’t know anyone who believes they’ve seen an honest emotion from Alex. When I watched his confessional interview with Peter Gammons and thought we might finally hear him level with the world.Until he said he wasn’t sure what he’d taken, only that it was banned.Alex took something for three years without knowing exactly what it was? Impossible. Alex didn’t get dressed without thinking of the impact he wanted to make with his attire. He never spoke to the press without knowing precisely what message he wanted to deliver.And the steroid cocktail he is alleged to have consumed is not something he could have purchased over the counter at GNC—part of it can’t even legally be sold in this country.What Alex did Monday was confess to as little as possible. He never said the word ‘illegal.’. Only ‘banned.’ He never said he’d injected anything, or been on a program.Alex Rodriguez taking injections without knowing what was in the syringe or how would impact his body? . . .When you think you’re just a bit smarter than anyone who interviews you, things get said that are too easily checked. Alex’s grandmother story, for instance. I talked to then-manager Piniella a bit later in the evening, and asked if he’d counseled his young shortstop about the death in the family.“I didn’t know about it,” he said. “Alex hasn’t told me.”Now, Alex wants the world to know he’s sorry. That whatever it was he took in Texas because of the pressure he felt after signing that contract, he stopped taking when he went to New York—where apparently, there was no pressure.At least this time, he left Piniella out of it.
The thing about trust—and it’s something our president should remember; sure, he’s the golden boy who can do no wrong, but so was A-Rod, once upon a time—is that once you lose it, once people decide they can’t trust you not to spin them, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.
Isn’t the election over?
And didn’t Barack Obama win? And if so, shouldn’t somebody clue him in so he can stop campaigning and start governing?If you’re wondering that, too, after President Obama’s appearance in our neck of the woods to campaign for the so-called “stimulus” bill, take heart, because we’re not alone in our reaction. Granted, he’s a very effective campaigner, and his campaign appearance might do the trick—this time. Over the long haul, though, you can’t govern a country by giving stump speeches. Making your case to the American people is an important part of the process, true (Ronald Reagan was a past master at this), but while that may help you get the rudder over to keep the nation on the course you want, it’s not going to do much to propel the ship. The president needs to have more in his arsenal than going out and holding campaign rallies if he wants to have a successful term in office.The question is, why is President Obama still operating in campaign mode rather than in governing mode? I’m tempted to say that it’s because campaigning privileges style over substance, and that plays to his strengths. He knows how to campaign effectively, but when it comes down to getting things done, put me down as one of the increasing numbers who don’t believe he really knows what he wants to get done, let alone how. How else do you explain the fact that he articulated an ambitious plan for the stimulus package, then not only didn’t have anyone in his administration draft legislation to enact his plan, but rather let the House Democrats write a vastly different bill that doesn’t meet any of the standards and qualifications he laid out—and is now laying all his political capital on the line to defend that very different bill? This is bad governance; but it’s right in line with the way he ran his campaign. Unfortunately, now it’s time and past time for him to stop campaigning and start governing.
This makes sense
One of the things that’s been hard for me to understand about our president is how all his talk of bipartisanship—and his apparent firm belief in his ability to work in a bipartisan fashion—squared with his extremely partisan voting record. In her column today, Carol Platt Liebau makes a point that I think explains this:
From his days on The Harvard Law Review forward, Barack Obama gained a reputation for “bipartisanship.” The problem? His much vaunted bridge-building was always a matter more of style than of substance. He would treat those who disagreed with him with great politeness and civility, listen their views, and then ignore them.In environments like a law school campus, or Chicago city politics, or Illinois state politics—where liberals overwhelmingly outnumber conservatives—bipartisan words, without action, are enough. Where conservatives are otherwise completely disregarded and routinely treated with contempt, respectful words can secure their support and even a certain degree of affection. Throughout his life, Barack Obama has blossomed primarily in liberal hothouses; perhaps it’s no surprise that he concluded that a little lip service would fulfill the demands of bipartisanship. . . .Perhaps that’s why the President believed that simply talking to Republicans would be enough to secure their support for the stimulus package, even though the final product reflected none of their input.
Of course, as she goes on to note, real bipartisanship requires more than that—and more than that the Obama-Pelosi administration wasn’t willing to give. You can always find a few marginal members of the GOP to pick off, but that’s all they could manage; the result isn’t real bipartisanship, it’s what we might call “RINO bipartisanship” (kudos to Glenn Foden):
Coming home empty
And [Jesus] said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
And they began to celebrate.“Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive;
he was lost, and is found.’”—Luke 15:11-32 (ESV)
Mary Hulst, “Coming Home Empty”
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Another of the high points of this year’s Worship Symposium for me was Mary Hulst’s sermon on this passage. I actually would have liked her to go further in talking about the grace of the Father and the gracelessness of the older son, but even so, her message was a powerful evocation of God’s grace and love, coming straight out of the fact that, as a pastor preaching to a congregation of pastors and other church leaders (which is to say, people who play the “older son” role for a living), she knew us cold. I encourage you to listen—especially, but not only, if you’re another one who does the church thing professionally.
Credo ut intelligam
With Anselm of Canterbury, I believe so that I may understand—because I understand that that’s just how it works, for everybody, whether they know it or not. (This is part of the reason wrong belief is important: it produces wrong understanding.) As a candidate for ordination as a pastor in the Reformed Church in America, part of my task was to write a credo—a reasonably full statement of what I believe. Last year, I broke that credo up into ten parts and posted them. Those ten parts cover the following topics (among other things):
- Who is God?
- What is God like?
- The problem of evil
- Considering humanity
- The person and work of Jesus
- Relationship with God (or not)
- The Holy Spirit and the Bible
- The gifts of the Spirit
- The church and its mission
- The coming kingdom of God
For various reasons, I wrote this as a conversation between myself and someone I knew fairly well at the time, so the sections do flow into each other to some degree.
Rivers in the desert
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”—Isaiah 43:18-19 (ESV)This is one of the more startling moments in Scripture. It’s startling because this section of Isaiah is full of appeals and references to “the former things,” to all the things he’s done for them in the past; indeed, immediately before this, God has anchored his promise to bring his people back home in the story of the Exodus, in the reminder that he’s done it before. And then he says, essentially, “But forget about all that.” So what’s the deal?It seems safe to say that God isn’t commanding his people to collective amnesia; nor is this a license, as many Western theologians want to think, to throw out all that stuff that God says about sin (at least the sins we don’t want to believe are wrong) and judgment. Rather, this is hyperbole designed to jolt Israel into opening their eyes and ears and actually hearing him, and seeing what God is doing. God is not only present and active in the past, but also in the present—theirs and ours—and they had no sense of that. They had no concept of what God was doing in their own time, or what he might be calling them to do; they knew all about the Exodus, they’d heard about it a million times before, and they would no doubt have told you they believed God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt. What they didn’t believe was that that had anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believed God had saved, but not that he would save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.And so too often, we as Christians in this country are like those Jews in captivity in Babylon—we have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. God wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a road for you through the wilderness, and streams of living water in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”
Redefining evil for convenience
Here’s Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on “the normalization of evil”:
Somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable “tactical” considerations. . . .The clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. . . .When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas—the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains—to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.
Wal-Mart Confidential
Charles Platt, a former senior writer for Wired, went to work at a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff, Arizona and wrote about it for the New York Post. He has some interesting things to say about his experience:
My starting wage was so low (around $7 per hour), a modest increment still didn’t leave me with enough to live on comfortably, but when I looked at the alternatives, many of them were worse. Coworkers assured me that the nearest Target paid its hourly full-timers less than Wal-Mart, while fast-food franchises were at the bottom of everyone’s list.I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans. . . .You have to wonder, then, why the store has such a terrible reputation, and I have to tell you that so far as I can determine, trade unions have done most of the mudslinging. Web sites that serve as a source for negative stories are often affiliated with unions. Walmartwatch.com, for instance, is partnered with the Service Employees International Union; Wakeupwalmart.com is entirely owned by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. For years, now, they’ve campaigned against Wal-Mart, for reasons that may have more to do with money than compassion for the working poor. If more than one million Wal-Mart employees in the United States could be induced to join a union, by my calculation they’d be compelled to pay more than half-billion dollars each year in dues.Anti-growth activists are the other primary source of anti-Wal-Mart sentiment. In the town where I worked, I was told that activists even opposed a new Barnes & Noble because it was “too big.” If they’re offended by a large bookstore, you can imagine how they feel about a discount retailer.The argument, of course, is that smaller enterprises cannot compete. My outlook on this is hardcore: I think that many of the “mom-and-pop” stores so beloved by activists don’t deserve to remain in business. . . .Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It’s the best friend we could ask for.