In a not-particularly-surprising move, Arizona passed a very strict law giving police broad powers to crack down on illegal immigration. Equally unsurprising is the backlash from those who worry that rights will get trampled in the enforcement of this law. The biggest complaint is against the provision allowing police to stop anyone they suspect of being here illegally and have them prove that they are legal residents.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that such authority would never be abused. More disturbingly to me, 60% of people favor this law despite the fact that 58% of people in the same poll believe that the rights of some citizens will be infringed upon by the enforcement of this law. If we assume that all 40% of people who do not favor this law are among the 58% who fear the rights of citizens will be infringed then there is almost 1 in 5 who is willing to infringe on the basic rights of citizens in order to enforce our essentially arbitrary immigration laws.

My own position on immigration is the same as it was nearly three years ago – we’re asking the wrong questions and until we take the time to decide what we believe about the value of immigration for our nation we will never be able to write and enforce coherant laws relating to immigration.

My more conservative friends might wish to blackball me for saying it, but I think the first thing we need to do about the immigration issue is abandon any pretense that we are going to catch all the illegal aliens and send them home. If they are doing nothing except building our country throught their own honest labor then I think we are wasting our time trying to round them up and that is completely unacceptable if it also includes infringing upon the rights of citizens who might be mistaken for illegal immigrants.

On the other hand my few liberal friends will undoubtedly take umbrage with my position that immigration status should be a secondary offence, like seat belt laws (or like seat belt laws used to be in some places). A person should not be stopped simply on suspicion of being illegal but if they are stopped for any other reason they may be required to prove their legal status. Anyone who cannot prove their legal citizenship should be deported for any but the most minor of offenses. Those without a valid and current visa should be deported for any offense.

When minors are picked up for any offense their parents may be required to prove their legal status. Unless one parent was a citizen prior to the child’s birth or both parents are citizens currently, the child should be deported with (or to) any non-citizen parent.

Along with such laws, we should make an easy to get “Citizenship Visa” for those who desire to become citizens. The visa would expire after a set time sufficient to become a citizen and they would be deported if they did not become a citizen within the allotted timeframe. Those who left promptly when the visa expired would be able to apply for another such visa five (or possibly ten) years later while those who overstayed their visa would be denied future opportunities for such visas.

And by the way, the military should not accept anyone who was not a citizen or a holder of a citizenship visa.

Ever since the passage of that rancid piece of legislative sausage labeled health care reform Republicans have been talking about repealing the bill. Some even talk about “repeal and replace” as their goal. Alongside that rhetoric (and that’s pretty much all it is at this point) there has been the action taken by the Attorneys General of many states to file suit against the constitutionality of the bill. My purpose here is not to discuss the issue of health care reform; rather, it is to talk about the differences between these two legal paths out of this reform as well as another path which is fundamentally different—nullification—which thus far has not been actively pursued by most opponents of the bill.

While the battle cry “Repeal it!” is very memorable and effective at rallying the emotions of voters who are willing to admit that this bill simply does not pass the smell test, critics of this approach point out that the chances of repealing this bill are virtually nonexistent. To repeal it while Obama is in office would require 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress to override his certain veto of any bill to repeal. To wait until after he leaves office, even if he only serves one term assures that passion and energy will almost certainly have cooled enough that Congress would no longer consider a bill to repeal it. Remember, there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program and by 2012 all the bureacracy related to this “reform” will be entrenched.

The lawsuit from many states over this bill has a higher chance of success because even proponents of the bill recognize that the constitutionality of an individual mandate is highly suspect. Actually, the only way to argue that it is constitutional is to argue that the Constitution itself has no force of law beyond establishing the structure of our multi-level government. While this should be a slam dunk in any court that respects the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, I would not trust our Supreme Court to overturn Congress on a piece of legislation that is this emotionally charged unless the legislation were banning abortion or gay marriage. The fact is that the majority of our Supreme Court justices see the Supreme Court as the supreme law of the land rather than the Constitution.

While repeal and filing suit each presume that the federal government is ultimately sovereign, nullification assumes that ultimately the states are sovereign in our republic. Nullification has been used before, mostly during the first century of our nation’s history while the state governments really remembered that they had a sovereign power within the nation as a whole.

I wrote to my state senator and representative asking about nullification and the response I got was:

I don’t know if there is much appetite within the legislature to nullify the health care bill.

That sounds accurate to me but I think we are cutting off the real power of our system of federalism by ignoring such an opportunity to remind Congress by nullifying this lousy bill that the states remain sovereign on most issues according to the Constitution and that we as states have not forgotten that. Instead we crawl back to the federal government and ask if they might please modify or remove the legislation themselves as if we needed permission to act within the sphere of our established rights as a state.

After another year of domestic turmoil and political shenanigans, a year of watching President Obama in office rather than out on the campaign trail, I find myself frequently having the thought “if only McCain had been elected President instead.”

The thought came again today but unlike previous times I feel like sharing what would likely have happened in a McCain administration to this point.

If McCain had been president he would not have received the Nobel Peace Prize and Justice Souter would not have retired so he would not likely have named any justices to the Supreme Court by this point in his presidency. As far as issues that he would have dealt with that Obama has been dealing with I would like to address health care legislation, auto bailouts, stimulus, and Iran.

Obama took over a year to get any health care legislation to his desk. McCain would have dealt with the issue much more quickly. There are three possible outcomes that we might have seen. One is that Congress sent another piece of sausage like a scaled down version of what Obama got and McCain would have signed in a less expensive bill that, like the current bill, would have done little if anything to alleviate the problems we see. Another possibility is that Congress would send him a bill that was “too socialist” and McCain would then veto it. The final possibility is that Congress would conclude that they could not pass a bill that McCain would sign and they would abandon the issue and focus on other priorities. In any of the cases we would have less debt and as large of problems as we now have but the issue would have been over no later than Thanksgiving.

On the auto bailouts McCain would have grumbled more than Obama did about how undesireable it was for government to take over these large institutions. Then he would have “grudgingly” done almost exactly the same thing as Obama.

When the issue of a stimulus package was on the table McCain would have acted as quickly as Obama but the package might have been marginally smaller and there would have been a lot less verbiage about “green jobs.”

The biggest difference between the Obama presidency and a McCain presidency (besides the Nobel Peace Prize of course) would be on the issue of Iran. Obama is now talking about international sanctions whereas McCain would have done that before most of the rest of us had even become aware of the outcome of their elections last year. By now he would have us at war (more than offsetting any pittance we might have saved on smaller health care and stimulus legislation) unless, simply by the fact of his election, the anti-war wing of liberals had remained fired up. Instead, now that Obama is talking sanctions, it is the right move rather than being a code for ramping up for war (as it would have been viewed had McCain done the talking).

My point, of course, is that who we elect as President has surprisingly little bearing on what challenges we face or how badly our mangled political culture mishandles them. It’s definitely time for a change and I hope that the American people will soon be able to recognize the difference between real change and a change of posture.

Before the health care vote even started candidates and elected officials opposed to this atrocious excuse for health care reform were pledging to repeal it if passed. They have asked citizens to support those who are willing to repeal this bill. When it passed they renewed their pledge. That’s great on paper but the reality is that we are unlikely to ever have the super-majority necessary to override a veto should a bill to repeal ever pass. That means that efforts to repeal would have to wait at least three years until we got a president willing to repeal this monstrosity. Sadly the voters have shown many times that they do not have a three year attention span. As for congress, I find it miraculous that they had a two year attention span on this issue—perhaps they managed because they completely abandoned paying any attention to how much the voters disliked this particular piece of rancid sausage.

It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

He arrives there from this bit of data:

One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.

The problem that he identifies is that:

The odd thing is that when you turn to political life, we are living in an age of reverse-generativity. Far from serving the young, the old are now taking from them. First, they are taking money. According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.

Second, they are taking freedom. In 2009, for the first time in American history, every single penny of federal tax revenue went to pay for mandatory spending programs, according to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute. As more money goes to pay off promises made mostly to the old, the young have less control.

Third, they are taking opportunity. For decades, federal spending has hovered around 20 percent of G.D.P. By 2019, it is forecast to be at 25 percent and rising. The higher tax rates implied by that spending will mean less growth and fewer opportunities. Already, pension costs in many states are squeezing education spending.

So his conclusion is that the problem is reverse-generativity and that the only people who can stop it are those who have the most to gain by perpetuation or even accelerating it. Why do I find that hard to swallow?

Along the way he offers this tortured logic for his conclusion:

I used to think that political leaders could avert fiscal suicide. But it’s now clear change will not be led from Washington. On the other hand, over the past couple of years we’ve seen the power of spontaneous social movements: first the movement that formed behind Barack Obama, and now, equally large, the Tea Party movement.

Spontaneous social movements can make the unthinkable thinkable, and they can do it quickly.

. . .

Old people now have the time, the energy and, with the Internet, the tools to organize.

The examples of spontaneous social movements were both driven primarily by younger people. He offers no evidence that this older generation will suddenly stop doing the things that helped them amass their political power in favor of taking the route that their grandchildren are pioneering – especially in an effort that would diminish their political power and rob them of their spare time.

Altruism and performing service is much easier and more immediately rewarding when it is directed at friends and relatives than when it is directed at an anonymous society.

The fact is that it really is clear that change will not come from Washington – it will have to come to Washington in the form of new voices and new leaders who have the ability to look past traditional divisions and traditional ideas and push through some new ideas using new alliances to bring about the kind of transformational changes that could actually avert eh looming economic crisis that virtually everyone agrees is on the horizon.

While candidate Mike Lee acted like a senator on the issue of confirming Ben Bernanke for another term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Bob Bennett acted like a marionette under the control of the mystical wizard of Washington D.C. With a short press release and a predictable vote, our “Senator” Bob Bennett plainly demonstrated the cancerous logic that is rampant among Washington insiders. Here is how he justified his vote to confirm Ben Bernanke:

I reluctantly cast a vote in favor of Ben Bernanke because I do not want to give President Obama the opportunity to put someone who shares his leftist views in charge of the Federal Reserve. I am aware of the mistakes that have been made at the Fed while Chairman Bernanke has been there, but I fear an alternative would be worse for the country’s economic future.

So our elected Marionette is simply trying to save us from having the president nominate someone else. Cute. Perhaps he should have engaged his brain and realized two simple facts – first, if Bernanke was not confirmed by the senate there is little chance that President Obama would have name a more extreme nominee (the natural reaction would be to nominate a safer pick); second, considering the makeup of the Senate (not to mention the final vote tally) opposing Bernanke would have been unlikely to prevent his confirmation but at least it would not have demonstrated approval for his performance (a vote to confirm sends that message more strongly than any press release about your supposed reluctance to cast the vote).

In contrast, Mike Lee (who ought to be replacing Bennett within a year) demonstrated what senatorial advice and consent should look like. Mike issued a statement opposing confirmation for Bernanke and giving solid reasons for that opposition:

“It is clear that during Chairman Bernanke’s term, the Federal Reserve has played a significant role in creating and perpetuating policies and strategies that have contributed significantly to the most difficult economic environment our country has faced in a generation.” Mike Lee continued, “To confirm the Chairman to a second term would be both a tacit approval of his actions during these past few years, and an endorsement that ‘business as usual’ is acceptable. That is something I am simply not willing to do.”

. . .

“Simply replacing Bernanke may not be sufficient, but Chairman Bernanke must be held accountable for the Fed’s actions. It is time to send a clear message that ‘business as usual’ is not acceptable, that transparency is mandatory and that everyone is accountable, now and in the future. This is the first in a series of important steps which must be taken to ensure the integrity and reliability of our monetary system.” (emphasis added)

Bennett failed to demonstrate any responsibility for the senatorial task of advice and consent. Instead he chose to throw up his hands and issue a statement about how sorry he was to vote against the wishes of his constituents and even his own better judgment. Worse yet, he did so on a vote where voting his conscience would not have made a material difference except to be honest about his position.

Back in October I wrote about the dangers of a crisis mentality and tried to show that the abuse of crisis was not a one-party trait. I see that Will Wilkinson did a better job of showing that this month in Let the next crisis go to waste:

The Aughts began in crisis when the second plane hit the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration, loath to let a serious crisis go to waste, managed to parlay the nation’s alarm and credulity into an ill-conceived invasion of an entirely unrelated country, wasting over a trillion dollars and many tens of thousands of lives, all while losing control of the fight in Afghanistan and failing utterly to bring down Osama bin Laden.

Bush’s botched attempts to capitalize on crisis—the ugly aftermath to which Obama is heir—might have made an alert leader wary. But instead, Obama set up shop in the Oval Office and proceeded immediately to use crisis as (Emanuel’s words again) “an opportunity to do things you’d think you could not do.”

Rather than acting as a prudent guardian of the public good in a time of economic turbulence and hardship, Obama and the Democratic Congress have hurried to check the boxes on their partisan wish list precisely when the nation most needed a restorative break from transformative ambition.

When Obama was campaigning he promised change – the only change we got was that the president was officially affiliated with a different party than before. His opponents during the campaign were vocal about the fact that they could not believe he would deliver the promised change. Since his inauguration some of those who supported him have found that they no longer believe in the change he promised. We were promised an end to “politics as usual.” Instead some left wishing for the politics of the 90’s – nasty as they were – rather than the politics of today. As Mr. Wilkinson put it:

This marriage of incompetence and craven opportunism is so much in the familiar spirit of the age that one must conclude that the age itself remains unchanged.

The “crisis as opportunity” mentality can lead to only one thing – criminal behavior. It is the same mentality that leads to looters during the L.A. race riots of the past and the Hatian earthquake of the present.

I have concluded that regardless of whatever other rhetoric a candidate may offer in the future the biggest change I want to see will be a candidate who promises to treat a crisis as a crisis and not as an opportunity.

The men and women serving in our armed forces are the best in the world. They can accomplish anything they are asked to do, if they are given the proper resources and clear rules of engagement.

He believes that we should be working towards:

Imagine the best equipped strategic strike forces rapidly deployed at a moment's notice to respond to the national security interests of the United States of America. Also, imagine a well compensated military that cares for the military families, now, in the future, and especially when wounded.

He thinks this will take us there:

• Dedicate at least 4% of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for national defense spending.
• Secure our borders, enforce our current immigration laws, and reject amnesty for those who are here illegally.
• Adopt a “Go Big or Go Home” approach to our overseas military presence. We must have the best foreign intelligence, human and electronic.
• Support an “all of the above” national energy policy that advocates rapid development of renewable energy, clean/green energy, and the use of our various natural resources and nuclear capabilities. Recognize that energy independence is vital to our national security.
• Keep Guantanamo Bay open and continue with military tribunals.
• Sustain the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.
• Support Veterans by honoring all commitments made to them.

My reactions:

• Having a flat rate dedicated to defense might be better than our current what-can-we-get-away-with approach. Whether 4% is the right rate is up for debate.
• We need to secure our borders, but that will probably require a long discussion about what we believe about immigration and then a complete overhaul of our immigration laws. Then we would need to strictly enforce those immigration laws once they are in line with our immigration beliefs.
• “Go Big or Go Home” might help us be more careful about when and where we “go.”
• “All of the above” is definitely the right energy policy.
• Keeping Guantanamo Bay open is not helping our national security in any measurable way.
• We should sustain basic rights – obviously including the Second Amendment.
• We should honor all our commitments and our veterans have done the most to warrant making those commitments to them than any other group – certainly they have done more than most of our members of Congress.

Americans have lost confidence in their elected leaders and the direction of the country as a whole. We are being governed by a “nanny state” mentality that is blanketing the country with the misconception that the government can and should solve all problems.

He envisions the goal as:

Imagine an atmosphere of personal responsibility where individuals took control of their future and worked hard to improve their lives. Restoration of confidence in the government is possible through true openness and transparency in all facets of government operations.

To achieve that goal he proposes:

• Fire the Czars and adhere to the procedures under the Constitution requiring Senate confirmation for such leadership positions.
• Apply all laws equally to Congress.
• Require Committees to post all proceedings on the Internet within 24 hours. Allow 72 hours for Bills and Conference Reports to be publicly online prior to a vote on the House Floor.
• Prohibit Members of Congress serving on Appropriations and Ways & Means from seeking earmarks.
• Require that 100% of all campaign donations be filed with the Federal Election Commission for public review.
• Attack the rampant waste, fraud, and abuses in Medicare and Medicaid.
• Deny the passage of “card check” and participate in labor law reform.
• Ensure that E-Verify is fully deployed and mandatory for hiring an employee.

My thoughts on his steps toward the goal:

• Sounds more like a sound bite than an real effective step in the right direction.
• What does this mean?
• This couldn’t hurt.
• This would make those committee assignments much less desirable but if the rest of our Representatives can still seek earmarks little will have been accomplished.
• I like it.
• Vague.
• Vague.
• I’m not sure that E-Verify is all that it is cracked up to be. I fear that it will be more expense than value.

The government is omnipresent in our lives, restricting our basic liberties. The proper role of government is a strictly limited one. We recognize that the States created the federal government. The federal government did not create the States. Further, it is not the government that will create jobs, wealth, or propel the United States of America to reach its fullest potential. It is the American people who will drive America forward.

He suggests that our goal should be:

Imagine a federal government that recognized it could not solve every problem. Imagine a government focused instead on the most important federal roles, such as national defense. Individuals should have the freedom to succeed or fail in this country. It is not the government’s role to stand in the way of either outcome or to choose winners and losers.

To achieve this goal he recommends:

• Repeal TARP and commit to no more “stimulus” bills that are merely a ruse to grow government.
• Appoint a bi-partisan “Sunset Commission” to identify at least 100 federal departments or programs recommended for elimination by December 31, 2011.
• Reduce the corporate income tax to a flat 10%. This will eliminate the wide array of corporate loopholes, incentivize business in the U.S.A., and simplify the tax code.
• Reject the “Cap & Trade” scheme and repeal all EPA funding related to carbon policy.
• Sell back to private ownership the three million acres of federal land identified under the Clinton Administration as having no federal purpose.

My thoughts on those steps is as follows:

• No more stimulus is a great idea.
• A bipartisan commission would only identify 100 departments by having half the commission identify at least 49 departments or programs and then trade those with the 49 other “crucial” departments or programs identified by the other half of the commission as recommended for elimination. Added to the two departments or programs that the majority could honestly agree on they would scrape together the recommended 100 – none of which will actually get eliminated. Mmmm, sausage.
• As I said before, a flat tax rate without loopholes allows the private portion of the economy to act with more confidence.
• All of our government “green” legislation and policies are more political than scientific. It’s too bad that our government can’t stick to facts and let opinions sort themselves out instead of the other way around.
• The government should sell off any federal land that has no federal purpose.