Free Republic

The Broken Branch: An Unusual Lawsuit Takes Congress to Task For Shoddy and Partisan Lawmaking, In Which A Bill Is Unconstitutionally Being Treated as Law By JOHN W. DEAN Two seasoned non-partisan Congress-watchers have teamed up (again) to report some bad news about Congress, assessing a decade of Republican rule. Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, have written a new book, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track. While I am familiar with the prior work of...

Just six months in office, Barack Obama seems to be in trouble. July was a ‘disaster’ for Obama, according to The Hill, the leading congressional paper (1). The president seems to be ‘flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter’ (2), and declining support shows that ‘the American people are starting to wake up to the truth’ about Obama (3).

Democrats are taking a gamble. It's still almost two years until the next election. This is plenty of time to come out of recession. I remain optimistic that this will be the case. By the obscene spending now, Democrats achieve a few things. They reward consituencies, increase dependency on government, and consolidate their own political power, all while blaming everything on Bush and Republicans. If they had waited for a few months to do this, they would be taking more of the blame. They'll get away with it, too. Conservatives are helping out by lowering expectations with every hysterical cry...

The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union. Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the...

Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, "over-determined." It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some. In 2006, voters set out to punish Republicans for loose practices in Washington -- most spectacularly the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- and the mishandling of the Iraq war. This year, they decided that Republicans deserved another whipping, even before the September financial meltdown added yet another black mark against the Bush administration.

Almost by definition, Barack Obama's election meets with the approval of a majority of American adults.  Many are wildly enthusiastic about the prospect of an Obama presidency.  More probably reside somewhere between cautiously optimistic and indifferent. But this column is addressed to politically active conservatives who fear the worst and are now wondering how to cope. The key, as always, is to maintain one's equilibrium.  To this end, I offer, unsolicited, the following suggestions: First, pray that President Obama achieves greatness in office.  Our overriding concern must always be the country we love, not the success of a party...

I'm not sure whether this American University analysis is correct or not, but if it is, turnout was not the real story of the 2008 election:

The free-market system, it is now fashionable to say, is to blame for the current financial crisis. By way of rejoinder, a growing cohort of commentators have argued that the crisis should be understood not as a failure of free-market economic theory but as its vindication. They argue that the U.S. government perverted the wisdom of the market by encouraging banks to make loans no rational actor would make -- and that the players took the risks they did because they held a reasonable expectation of a government bailout should things get hairy. The problem, in this view, is not...

Lee Smith laments that American Muslims have to read almost exclusively about scary Muslims and slightly less scary Muslims in the mainstream American media. “One can only sympathize with American Muslims,” he writes, "those who may or may not be religious, but surely have no attachment to the obscurantist fanatics that drove them from the region, and must now be wondering what is wrong with the New York Times that the only Muslims that register with the paper of record are very scary ones, and less scary ones." I have noticed and been annoyed by this tendency myself, and it...

In one of the most important international-law decisions in its history, the Supreme Court on Tuesday restored the Constitution’s prudent balance between politics and law in the quintessentially political arena of foreign affairs. Doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion concurrently provided individual justice for murder victims, vindication for the rights of states to democratic self-determination, and a searing reminder of why presidential elections — which can chart the high Court’s course for a generation — are crucially important.

Though he is little known in the West, Coptic priest Zakaria Botros — named Islam’s “Public Enemy #1” by the Arabic newspaper, al-Insan al-Jadid — has been making waves in the Islamic world. Along with fellow missionaries — mostly Muslim converts — he appears frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become...

"... a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama" - Barack Obama Lebanon, New Hampshire. January 7, 2008

Like almost everything about the Clintons, it started as a joke and somehow turned real. Hillary Rodham Clinton running for President wasn't a bad gag: she's widely believed to be consumed by ambition; her husband, her chosen vessel these past several decades, was a spent force, politically if not in the DNA fabric-analysis sense; and it was unlikely that she'd become Senator for New York in order to spend the next couple of decades attending to the complaints of whiny losers in upstate welfare backwaters.

In my column last week, I argued for electoral pragmatism by my fellow conservatives e.g., better a Giuliani Republican than Hillary. About two-thirds of my self-identified conservative Christian e-mail respondents strongly disagreed. That response reminded me of a very shrewd observation made several years ago by Robert William Fogel: "Coalitions spawned by religious movements are more ideological than partisan." ... Elections are very specific and limited choices between different outcomes. The decision not to vote or vote for a third-party candidate with no hope of winning is itself a moral choice for the outcome such a vote will effectuate. People...

David Brooks is a national treasure. He is perhaps our most gifted spotter of trends, and his pop-sociology seems moved by a genuine curiosity, and so is often blissfully immune from the draw of familiar categories and conventional wisdom. He has taught us more about the life of the contemporary middle class than anyone, and most weeks he is the only reason to read the New York Times. But as a spotter of trends, Brooks is also a generalizer, and tends to advance a simple, coherent, well packaged aphorism as an explanation for large events and ideas. It is the...

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change. When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders. Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while...

Almost all the “respectable” economic theories of politics begin by assuming that the typical citizen understands economics and votes accordingly—at least on average. By a “miracle of aggregation,” random errors are supposed to balance themselves out. But this works only if voters’ errors are random, not systematic. ... Out of all the complaints that economists lodge against laymen, four families of beliefs stand out: the anti-market bias, the anti-foreign bias, the make-work bias, and the pessimistic bias. ...

While the outside world hardly noticed, a significant and rapidly growing amount of money is now being managed in accord with Islamic law, the Shari'a. According to one study, "by the end of 2005, more than 300 institutions in over 65 jurisdictions were managing assets worth around US$700 billion to US$1 trillion in a Shari'ah-compatible manner." Islamic economics increasingly has become force to contend with due to burgeoning portfolios of oil exporters and multiplying Islamic financial instruments (such as interest-free mortgages and sukuk bonds). But what does it all amount to? Can Shari'a-compliant instruments challenge the existing international financial order?...

Okay, I admit it: It looks like the Surge is going to fail. No, not that surge. You know, the one that raised troop levels in Iraq just enough so that when we declare “victory” and start to pull out, we’ll be back to square one. We, and our new alien overlords at MoveOn.org had that scam’s number all along.

LOS INDIOS — Like other farmers along the Rio Grande, Tudor Uhlhorn wants to know where federal officials will build a fence that will cut across his family’s land as part of an effort to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. “I’d like to know how that fence is going to get across drainage ditches and irrigation canals,” said Uhlhorn, a farmer who owns part of a sprawling industrial park here. “But they’re going to do what they want anyway,” he said. On Thursday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Ralph Basham canceled a meeting in which he was expected...