Big Jolly Politics

politics in Harris County and Texas

Whose fault is the Shutdown?

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Many issues lead to the government shutdown, but DACA is the issue perpetuating the impasse.  This gives us an opportunity to look at DACA and explore a potential compromise.

At the beginning some full disclosure:

  1. My family consists of 2 citizens and 1 lawful permanent resident.
  2. I am being harmed by the shutdown.

The short version of why DACA is an issue is President Obama implemented it via executive order.  This was doubtless an illegal order, and states indicated they would file suit.  When time came, President Trump reversed the order to make the suit moot, and delayed implementation of the order to afford Congress an opportunity to address the issue before DACA was officially revoked so the resolution could be orderly with the possibility of continuing to protect the dreamers.

Although I draw a different conclusion than the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, they give a good summary of the debate positions in their concise explanation on the Catholic Social Teaching regarding immigration. The teaching states:

  1. The first duty is to welcome the foreigner out of charity and respect for the human person.
  2. The second duty is to secure one’s border and enforce the law for the sake of the common good.

If anyone is an innocent party to the immigration debate it is the dreamers.  So the thought of punishing them with deportation seems harsh.  However, not punishing the dreamers does not extend to rewarding them for their parent’s misdeeds.

Removing the fear of deportation is not punishing.  A grant of citizenship is a reward.  So how do we balance these two positions into a solution?  The answer is simple.  When Congress finally addresses the issue create a new immigration category for the dreamers: lawful permanent resident without possibility of citizenship subject to deportation for criminal offense.

This would meet both the moral requirement to “welcome the foreigner out of charity and respect for the human person” while maintaining law enforcement “for the sake of the common good.”  The dreamer can stay, but they cannot vote or sponsor family members for immigration.  However, if they commit criminal acts, they are subject to deportation for the sake of the common good.

So, whose fault is the shutdown?  The above reasoning isn’t novel/creative thinking.  The insistence on a pathway to citizenship makes clear that the democrats are seeking voters rather than humanitarian good.  To that end, the shutdown falls on their shoulders.

Murder of police officer shows stark contrast between Trump, Obama

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trump calls marconi

Following the murder of San Antonio Police Detective Benjamin Marconi on Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump called the detective’s son in a private call with no fanfare.

President-elect Donald Trump offered his condolences to the family of slain SAPD Det. Benjamin Marconi Monday, his son said.

Dane Gregory Marconi posted a Facebook status Monday evening that read: “Just got off the phone with the future president Trump, he sends his condolences to our family,” according to a post made by Annie Patterson Campos, who lists herself as a crime scene  investigator for the San Antonio Police Department on her account. Campos’ post has since garnered 500 shares and hundreds of likes.

Well done, President-elect Trump. Hopefully this sends a signal that cop killers will not be coddled or emboldened under the new administration.

Trump’s actions are in sharp contrast to those of President Obama when cops are killed.

obama calls thugs trump calls heroes

As he flew to Dallas Tuesday to pay tribute to five slain police officers, President Obama called the families of two black men who were shot and killed by police last week.

Mr. Obama called the families of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and of Philando Castile, who was killed last week in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, “to offer his and the first lady’s condolences on behalf of the American people,” the White House said.

 

NSA leaks: We Must Ask the Right Questions

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Ed Hubbard
Ed Hubbard

The news reports about the federal government’s programs of data collection from phone companies and Internet porthole/search-engine providers have troubled many of us, especially as they come on top of recent stories about

 

 

  • the unfolding investigations into the IRS’ politicized handling of tax-exemptions,
  • the politicized handling of the Benghazi affair (both before and after the terrorist attack),
  • the Justice Department’s seizure of press records,
  • Health and Human Services’ shakedown of private companies to provide funding for Obamacare that Congress had refused to authorize, and
  • Secretary Sebelius’ recent cold and flippant reaction to the plight of young cystic fibrosis patients

—and all on top of years of growing assertions of responsibilities and power by the federal government.

Regardless of what we may think should be the consequences for Mr. Snowden’s leak of top-secret details of the data collection programs, we need to step back and debate all of these programs and “scandals” wisely.  As Kipling said, we need to keep our “head when all about you are losing theirs ….”  This debate may be, and frankly should be, one of the most consequential our generation will have about the future of our relationship with our government.  If we get the answers wrong, we could leave our children and grandchildren with a country that we would not have wanted to inherit from our parents.  But to get the answers right, we have to ask the right questions.

To get the questions right, we must remember the circumstances in which we now live:

  • We have been in a constitutionally-declared state of war for almost 12 years—longer than any declared war or military engagement in our history;
  • We are in the fifth year of the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression—I am not sure that we have ever fought a prolonged military engagement during such an economic crisis;
  • We are at the end of a generational shift in political power from the Depression/World War II generation and the Baby Boomers, to the Baby Boomers and their children;
  • We are in the midst of profound demographic changes within our society; and
  • We have transitioned into a society that depends on electronic media for most of our daily public and private interactions.

Before I go further, please wrap your mind around these changes that we continue to live through—any one of these would have significantly impacted our daily lives and society, but all of them overlapping at once is a watershed event in our history with profound implications for the future relationship between our liberty-oriented society and our government.  Each of these developments foreseeably would have created unique political pressures to expand certain functions of our national government, at least temporarily.  But taken together, they are having a tsunami effect on the traditional limits on the power, or the exercise of the power, of our federal government just as the capability to expand the exercise of that power through electronic media has never been greater.

And it is the power that we have allowed our federal government to amass and exercise over the last 12 years that we must now question—not how the power has been exercised or whether it has been abused, but whether the government should have such power to exercise at all—even during wartime, and even if the capability exists to exert and exercise that power wisely and fairly.

For instance, many of the politicians and pundits over the last few days have cited to the Supreme Court case of Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) to support the government’s exercise of power to gather in bulk the phone records of American citizens; and then they cite to the need for such information in our War on Terror, to the protections provided by the overlapping oversight of the program from Congress and Judiciary, and to the fact that no one has uncovered an abuse of the exercise of the power.  While these people focus on the existence of the data, the capability to obtain the data, and the exercise of the power to obtain the data without a warrant, no one mentions the most fundamental issue—where does the power to obtain the data come from in the first instance, with or without a warrant?

It is true that the Supreme Court did allow the government to obtain from a phone company the phone numbers dialed by a citizen without first getting a warrant, because the citizen had forfeited any privacy interest in the phone numbers he dialed when he agreed to dial them through the phone company’s lines.  The problem is that the facts of that case differ in one very significant way from the program the government has implemented now:  in Smith, the police had identified the suspect and asked the phone company to use a pen register to obtain and turnover the numbers dialed by that suspect only; the phone lines and the general data collected and stored for use by the phone company remained in the possession of the phone company, which controlled how long and for what purpose the data would be used.

Unfortunately, two successive administrations have now used the war powers granted them by Congress to apply a rule of law developed and applied to a very narrowly-focused criminal investigation to a society-wide dragnet to copy and retain privately-collected, owned, and stored data for the government’s perpetual use.  In essence, all privately-created transactional records related to every citizen’s use of their phones and computers, which could have been accessed by the police in discreet cases in the past without a warrant, now have been converted to perpetual public records through this dragnet.  Regardless of how effective this program may have been to provide our government with access to data that led it to thwart planned terror plots, I find nothing in the constitutional war powers triggered by Congress’ post-9/11 authorization that grants our national government such sweeping power to gather and archive such private data for eventual searches, even if such searches are conducted only after obtaining judicial authorization.  The facts giving rise to the rule and reasoning in Smith simply don’t support the grant of such broad power to the federal government.  If the government does not have the power to engage in a mass gathering and archiving of private data, whether the government exercised that power properly is an irrelevant question.

However, the breadth of the grant of power to the federal government does have a direct relationship to the competence of a government to exercise its any of its responsibilities.  What the facts underlying all of the recent “scandals” and revelations have in common is an apparent incompetence within our government caused by its attempt to exercise ever-expanding power that it was never intended to possess—from the overreaching IRS employees, to the befuddled and behind-covering state department staff, to the misleading and misdirected prosecutorial actions at the Justice Department, to the imperious actions and judgments of the Secretary of HHS, and now to the overwhelmed NSA that has had to outsource top-secret data-mining to community-college dropouts with loose lips.  Instead of creating a benign, Magical Kingdom of Obama’s dreams, our national government is beginning to look and act more like something out of an old Marx Brothers’ movie.

But the inevitable consequences from this over-reach are not funny.  When the President told us the other day that you can’t have 100{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} security and 100{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} privacy, I had three immediate thoughts:

  1. “well, duh!”—that’s the nature of trade-offs that come with every human endeavor;
  2. not even a police state can provide 100{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} security, so why are we expanding the power of the government to achieve a goal that it is impossible to achieve, while risking institutionalizing the expansion of authority and loss of liberty for generations to come? And
  3. where in the Constitution did we grant this power to the federal government?

Yes, we are still at war, and we are at war with a network of groups and states that is unique in our history.  But ask yourself these questions:

  • Did Jefferson claim this power during the war against the Barbary Pirates?
  • Did Madison claim this power as the cities across the Eastern Seaboard were being overrun by the British during the War of 1812?
  • Did Lincoln claim this power during the war against the Confederacy?
  • Did Wilson claim this power during World War I?
  • Did FDR claim this power during the war against the Nazis or the Japanese?
  • Did Truman claim this power during the Korean War?
  • Did Johnson or Nixon claim this power during the war against Vietnam?

Although each of these Presidents, and others (including Polk and McKinley) pushed to, and sometimes beyond, the constitutional limits of recognized war powers, none of them tried to say that they could expand the federal government’s power as far as Bush and Obama have done to gather and archive—and later search—private data on a society-wide scale in a misguided effort to provide “100{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} security.”  Arguably, this action is the electronic equivalent of an exercise of martial law—a power that has been used sparingly, and in only isolated circumstances and locations, by prior administrations during wartime—even during the Civil War.  Just because we have the technological capability of centrally gathering and archiving such data, doesn’t mean that we have given our government the power to use that capability on such a sweeping, permanent scale— and it certainly doesn’t justify actually doing it without a grant of such power from the people.

As the inevitable hearings and investigations into all of these matters continue, let’s ask our Congressmen and media to ask this fundamental question:  Did “we the people” ever grant to the federal government the sweeping power to engage in these programs, during either wartime or peace?  If the answer is “no,” then we need to have an honest and open debate that clarifies and re-balances the law, one way or the other, in response to that answer—the nature of the country that we leave to our children and grandchildren hangs in the balance.

The Real Scandal with the IRS: Organizing for Action and the Chicago-style Misuse of Governmental Power

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Ed Hubbard
Ed Hubbard

In recent posts I have addressed two distinct issues:  the attempt by the Democratic Party to use new technology to nationalize the urban-machine approach to party building mastered in Chicago during the 20th Century; and the coerced conformity at the root of the modern progressive view of society.  Now I want to show how these issues collided to help create the IRS scandal now plaguing the Obama Administration.

I want to start with a not-so-obvious proposition:  the real scandal is not the mistreatment of conservative groups by the IRS—that was just a necessary by-product of the abuse of power, and the abuse of the tax laws, by this administration.

Instead, the real scandal is how the same abuse of power and law has been used to facilitate and perpetuate the database from both of Obama’s presidential campaigns for future use by the Democratic Party to identify and mobilize voters for their candidates.  What I am referring to is Organizing for Action, which is now a 501(c)4, tax-exempt “social welfare” organization.

Let’s recap what Organizing for Action really is—it is a website that gathers and sorts into a master database information from the contacts it obtains from its followers, which is then used to contact, identify and mobilize voters for Democratic candidates and the causes they support, and to solicit funds to support those candidates and causes.  As I recently quoted from an article in Salon, the database started during Obama’s 2008 campaign as “MyBarackObama, an interface for campaign supporters to create online identities, connect with other supporters and publicize their campaign activity.”  The website address was “my.barackobama.com,” and the email addresses for contacting the site or a campaign operative was “[email protected].”  As the Salon article went on to state, “[s]hortly after Obama took office, Democratic planners moved the MyBarackObama listserv and online community into the apparatus of the Democratic National Committee, converting it into Organizing for America.”  After being maintained by the DNC until the 2012 presidential election cycle, the same “listserv and online community” using the same email address became part of the Obama re-election campaign, known as Obama for America.  Then, after Election Day, November 6, 2012, this “listserv and online community” using the same email addresses used since the 2008 campaign, morphed yet again.

By January 18, 2013, what started out as MyBarackObama, then became Organizing for America, then became Obama for America, and had now become Organizing for Action, a 501(c)4, tax-exempt “social welfare” organization.  That’s right … within just 73 days after the election, the application to convert Obama’s campaign database into a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization to shelter its future donors from disclosure had been prepared for, submitted to, and approved by the IRS—that same group that could not figure out how to “provide good customer service” and evaluate the Tea Party applications since 2009.  The political importance to the Democratic Party of maintaining Obama’s database in this fashion cannot be underemphasized.  In a revealing interview from February of this year, Congresswoman Maxine Waters described the future political importance of this database as follows:

… I think some people are missing something here. The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful, and … that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before. And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to have to go down with that database and the concerns of those people, because they can’t get around it. And he’s been very smart. I mean it’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place, and I think that’s what any Democratic candidate is going to have to deal with.

(See http://freebeacon.com/maxine-waters-describes-the-impact-of-the-ofa-database/).

So, the Obama IRS facilitated the use of “social welfare” status by Obama’s Chicago-based campaign apparatus to maintain its database for use by the Democratic Party in perpetuity without ever having to disclose its donors in the future.  If Obama’s campaign apparatus is a “social welfare” organization, then we have a more serious problem with the IRS, and this administration, than just a biased enforcement against conservative groups—it is the biased use of government power to benefit one set of political views and one political movement, while using that same power to suppress the opposing political view or movement.

Welcome to the way of Chicago politics, now playing nationally.

The flip-side of the coin of expanding the block-to-block organizational approach of the Chicago machine to national Democratic Party efforts through groups like Organizing for Action (and Battleground Texas), is the raw use of governmental power by such a political machine to protect itself and suppress its opposition—you don’t get one without the other.  This adaptation of raw machine political power to the administration of our national government is the real scandal that is surfacing.

How did this happen?

I believe the Obama administration’s abuse of the IRS tax emption process was caused by the collision of at least four variables that had to exist to create this scandal.  First, Obama’s political campaign and administration attracted people who believe in the liberal orthodoxy of the benign and beneficial role of an expanded national government in domestic affairs—what I earlier called the “Magical Kingdom” model of government.  Second, the expansion of the national government these people started to implement exposed the natural limits of the liberal orthodoxy—the limits of individual and institutional competence, and the effect of the aggregation of power on human nature.  Third, the exposed incompetence and avarice left the government vulnerable to those who would abuse power for their own gain.  Finally, the Chicago political mindset does not tolerate, or even recognize the legitimacy of political opposition, and it uses political power to suppress its opposition and to win at all costs.  When these forces collided within the Obama administration, the IRS tax exemption process was too irresistible a tool not to use—and abuse—to further their goals.

Now we are seeing an old tactic of machine politicians caught “with their hands in the cookie jar”:  feign ignorance, blame incompetence, and designate a “fall guy,” in order to stop any further investigation of the real scandal—in this case, to stop any further investigation that might focus on the abuse of the IRS to shelter the maintenance and expansion of the database of the Obama campaign for use by the Democratic Party without public scrutiny in the future.

As the committee investigations and the media interviews unfold, remember the questions that probably won’t be asked and the real scandal that will be hovering like a cloud over Washington:  Organizing for Action, and the Chicago-style misuse of governmental power.  To preserve whatever is left of the integrity of our government, we must demand the right questions be asked, and that we get real answers to those questions.

 

The IRS Scandal and Obama’s Magical Kingdom

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Ed Hubbard
Ed Hubbard

When I first saw the excerpts of President Obama’s commencement speech at The Ohio State University, I shook my head over what seemed to be his increasingly bitter and false critique of the conservative view of limited government.  Then as the news of the IRS scandal expanded, including the local angle of its impact on local Tea Party groups and on the leaders of King Street Patriots, it seemed to me that there was a connection between Obama’s view of government and politics, and the scandals over the IRS and AP that were unfolding.  So, I decided to actually read Obama’s speech (at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/05/i-dare-you-to-do-better-obamas-ohio-state-commencement-speech/).

I was at once pleasantly surprised, while my deepest concerns were also confirmed.  First, the pleasant surprise—I could agree with probably 90{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of what the President told these graduates.  The foundation of his speech was a discussion of American citizenship, including its foundation and its responsibilities, which requires all of us over our lifetimes to be engaged in more than our own immediate ambitions and interests.  Indeed, our society of free people will come to a screeching halt without such engagement.

Where the President and I (and probably most conservatives) disagree is over the role of the national government in this process of citizenship.  Most American Conservatives believe that the responsibilities of citizenship emanate from each individual citizen to form caring relationships through families, neighborhoods, congregations, businesses, private civic institutions and organizations, and local governments, and that those relationships bind us together into a society capable of accomplishing great things. To us, government is one of those relationships that forms a tool we use in this process to protect this society, to help coordinate and facilitate certain activities within this society, and to meet those responsibilities of citizenship that simply cannot be met through our private relationships alone.

Following the instructions from our Founders, we conservatives strive to limit the role of government in this process of society because of the vast police power that is inherently vested in government to accomplish the tasks we assign it—a lesson that has been learned as a result of too many tragic examples of the tyrannical use of such power by democracies as well as dictators over the course of human history.  We enforce these limits through laws and constitutions, but also through our own civic engagement in our private relationships and in our governments at every level.  As a result, we see ourselves as a society of free people using their caring relationships to create and maintain a Shining City on a Hill that is protected by the light footprint of three tiers of limited governments—local, state, and national—that we run.

In stark contrast to this conservative view of the relationship of government to citizenship is the President’s progressive view.    This viewpoint interprets the Founders’ actions as creating a national government through which citizens would channel their civic engagement to create a national society and to accomplish great national goals.  This viewpoint remembers every great civic accomplishment over the course of our history as resulting from an initiative of this national government.  This viewpoint sees the private and local institutions and governments through which we have developed and used our private caring relationships as being the source of tyranny and misery that the national government had to address.

In the end, this progressive view sees the national government as the source of society, the focus of our citizenship, and the primary force for collective good, which uses its power to avenge tyranny rather than create it.  One could call this progressive view of our society a Magical Kingdom of a benign national government bestowing society through the engagement of its citizens in its schemes, in contrast to the Shining City on a Hill in which a light government protects the civic engagement of a society of free people.

Let’s face it, neither ideal has ever been fully achieved—such is the nature of ideals—and there is some truth to both views of the American experience.  But we must ask ourselves these hard questions:  which of these views is most consistent with the ideas that formed this country, and which of these views is most consistent with human experience?  For me, the answers are obvious; and they become even more obvious when you remember that Obama’s views are further skewed by his experience of rising through the Chicago Democratic machine.

The model of the Magical Kingdom is the oldest, and most common model of society implemented by every culture and civilization at one time or another throughout human history.  In fact, one could say it is the default model, to which every society eventually has reverted because it is the easiest to control, implement, and manipulate.  It centralizes power, always in the name of the greater good; but to maintain that power it first asks for the allegiance, engagement and conformity of its citizens to its goals, and then it simply coerces conformity—and that coercion slowly steals the freedom of the citizen, minimizes the private relationships among citizens, and ultimately destroys citizenship.  This evolution of  the Magical Kingdom has occurred in democracies and republics, in tribes and theocracies, and in dictatorships and monarchies.  It is the model that has corrupted Chicago politics since the 1920s, and, if fully implemented at the national level, it will corrupt this “last, best hope of Earth.”

Today, we are seeing the first sprouts from the seeds of Obama’s coercive Magical Kingdom.  As he and his Chicago team were busy morphing their campaign apparatus from 2008 into an arm of the DNC, then his re-election campaign committee, and then into a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” under Section 501(c)4, his operatives at the IRS (and other agencies) were trying to coerce conformity by using governmental power to investigate its opponents.  When the public realized that the “emperor had no clothes” when it came to the story of the Benghazi attacks, we were told to conform by ignoring the story—it just didn’t matter anymore, and it was an old story that should be allowed to be forgotten.  When his docile press coverage became less docile, his operatives at the Justice Department used governmental power to conduct an over-broad investigation of the Associated Press, thereby coercing future silence from the rest of the media by using the AP as an example.

As the characters on ABC’s drama Once Upon a Time continually remind the audience, “magic always comes with a price.”  And the price extracted by the Magical Kingdom ultimately is a coerced conformity and a hollow citizenship.  So yes, Mr. President, some of us are concerned when you incorrectly tell these young graduates that “[t]he founders trusted us with this awesome authority.”  In fact, they didn’t trust us with that authority, which is why they created a limited national government, and preserved the tiers of local and state governments to conduct most of the business of government.  And no, Mr. President, we conservatives have never said that government is “the root of all our problems,” but your own view and actions have confirmed what every objective student of history has learned from human experience, that the potential for tyranny does lurk around the corners of false hope within the Magical Kingdom—as the conduct of your operatives once again confirms.

And that is why we conservatives embrace the radical experiment of the Shining City on a Hill, rather than the tired model of the Magical Kingdom; and why we challenge this year’s graduates to use their citizenship to embrace and engage in this harder work over their lifetime of building the networks of private relationships and local governments needed to preserve our exceptional experiment in self-government.

Obama or Romney? Prediction time!

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Okay, we’re down to the wire. Tomorrow will either be the end of a four year nightmare in the White House or a fresh start, a chance to return to some of our founding principles. So….who do you think is going to win? There is a very cool interactive site called 270towin.com that let’s us play with different scenarios and come up with our own prediction. In addition to myself and Ed Hubbard, we have two political insiders that help in the background at BJP. Here are our predictions, plus that of Michael Barone. I put them in order of most electoral votes for Mitt Romney (click on a map to enlarge it):

 

 

 

 

 

Whoo hoo! We all predict Romney winning! Take this post to Starbuck, give ’em five bucks, and they’ll give you a cup of coffee of your choice!

So what do you think? Hey, at least we put it out there. Try your luck and put your link in the comments. Betcha can’t beat me.

If you are in the Houston television market, be sure and tune in to Click2Houston (Channel 2, NBC affiliate) tomorrow night between 7 and 11. I’ll be on with Chris Bell to discuss the results – if you beat me, I’ll figure out a way to give you a shoutout on air! Also be sure and check the Houston Chronicle’s live Twitter feed – I’ll make sure and mention you there as well.