Some hard truths

Fellow conservative blogger Donald Douglas has an interesting post up that cites Robert Bork's recent book entitled: A Time To Speak:Selected Writings and Arguments. Many of you will remember Bork as having been an unfair victim of left-wing demagoguery during his 1987 Senate confirmation hearings after Ronald Reagan nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court. Though beaten in that instance, Bork has been unbowed in using his prodigious intellectual talents to influence the national debate via his writings over the past 20 years. As Douglas recounts, Bork wrote back in 1995 with uncanny prescience in his essay Hard Truths About the Culture War that we face a real and growing threat from liberalism that is destroying our culture: Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols-universities, some churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy. So pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is not entirely accurate to call the United States a majoritarian democracy. The elites of modern liberalism do not win all the battles, but despite their relatively small numbers, they win more than their share and move the culture always in one direction ....

What we are seeing in modern liberalism is the ultimate triumph of the New Left of the 1960s - the New Left that collapsed as a unified political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many more. In a real sense, however, the New Left did not collapse. Each of its splinters pursues a leftist agenda, but there is no publicly announced overarching philosophy that enables people to see easily that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical left philosophy. The groups support one another and come together easily on many issues. In that sense, the splintering of the New Left made it less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than ever before.

In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. These translate as bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion, while people are diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex ...

As Douglas also notes, the "splintered" left-wing groups that Bork described in 1995 look a lot like the various liberal organizations that have now organized to make change within the Obama Administration.

An excellent example of this can be found in Ben Smith's recent article at Politico.com entitled: Unity '09 -- Dem Groups Quietly Align:

A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.

Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.

The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups.

The obvious point to be made here is that the most radical of left-wing interest groups are organizing to have a major impact on public policy in the Obama White House. What follows logically from this is a pro-choice, pro-illegal immigration, pro-tort/pro-defendant and pro-union orientation that will systematically weaken the foundation of our nation and our economy. Just today, for example, it was revealed that estimates for Obama's "Cap and Trade" environmental protection regime will cost the economy well over $1 trillion over the next several years -- a huge tax on business in the name of satisfying the global warming alarmists who seek curbs on carbon at any cost.

With the Obama presidency we have opened the West Wing to the worst kind of single-minded interest groups -- for whom the word "compromise" and "in the national interest" have absolutely no meaning. There is no quid-pro-quo among the true believers, who have organized their lives around unyielding belief in the importance of a single issue -- be it abortion, immigration, torture, civil liberties or the environment.  For these disciples, there is no second place  -- total victory is the only option.  And for those of us who believe in open, honest debate, this is a hard truth, indeed.

Motorists shafted by Dems' tax trick

Beginning July 1, Colorado drivers will pay higher taxes--we're told to call them "fees"--on every vehicle every year when we renew our license plates. The increase of $29 to $51 per vehicle is projected to generate $250 million annually to repair unsafe roads and bridges, Gov. Bill Ritter said when he signed the "fee" hike into law.

All this occurs under the guise of economic stimulus as Colorado Democrats learn from their Washington counterparts to strike quickly while the economy is on the ropes and the public is too worried about their own finances to pay attention to statehouse shenanigans.

To be fair, transportation funding from Colorado's fuel tax has been stagnant in recent years because it's calculated on a per-gallon, rather than a per-cent, basis. Higher fuel prices and better fuel efficiency keep total fuel consumption relatively flat. For the last 10 years, the state's share of fuel tax receipts never fell below $379 million but never grew above $430 million.

When the economy is booming, roads and bridges receive a tremendous bonus from the general fund ‹ income and sales taxes ‹ which nearly matched the fuel tax, adding $1.3 billion to the transportation budget from 2005 to 2007.

However, just hours after Gov. Ritter signed the vehicle fee hike into law, every Democrat in the state senate voted to sever this general fund lifeline to transportation.

If it sounds like Democrats are talking out of both sides of their mouths, it's because they are - at least, so far. One day, they say our roads and bridges are unsafe and demand more money from Colorado drivers. The next day, they take a hatchet to transportation funding.

Any sane person can be excused for wondering what they're drinking or smoking at the state capitol.

Sadly this is nothing new. Dating back to former Gov. Roy Romer, Democrats' favorite tactic has been to grow social welfare spending and leave transportation with scraps. Romer's approach was to tell voters that if they wanted more money for transportation, they should vote for higher taxes.

In 1997, Romer and Republicans reached a compromise that guaranteed the aforementioned bonus source of highway funding and limited general fund spending increases to no more than six percent per year.

Republican Gov. Bill Owens staunchly defended that compromise and worked out a similar agreement with Democrats in 2002.

Now that Democrats hold a monopoly at the state capitol, they seem intent upon smashing those agreements in order to boost social welfare spending.

Senate Bill 228 would eviscerate the limit on general fund spending, end a vital source of transportation funding, and allow rapid expansion of entitlements. Even Gov. Romer didn't suggest repealing this limit without the required public vote, but today's Democrats are above consulting lowly taxpayers.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. John Morse, nearly stepped in it recently when, reacting to opposition from Denver chamber of commerce, he declared, "Let's let the people's elected representatives decide that - not the chamber."

Better yet, Sen. Morse, let's let the people decide for themselves, as the constitution ­ which you pledged to uphold ­ requires.

Ironically, proponents suggest that eliminating a spending limit to facilitate more spending on social welfare will help Colorado "get out of a recession."

That's an argument with rife with economic illiteracy. If all spending limits disappeared tomorrow, state government still couldn't spend an extra dime. In a recession, it's the economy that limits spending. Moreover, Colorado's government doesn't fund the economy; the economy funds government.

If Democrats want to expand social welfare spending, they should be honest about it. If they believe transportation needs more money, they should first protect every existing resource. And if they want to repeal state spending limits, they should follow the constitution by asking the voters.

Mark Hillman served as senate majority leader and state treasurer. To readmore or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com

Obama's kinder, gentler foreign policy

Though much of the focus of Barack Obama's first six weeks in office has been on his trillion dollar economic stimulus and deficit-busting budget proposals, the administration has nonetheless given us some insight into the nation's new foreign policy. If you are someone who believes that the world remains a dangerous place, it is anything but comforting. Many who voted for Obama undoubtedly believed that some of his more radical foreign policy positions during the 2008 campaign were rhetoric designed to appeal to the left-wing base of the Democratic Party -- those who believe that the Iraq War was a grievous error and that the "war on terror" is a Bush construct designed to assert U.S. imperialism abroad and usurp civil rights at home. Unfortunately, his first month as president shows that Obama intends to be largely consistent with the promises he made during the campaign. His first order of business after taking office was to sign an executive order closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where a number of the most dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists -- including the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- is now housed. He also banned the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, limiting our ability to question terrorist detainees to the strict rules of the Army Field Manual. In making these two decisions as a first order of his new Administration, Obama was making clear that he intends to place values -- specifically the democratic ideals of due process and human rights -- at the very forefront of U.S. foreign policy. In closing Guantanamo and banning forms of interrogation that the left views as torture, Obama said "Living our values doesn't make us weaker. It makes us safer, and it makes us stronger."

It is not a stretch to believe that those who are now formulating foreign policy in the Obama Administration believe that the importance of being true to our values warrants a substantial redefining of how America extends its power to the rest of the world. For generations, our foreign policy has been based on the concept of realism and "realpolitik" -- the notion that power should be projected on the basis of our national interest, and that power (as opposed to international law or the United Nations) is the principal currency in international affairs. Realpolitik is, above all else, a practical concept; since power considerations dominate, it often leads to choices that in hindsight seem less than principled. One example that liberals like to use is U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran -- just a decade before the U.S. itself went to war against the Iraqi army in the first Gulf War. The U.S. supported Iraq not because we thought that Saddam Hussein was the "good guy", but because he was seen as less dangerous than Iran, and a potential tool to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Such "situational" principles drive liberals and idealists crazy, of course, because the left generally sees the world through a lens that doesn't lend itself to the pragmatic use of American power. Liberals have always been more idealistic about how the possibility of peace-through- negotiation. Power -- especially of the military variety -- should only be used in the most extreme cases of self defense, and then only as a last resort. And when we do use military force, we should do so in a way that is consistent with our values. Realpolitik is now valuespolitik.

Valuespolitik is entirely consistent with how Barack Obama views the world -- and appears now to be the underlying principle of our new foreign policy. At the center lies the promise of negotiation -- of finding some shared basis of interest and understanding that can lead to first engagement and then reconciliation. Here are a few examples:

-- In some of his first comments to the media as reported in the New York Times, Obama stated his "determination that the United States explore ways to engage directly with Iran", even as he confirmed Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons and is supporting terrorist groups destabilizing Iraq and the Middle East. In this same article, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is quoted as saying “(that) there is a clear opportunity for the Iranians to demonstrate some willingness to engage meaningfully with the international community", and stated that "there could be some form of direct communication between the United States and North Korea."

-- According to a recent piece by Claudia Rossett in Forbes, the President's hand-picked Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke (has) "been talking about Iran's reach into Afghanistan not as part of the problem, but as part of the solution. Despite allegations, some by NATO officials, that Iran has been helping Taliban "extremists"--as Obama labels the terror-dedicated Taliban -- Holbrooke opined recently on an Afghan TV station that Iran (yes, the same Iran run by the totalitarian mullahs who applaud Palestinian suicide-bombers, jail and torture dissident bloggers, and execute children and homosexuals) has a "legitimate role to play in this region, as do all of Afghanistan's neighbors."

-- Rossett also notes in her Forbes article that despite overwhelming evidence of the Iranian-backed terror nest that Gaza has become, the U.S. seems less interested in ending the terrorist reign of Hamas than in bankrolling its territorial base. “Reports earlier this week, citing an unnamed U.S. official, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to attend a funding conference in Cairo next week where she will pledge $900 million in U.S. aid for Gaza. At a Tuesday press briefing, a State Department spokesman confirmed that while details, including the exact amount, are still being worked out, a whopping pledge is indeed in the offing: It'll be, you know, several hundred million."

The pattern that emerges from these examples is that valuespolitik assumes that interests between the U.S. and the rest of the world can somehow be aligned in a way that will result in a more secure geopolitical situation – and that we can achieve this while not compromising our own democratic values. In Obama's view, valuespolitik is achieved principally through direct engagement and negotiation. Never mind, of course, that the United States and Europe have been negotiating with Iran for the past several years on their nuclear weapons program, offering all manner of economic incentives to encourage the Iranians to join the peaceful international community. The result of all this talk has been that the Iranians are now closer than ever to achieving both a nuclear warhead and the means of delivering it.

The failure of past efforts at negotiation doesn't sway our new president, however. Barack Obama genuinely believes that he is the one the international community has been waiting for; that his unique ability to communicate -- and the power that Clinton, Holbrooke and others will have speaking on his behalf -- can bring Iran, North Korea and even Hamas in from the cold. Some would call such a belief naive, others would call it hubris. I would call it both. But whatever you call it, this strategy lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy.

Thinking about Obama's foreign policy reminds me of an old story about Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. LBJ was the consummate deal maker and believed that given an opportunity, there wasn't anyone he couldn't convince to see things his way. As the situation in Vietnam deteriorated and protests began heating up at home, LBJ offered to Ho Chi Minh a "Great Society" program for Vietnam, using American dollars to give the Vietnamese people food, shelter and prosperity. “A TVA for the Mekong Delta” he liked to say. It was all part of a fundamental belief that everyone has a price. Jack Valenti, a Johnson aide once recounted LBJ saying to him: "If I could just sit in a room with Ho Chi Minh and talk to him, I think we could cut a deal."

What Johnson failed to realize is that Ho Chi Minh was never going to accept a permanent partition of his country into North and South, and that North Vietnam would never cease their struggle for a unified, independent Vietnam. It just wasn't open to negotiation.

One guesses that this would be an instructive lesson for Barack Obama in dealing with Iran and other Islamic fundamentalists. The goal of Iran is the destruction of Israel and the West. The goal of Al Qaeda and Islamic radicals is the death of all non-believers and the establishment of a world caliphate based on Islamic law. These are not deal points to be negotiated away. These are fundamental beliefs that defy bargaining. No focus on shared values can lead to success, for we have no values in common.

And this is the core weakness of valuespolitik. While negotiation can achieve certain gains on the margins, it has the effect of blinding our policy to the true, non-negotiable threats that face us. And we pursue it at our own peril.

Spenders aim to bust the 6%

Emboldened that the state supreme court still hasn't ruled on Gov. Bill Ritter's plainly unconstitutional property tax hike, tax-and-spenders at the State Capitol are drawing up their game plan for another end-run around voters. If they can get away with hiking property taxes by claiming it's not a tax increase, then Democrats are increasingly confident they can again bypass voters and the state constitution by claiming that a spending limit is something else.

The Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR) in the state constitution famously mandates that taxes cannot be increased without voter approval. However, voters also get the final word on weakening any limits on "revenue, spending and debt."

In 2005, Referendum C suspended much of TABOR for five years and modified other portions indefinitely. However, Ref C left intact a provision that limits annual increases in general fund spending to six percent and devotes anything over that amount to roads and bridges.

Now Democrats - and one Republican - want to eviscerate that limit, too, although their justification and methods are dubious.

Even Gov. Ritter's budget office - known for its dreamily-optimistic projections - doesn't expect general fund growth to bump against the limit in the next four years.

Why then are liberals chafing at a limit that won't actually impede them anytime soon? For the same reason their counterparts in Washington turned an "economic stimulus" bill into a big-government spending binge.

"You never want a crisis to go to waste," reminds Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to President Obama.

Taxpayers striving to keep their own financial boat afloat don't have time to worry about the minutiae of government formulas, so Democrats shamelessly use today's economic distress to dismantle anything that might slow state spending when the economy rebounds.

Spendaholics are all atwitter. "We've got to do something!" more often conceals an agenda of opportunism than of necessity.

"We don't have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem," complain activists at the liberal Colorado Center on Law and Policy. Translation: "Government can't spend enough because taxes aren't high enough."

No wonder they don't trust the voters.

Next, Jean Dubofsky, a former supreme court justice with a crafty legal mind and a penchant for legislating from the bench, proffered a clever legal strategy.

Dubofsky is no neutral observer. She's a board member of the Colorado ACLU and two liberal think tanks that despise TABOR. Her opinion suggests that the six percent limit really isn't a limit and can, therefore, be changed without voter approval.

Two Democrat legislators are dutifully parroting that message.

Denver Rep. Mark Ferrandino claims the six percent limit "doesn't actually limit the amount of money we're spending." Colorado Springs Sen. John Morse calls the six percent limit "an allocation strategy. TABOR is silent on allocation strategies."

Past legislatures and former governors from both parties have taken TABOR at its word when it plainly says: "Other limits on . . . revenue, spending and debt may be weakened only by future voter approval." Further, the constitution requires that TABOR's "preferred interpretation shall reasonably restrain most the growth of government.."

Although a spending limit of six percent is indeed arbitrary, it is hardly draconian. Yes, it could cause major difficulty in an age of hyper-inflation, but for eight of the past 10 years, six percent was more than the combined growth of inflation and population. Why then do liberals find it so oppressive?

Because expanding entitlement spending is the holy grail of the Left. More people who depend on government means more votes for the party that promises bigger government. Expanding social welfare is difficult when anything over six percent must go to roads and bridges.

It's ironic that liberals who liken government spending to "investment" now prefer to shift money away from lasting infrastructure and into social programs where more spending always begets demand for more spending.

If Gov. Ritter and Democrat legislators aren't willing to trust voters with these decisions, as the constitution requires, why then should voters trust them with their taxes?

Time for Republicans to be ‘reactionary’

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." - Samuel Johnson, English writer Now that the misnamed "stimulus" package has passed that President Obama requested and the Congressional Democrats crafted, we have clarity about our nation’s choices and thereby its future. The poorly kept secret is out: this is not a bailout law, this $780 billion monstrosity. It includes everything Democrats have wanted for decades, from subsidies to handouts to income transfers.

The best news is that no Republicans in the House of Representatives and only three (northeastern) Republican Senators voted for the omnibus legislation, meaning that our so-called "reactionary" political party is doing the right thing and laying the basis for a comeback in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Much has been written and said in recent years about how much better it is to be "proactive" than reactive, as if there’s something unintelligent and ill-advised about responding promptly to challenges that arise. I see a good sign in the initial GOP reaction to the opening salvo in the Democrats’ campaign to make Big Government permanent and impregnable, for precisely the reason that Dr. Johnson gives.

Reactionary has been a bad word and unwelcome label at least since self-styled "progressives"such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson came upon our political scene a century ago. They favored equality of condition over equality of rights and therefore saw nothing sacred about freedom of commerce or the Constitution that provided security for it.

Not surprisingly, then, Republicans in opposition were castigated as hopelessly reactionary in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal dramatically increased the role–and the cost–of the federal government’s regulation of commerce. When FDR took office in 1933, the annual federal budget was $3 billion. Now it is $3 TRILLION dollars.

Republicans survived the New Deal by conceding the good intentions of the Democrats, promising the same advantages for less cost. They were tax collectors for the welfare state until Ronald Reagan showed that high tax rates are counterproductive and instead stimulated our "Carterized" commerce with a cut in the rates and the number of brackets in 1981.

Reagan’s "reaction" to the stagflation (high inflation, unemployment and interest rates) of the 1970s was exactly right. But he was not the first Republican president to "react" to bad Democrat policy.

Our first GOP chief executive, Abraham Lincoln, reacted to the Democrats’ policy of extending slavery into western territories and even Latin America by calling for the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and overturning of Dred Scott v. Sanford that made this possible.

When there is a fire, we expect the fire department to react. When a crime is committed, we expect the same from the police. When we were attacked by our Islamist enemies on September 11, 2001, President Bush reacted by taking the war to the enemy. In all these cases, we are better for our duly constituted authorities reacting promptly to threats to public safety.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being "proactive" in the sense that the fire and police departments encourage prevention among the citizenry, and the U.S. government seeks peace with friendly nations and is on guard against unfriendly ones.

But when the threat to our safety, and most assuredly to our liberties, is clear and palpable, the political party that should be preferred is the one that reacts in the right way. Just as the first Republicans did not relent until they had won control of the government and reversed bad policy, so today’s party should work in earnest to sound the alarm at the Democrat majority’s assault on our freedom.

Already President Obama has rescinded the ban on government funding of abortions overseas. Next will be all abortions in this country through the utterly dishonest "Freedom of Choice" Act that will remove all legislative, judicial and funding limits on abortions for all nine months of pregnancy.

Equally menacing are the deceptive (again) Freedom of Choice Act which would permit unionization without a secret ballot; and the misnamed "Fairness Doctrine," which would force all radio stations to provide equal time to popular conservative talk shows, effectively driving them off the air.

In a year or two, socialized medicine will be proposed, probably in stages, which will drive up the cost of health care and lead to rationing as government bureaucrats decide who deserves to live or to die.

There’s plenty here for freedom-loving Americans to react to. The sooner we toss out the avatars of Big Government, the better.