Over in Newsweek lurks an interesting question by Daniel Stone.  Is the Presidency too big a job? It’s difficult to decide exactly what the author is aiming toward with his article.  My very first thought upon finding the article is that he was going to write something of an apologia for President Obama, that part of the reason he seems to have done so poorly is simply that he has far too much to do.  Reading through the article, however, it seemed more as if the author was trying to argue in favor of giving more power to government agencies.  Whatever his purpose, the author certainly fails to take note of the most fundamental causes of Presidential overload.  Put simply, the President has too much to do because he has to do too much.

One item that Mr. Stone chronicles nicely in his article is the growth of the Presidency.  To some degree, the changes can be explained by differences in public expectations and leadership styles.  The American people have come to believe that a modern President needs to be something of a Renaissance Man, knowledgeable about economics, the military, disaster recovery, emergency relief, law, the environment, and all manner of other things; and that when something goes wrong, that the President is the person to blame.  At the same time, Presidents have tended to help encourage that perception — President Obama moreso than most — by personally involving themselves in being the large public mouthpiece for the positions they advocate.  Looked at from that standpoint, Mr. Stone’s assertion that the President should delegate more to the agencies would certainly seem to make sense.

The trouble with Mr. Stone’s analysis is that it fails to look even one level deeper to understand why modern Presidents seem to have so much more to do.  The change isn’t simply due to perception, or failure to delegate.  Presidents seem to have more to do because, in fact, they do have more to do.  The growth of the regulatory state since the 1930s generally tracks with Mr. Stone’s chronicle of the expansion of the President’s role over the same time period.

As President Truman once said, “The buck stops [with the President].”  As government has expanded, so too have the number of “bucks” being passed around from one bureaucrat to another.  Many of those, ultimately, end up on the President’s desk.

The way to solve the problem of the overworked President isn’t to cut back on the number of advisors or to put more work on the shoulders of the regulatory agencies.  It is, quite simply, to give the government (and, thus, the President) less work to do.  Many of the areas where the federal government has extended its authority could be handled at least as well by the states, local governments, private businesses, and charities.  Such a shift would allow the President, and federal government at large, to focus more intently on those issues which truly must be handled by the federal government, without the distraction of so many minor issues occupying his time.

Of course, such a change would also require bureaucrats to give up the power that they have unconstitutionally amassed for themselves over the past eighty years.  While the nation would be better off, it remains to be seen when the political class will see fit to make such a transformation reality.  With the success of conservatism this past November, it’s possible that the groundwork is finally being laid.

Without that sort of fundamental change, however, it is all but inevitable that the role of the President will continue to grow.  At what point the job becomes unsustainable and collapses is hard to tell, but what is certain is that it will happen.  No amount of delegation can cure the fattening of the American bureaucracy, or the over-extended role of the American President.

This past Tuesday, conservatives carried out a historic rout of Democrats and liberalism across America.  The war to reclaim America is far from over — it’s only just begun — but the first round certainly belongs to the Right.  The victory wasn’t accomplished with perfection — guys like Barney Frank and Harry Reid weren’t fired — but such glitches are minor compared to the sweeping victory won by conservatives nationally.  Indeed, far from the mainstream coverage and national headlines, conservatives made dramatic gains in the states; even Union/Democrat strongholds like Michigan.  In the numbers game of counting bodies, there is more than enough to be excited about.  But, as one reader here asked, there is a question remaining:  Now that conservatives have won, what are they going to do?  Do they even have an agenda other than stopping Obama?  This is, for sure, a very good question, and one that is entirely appropriate.

To answer the question, it’s important to pay attention to what this election was actually about, because it was different from most of the elections that America has faced in recent history.  Unlike the historic election of the first black President, Barack Obama, in 2008, this election had very little to do with the candidates.  What’s more, unlike most elections, this one really wasn’t about particular policies.  This election, more than anything, was about ideology and the role of government in Americans’ lives.we

What the election tells us more than anything is that the American people believe in conservative principles.  In particular, conservative economic principles and liberty through minimizing the size and scope of government.  The Tea Party originated as a direct reaction to liberal, big government policies like TARP, the stimulus, bailouts of various industries, threats of even more stimulus, pork in the omnibus spending bill, Obamacare, and so on.  The overall theme of the entire Tea Party was the message that Americans have been “Taxed Enough Already” and that the government is already spending too much time and money getting in everybody’s way.

Looked at a little bit differently, American conservatives finally had enough of swallowing hard when choosing between moderate liberalism and radical leftism at the ballot box.

Of course, conservatives do have some policy ideas which the partisan political media has pointedly ignored for the past two years and will pointedly ignore for at least two more.  On health care, the idea is to demolish Obamacare and replace it with a more competitive market by allowing insurers to operate across state lines.  On spending, the plan is to quit coming up with pork projects and find ways to decrease overall government spending.  On taxation, the goal is to maintain the current tax code and look for ways to grant even more tax cuts (not rebates, not credits, actual cuts) to businesses.  On the military, the key is to make sure that the troops are able to keep up the mission of protecting America from foreign governments and Islamic jihadists.  On social issues, there really is no agenda, although it’s likely that any votes that do come up on social matters will trend to the Right.

Ultimately, though, everyone who looked at this past election realistically knew that no matter what policies the candidates have, it really makes very little difference.  The partisan political media won’t acknowledge conservative policies at all unless it’s to unfairly denounce them.  There was never a guarantee (or even a realistic probability) that Republicans would take a majority of the Senate (even if they did, it was mathematically impossible that they could become filibuster-proof), so Republicans will be hard pressed to pass bills.  Not that passing bills would matter, since Obama would veto them anyway.  For the next two years, Republicans literally cannot win on policy, so talking about any kind of policy in detail is, for now, right around 18 months premature.

For the next two years, the key for conservatives is to stay true to the principles that swept them into office this past Tuesday.  The American people know that there is a serious limit to how much conservatives will be able to get done as long as Democrats control the Senate and Obama controls the White House.  But the American people also know that the last time Republicans took control preaching conservatism, they got into office and wandered off to the left.  Conservatives now are prepared to be patient as long as the people they elected this year stay on the path of conservatism.

So, what is it that conservatives are going to do?  This above all, to thine own self be true.

It’s starting to get right down to the wire in this year’s wild election season, with Election Day right here upon us.  Skimming through the reporting in the so-called news, one would tend to think that November 2nd is the coming of some sort of apocalypse.  Of course, for them and their liberal comrades, it very nearly might be.  Election Day marks the first day of substance in the conservative ascendancy sweeping across the United States.  It marks our first chance to “vote the bums out” and begin to fill the government with leaders who truly understand the needs of the American people: The need to live out their lives as they, not as bureaucrats, see fit.

Americans today are as angry at government as they’ve been in generations, having seen for two years the government violate its sacred trust with the American people.  Even in the country’s most liberalized classrooms, children learning basic civics are taught that America is a democracy and that when it comes to governance, it is the people, by their vote, who ultimately decide the fate of the nation.  Even President Obama has told us that elections have consequences.  Yet, these past two years, Democrats (and a few Republicans) have been ruling against the American people based on a false “mandate” spawned from the President’s victory and liberal egotism to transform America.  Every fifth grader knows that that isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

Americans, though, are a patient people who believe fundamentally in the system, even as they watch the political class corrupt the system toward their own ends.  We know and believe that constitutional government is greater than any man or any Congress.  Despite Speaker Pelosi having spent so much time and energy “draining the swamp” into the waste collection facility known as the House of Representatives, Americans know that on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, we gain access to the most powerful bureaucratic cleanser in the world: The American Ballot Box.

When it comes to regime change, the standard in the world generally comes down to some form of military conquest.  When people get mad at their government, votes are counted in bodies, and the party that creates the most usually wins.  This year, it’s beyond question that the American people are mad — we’ve been lied to, cheated, ignored, belittled, insulted, assaulted, and robbed, and we’re not going to take it anymore.  But for all of the anger — all of it justified — the Party of Guns will dismantle the government without firing a single shot.

For our trouble, the Left will give us the same vitriolic hazing as ever, communicated from on high in the ruling class through the bullhorn of the so-called news.  We will spend the next two years watching America not get any better as we listen to the partisan political operatives in the media tell us that we have no ideas, have nothing to offer, and will have, by the end of the next two years, no accomplishments.

The challenge after Election Day will be for the American people to stay focused.  Things may get worse before they get better (and the media will say that things are getting much worse even if they improve).  But the goal for this Congress is not to accomplish anything other than stopping the Left from pushing America further down the path of destruction.  This is the year for the setup guys.

Let the cleansing begin!

It looks like the allegiance between the Tea Party and the founders is paying some tangible dividends.  New York Times op-ed contributor Ron Chernow has published a thoroughly incoherent column which purports to pit the Founders against the Tea Party and prove that the advocates for limited government have no special purchase on the people who created that limited government in the first place.  Unfortunately for Ron, his article fails to accomplish that task even by its own terms, nevermind the clear history which would place any one of the Founders, if not in the Tea Party, at least decidedly against President Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress.

The essence of the author’s argument is that the Founders, far from being a homogeneous group, were a bunch of politicians with a variety of different ideas for how the newly formed nation should be governed.  And certainly, to the extent that that’s his argument, it’s true.  The Constitution itself is a document filled with compromises, most famously the 3/5 compromise on slaves and the large state / small state compromise which led to the level of representation in the House and Senate.  Indeed, even after the delegates had completed their work, the Constitution remained controversial.  This led to the Constitution being assailed in the Antifederalist papers, defended in the Federalist papers, with even more compromise brought thereafter with the drafting and passage of the Bill of Rights.

As the author himself acknowledges, “the founders favored limited government … but they clashed sharply over those limits.”  Notably, the primary argument had nothing to do with the further expansion of federal power.  In general, the Federalists said that the Constitution gives the national government just the right amount of power.  Their opponents, the Antifederalists, warned that the Constitution gave the national government too much.  As the Tea Party fights to get today’s national government back within Constitutional bounds, what they are really fighting to accomplish is to get our national government back in line with the founding era’s liberal view of national power.

Today, of course, the debate has shifted.  Liberals in Congress and President Obama actively champion by their actions a government with no meaningful limits at all.  Indeed, even those limits which should seem insurmountable — the express limits imposed by the Bill of Rights — are being actively undercut by Washington liberals.  Even conservatives are generally unwilling to look past the New Deal’s reallocation of power from the people and the states to the national government; fighting to return us not to the Founders’ vision of America, but to the immediate aftermath of FDR.  There is simply no comparison between today’s politics and the founding era; even King George III would be hard pressed to affect the daily lives of his people the way President Obama is able to affect ours.

In the end, the author concludes that “[n]o single group should ever presume to claim special ownership of the founding fathers or the Constitution they wrought.”  This statement, though somewhat true, is mostly meaningless.  It’s true that no particular group has special ownership of the Founders’ ideals; such ideals, after all, are (theoretically) the birthright of every American.  But it is false to imply, as the author clearly intends, that any group may validly lay claim those ideals.

Today’s liberal Democrats adhere to no ideology but their own — an ideology which seeks to forever destroy the balance of power the Founders once worked so hard and so carefully to establish.

As the weekend of September 11 draws to a close, it wraps up a week of news coverage reminding us of where we stand as a nation with respect to the enemy that made itself impossible to miss nine years ago.  The results, it seems, have not been pretty.  Aside from the fact that America is still a defender of Israel and the fact that we still exist at all — though, not to worry, the President is working on solving both of those problems as we speak — the terrorists seem to have done pretty well for themselves.  Americans today have fewer liberties than ever, with freedoms taken from us by conservatives and liberals alike, all in the name of national defense.  Our troops are embroiled in a war in Afghanistan, the terrorists’ home turf, under the guidance of a Commander in Chief that says quite strongly by his actions that their fight is little to him but a political distraction.  But the two biggest stories this week tell a story of American weakness and fear which should be music to the ears of the Radical Islamists who seek to do us harm.

The stories of the week about the Muslim world have undoubtedly been the Florida preacher who was for Koran burning before he was against it, and the ongoing saga of the Ground Zero Mosque.  Right from the start, the preacher was attacked by the operatives of the media with story after maligning story about how he shouldn’t be doing what he wanted to do.  A common refrain started by the media was that the act of burning a Koran would be inflammatory to Muslims, and play into the hands of the radicals that seek to do America harm.  This sentiment was picked up by General Petraeus, warning that it might intensify the danger to our troops overseas, which was all that it took to bring the conservative media on-board with the message.  And then, today, I see that the imam who wants to build the Ground Zero Mosque has added not upsetting terrorists to the list of reasons why he can’t possibly build on another location.  If the General says that moving the mosque will hurt our troops, will that make the conservatives upset by the planned location sit down?

At bottom, we know that the imam is only using that excuse because he knows that it works.  Both at home and abroad, Americans are portrayed as being deathly afraid of upsetting anyone in the Muslim world.  We’re warned repeatedly by the President and others that being anything less than respectful Muslims endangers everyone.  After all, we all know that when terrorists get mad, they shoot people, stab people, blow up civilians, or fly planes into buildings; nevermind that they’d be doing those things anyway.  Be afraid, is the message.  Be afraid to fly on airplanes; be afraid that someone might have a bomb in their shoe, be so afraid that we submit ourselves to high tech full body scans just to go from point A to point B.  Be afraid of showing your outrage against the outrageous; don’t call out Islamic haters for being hateful, don’t burn their Koran even as they burn your flag and Bible, don’t question that mosque being built on Ground Zero.  If you do, then they are going to come after you, and your family, and your neighbors, and the country, and the troops, and so on until someone meaningful enough to you turns up, that you’ll be told terrorists will kill, to make you stop doing whatever it is that you wanted to do.

Terrorists fight by instilling fear.  Their goal is to make their enemies so afraid of the consequences of stepping out of line that they will do whatever the terrorists want.

Radical Islam need not conquer us from without; they win when Americans become too afraid to live free.  This week brought us proof that such fear is palpable and strong enough to have a real effect on our behavior.  We are, increasingly, a people at war with ourselves, with our morality, and with our sense of right and wrong.  We’ve allowed ourselves to give up some freedoms, and find ourselves now being asked to surrender even more, all in the hope that the terrorists might calm down.  But they won’t calm down.  Why would they?  They’re winning.

And scoring their biggest victories without even firing a shot.

A recent article by Victor Davis Hanson over at National Review Online draws, in the course of making a broader argument, an interesting analogy which got me thinking about America’s current place in history.  He notes, quite interestingly, that the current noise over boycotts against Arizona have “a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another.”  This statement caught my attention as being both insightful and intriguing.  At the risk of jumping into “revolutionary” talk that even I think is somewhat overdone, I do have to wonder if America might be coming to the precipice of what I would consider to be the third American revolution.

Looking back historically, the first two revolutions both have remarkably common elements about them.  Both of the first two revolutions, the American Revolution and the Civil War, were, at an important level, battles over the role of government in America.  This battle is easily seen in the American Revolution, as nearly every history class around will characterize it as a fight against the tyranny of England and the unjust, confiscatory tax policies of King George.  Those who supported American independence were convinced that the Crown was too powerful, and the battle against England was an ultimately successful fight to cast off the reigns of an overpowering central government and return a degree of independence not only to the colonies as nations, but to the colonists as individuals.  Harder to see but no less present are the shades of government oppression in play during the Civil War.  Although the common story is that the Civil War was about slavery, the issue of slaves was more of a proxy for a deeper battle being waged against the reach of the federal government, particularly in southern states which viewed the northern and federal campaign against slavery as an assault on their independence.  The South, of course, lost that battle, and the entire concept of state independence has never quite been the same since.

Of course, at the time of the Civil War, the slow collapse of federalism and the rise of federal power were hardly the foregone conclusions that they appear to have become today.  Nevertheless, the government’s intervention to bring about the demise of slavery set a precedent for using government intervention to cure America’s ills.  FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and everything that the Warren Court did, all take their strength from the fact that the government was able to “solve” slavery by aggrandizing power to itself.

What President Obama has now given us is the clearest glimpse to date of the consequences of reassigning power from the people to the government following the Civil War.  No longer is the government in the business of solving real problems like slavery or segregation — to their credit, my parents’ generation has taken care of the lingering inequalities which had echoed through time all the way since the founding.  What we see instead is that the government spends its time building up power by attacking an endless army of straw men, crafting “solutions” for things which are not problems, imagining problems and then purporting to solve them, and providing solutions to problems which would not have existed if not for the government.

The Tea Party movement — a name which, itself, conjures memories of the first revolution — is the first, best indication that the people have had enough.  As I have said now many times, the culture wars of the current generation will give way to a deeper battle over the role of government itself in America.  Tea Partiers all come from diverse walks of conservatism, and many would certainly disagree on many aspects of the culture wars including such staple issues as abortion, gay marriage, and religion.  They have, however, united under a common banner against the size and scope of the government as it exists today and as its current administration wants to grow it long into the future.  The younger generation has reached the point where the fight over liberty itself has become more important than the petty squabbles over what to do with the freedoms that have been secured.

American revolutions have never been about land, or money, or politics, or power.  They have, fundamentally, been about changing the relationship between the people and their government.  It seems to me that America is closing in on rekindling that old fight.  Shades of 1850 might just be about right.

Back in May on the blog Public Discourse, James Stoner points out an interesting analogy between Apple and the government.  In a post primarily dealing with the porn scandal at the SEC, Mr. Stoner added the following interesting comments about Apple and the iPhone:

Coincidentally, during the week that saw the announcement of the report on pornography use at the SEC there also surfaced a comment from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, defending his company’s ban of pornography “apps” for iPhone and other Apple products. Apologizing to a user for mistakenly rejecting an app with a controversial political cartoon, Jobs added, “However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone,” (Android is the comparable product of his new competitor, Google). The Wired article relaying the comment interprets “Jobs’ opposition to porn [as] loud and clear,” but adds no reasons from Jobs for his opposition: Is his a moral objection to pornography, a purely aesthetic distaste, concern about his company’s branding, concern about its market with the parents of young teens getting their first phone, or some combination of all these? The response of many geeks was instantaneous and predictable: Don’t tell me what I can and cannot watch, that’s why I’ll never buy Apple, “The web is about openness. It’s about freedom.” For whatever reason, Jobs seems unyielding and his company vigilant. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition passes muster, even Playboy without nudity and a reader for the iPhone that allows downloading of the ancient Kama Sutra are allowed, but try to sneak pornographic images into an approved app and iTunes will cut you off.

He then adds:

[O]ne can commend Steve Jobs for steadfastly refusing to allow Apple to become a platform for easy access to pornography, and commend him as well for showing that this can be done through determined business leadership, without recourse to government regulation that can threaten legitimate freedom and impose its own social costs.

But can Steve Jobs really be commended for this? I suppose as one of the “geeks” offering the “predictable” response, Mr. Stoner would be unlikely to have much interest in or patience for my views on the subject of Apple and porn.  I think, however, that it is Mr. Stoner who has missed an important reason why there is little to commend about Apple’s decision to ban pornography from its most newsworthy device.  Although Steve Jobs may be able to limit access to porn, such limits are unlikely to change the hearts and minds of people who would otherwise seek to consume it.

The main flaw in Mr. Stoner’s argument is the unfortunate fact that he reads too much into the distinction between government, on the one hand, and Apple, on the other.  It is, of course, undoubtedly true that Apple is not the government.  Unlike the government, Apple cannot force you to buy its products, and it is far easier for me to buy an EVO-4G instead of an iPhone than it is for me to move from Michigan to Peru.  That said, Apple is, without a doubt, the top central planner of the iPhone environment, and within its electronic walls, Apple acts very much like a fascist government.  While Apple may not necessarily choose winners, they undoubtedly choose the losers of its domain, leaving behind the scattered remains of such notable products as Google Voice and Adobe’s Flash Player, along with many other less notable apps which they rejected from the App Store — and, thus, the iPhone — for numerous reasons, including no reason at all.  Also, like a government, Apple collects sales tax on every piece of software sold for the iPhone, and now seeks to do the same for every advertisement by pushing its iAd service.

In short, while it may be easy to avoid the iPhone environment, once inside, there is very little that can be classified as being “legitimate[ly] free[.]”

With freedom, thus, outside the question, I find it difficult to agree with Mr. Stoner that anything about Apple shutting down porn does anything good for society.  If Steve Jobs were blocking porn as a way to send a message about values, then certainly that would be something to be applauded — except that I don’t think anyone believes that to be the case.  Instead, Apple is engaging in a sort of morally void behavior which just happens to have a desired result.  It is doubtful that anyone who wants to consume porn will find themselves not wanting to consume it because Apple has forbidden the stuff from its iPhone.  People will simply need to go find it somewhere else.

When governments pass laws or companies enact policies that mandate some moralistic result, neither are usually very effective at actually transforming the morals of their citizens or customers.  There is, quite simply, no comparison between choosing to do the right thing versus being prevented from doing things wrong.  Imposing a law against pornography does not take away the desires which bring people to consume it any more than imposing a law of gravity takes away man’s desire to fly.

Rather than trying to outlaw porn, we as a society would be much farther ahead understanding the reasons which bring people to consume it and finding a more wholesome way to satisfy those needs.  If porn is being used as stress relief, we would surely be better off emphasizing other ways to reduce workplace stress either through job restructuring (to combat the cause of stress) or some other physical activity (to direct stressful energies in a more positive direction).  But most important is that people must be made to affirmatively want to do these things, not merely fall into them for lack of a viable alternative.

That said, unlike the government which I consistently believe should be reduced in both size and power, I hold no malice toward Steve Jobs or Apple.  The iPhone, iTunes, the App Store, and all such things are their business and Apple participates in the free market just the same as anybody else.  If Apple wants to banish porn, to choose winners and losers, to lay and collect taxes, or to do any of the other things that they do, then that is entirely their right.

But as I hit “Publish” using my myTouch 3G (with Google), I affirm my own right to make my own choices, and to have my own values to win or lose by the power of persuasion in the marketplace of ideas.

Ever since his interview with Rachel Maddow, Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have been the centerpiece of an unfortunately predictable one-sided conversation that the media appears to be having with itself about how thoroughly racist Paul’s comments are.  Even more unfortunate (though just as predictable) has been the media’s effort to discredit the tea party as racist by emphasizing that Rand Paul is, in some sense, their champion from Kentucky.  Whatever the merits of his position, the entire episode has left us with two important points which even conservative commentators have been tending to ignore.  The first is that nobody who understands Libertarianism will be able to find a racist motive in what Rand Paul said.  The second is that what Rand Paul said had nothing to do with the Tea Party.

Even if nothing else comes of his comments, what Paul has given us is an interesting starting point for a serious discussion about what it means to be a Libertarian.  To begin with, Libertarianism as a political concept is one that we know from Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign is a philosophy which Liberals can’t stand, and Conservatives tend to have difficulty swallowing.  In a nutshell, Libertarians believe that the government should do no more than it absolutely must.  In support of their philosophy, Libertarians tend to be skeptical of any government institution, even those with long and highly praised histories.  Libertarians also tend to be a bit irreverent when it comes to government institutions.  The skepticism certainly grates on the Left, and the irreverence tends to make the Right nervous.

Both traits, however, were certainly on display during the interview with Rachel Maddow.  In this case, the institution is the Civil Rights Act itself — in particular, the bits that make private sector discrimination illegal.  Even the most simple-minded understanding of the interview reveals that Paul has absolutely no love of discrimination in any form.  I find it inconceivable that he would allow discrimination to go on in any business that he owned, and I think it would be interesting to ask if he would frequent businesses which he knew to have discriminatory practices.  Yet, in his skepticism he clearly sees something improper about outlawing private sector discrimination, and in his irreverence he’s actually willing to say so.

However understandable his statement may be within the realm of Libertarian thought, what has been clear for a very long time is the fact that Libertarian thought does not dominate Conservatism, even the “radical” sort expressed by the Tea Parties.  Indeed, from what I’ve observed, the Tea Parties have been willing to mostly gloss over the deep divide between Republicanism¹ and Libertarianism by uniting on the common ground issue of fiscal responsibility in government.  Whether willful or not, the Tea Parties have done an excellent job of staying away from social issues and focusing intensely on the government’s role in the economy.  Were the Tea Parties a social-issues movement rather than an economic-issues movement, I doubt Rand Paul would have enjoyed much success.

In sum, most of the mainstream commentary about the Maddow interview has gotten the core issue predictably wrong.  However, I hope that Conservatives, at least, will look past the immediate spin from the mainstream commentators and use Rand Paul’s comments to think a bit more deeply about the role of government in society.  After all, we will only be able to put off for so long the evil day on which the Republican/Libertarian divide comes to a head.  The Civil Rights Act provides an outstanding starting point for having an adult conversation about the duties and obligations of our government.

1. For lack of a better term.  Think about the kinds of things Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, and other prominent Conservative commentators might say to get a feel for what I mean. [↩]

Pretty much ever since the Christmas Eve bombing attempt, the news and blogosphere has been filled with commentary regarding the proper venue for trying individuals like the Christmas Bomber.  With President Obama having decided that the Christmas Bomber is to be tried in civilian court, the conservative press has been filled with objections very reminiscent of those used in connection with Obama’s deeply confused policy of how to deal with the prisoners at Guantanamo.  Although I instinctively agree that the Christmas Bomber belongs in military court, I have a hard time identifying any useful principle which differentiates him from other domestic terrorists like the Oklahoma City bomber, who certainly do belong in civilian court.

People like the Christmas Bomber sit at an interesting mid point between domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and radical Islamic terrorists like those detained at Guantanamo Bay.  There is little doubt that the Christmas Bomber is, himself, a radical Islamic terrorist.  However, despite his allegiance, the details of his attack more closely mirror the events of Guantanamo Bay than they do the events on the foreign battlefield where the Guantanamo detainees were captured — the Christmas Bomber was legally traveling to America and he was arrested on American soil.

All of the arguments holding that the Christmas Bomber should be tried by the military flow, ultimately, from his association with al Qaeda.  This begs the question of whether a person’s trial rights depend in some fundamental way on the groups with which they associate.  There is a good deal of logic to answering that question affirmatively.  After all, al Qaeda is a known terrorist organization which has accomplished multiple attacks against the United States both at home and overseas, and which is willing to say that they are at war with us, even if we are unwilling to return the courtesy.  On the other hand, the very fact that we are unwilling to say that we are at war with al Qaeda (or to do so only haphazardly) is symptomatic with a major problem with predicating rights on associations.

The trouble with linking rights to associations is the arbitrary nature of how associations might be viewed.  The merits of a particular group are decided by the government; al Qaeda may look and act like a terrorist organization, but the United States only recognizes them as such because of decisions made by the folks in Washington DC.  But aside from the sheer irrationality of the conclusion, what prevents those same politicians from declaring another group — say, America’s veterans — to be terrorists undeserving of rights?

In the absence of a deep principle separating terrorist organizations from politically disfavored groups or McVeigh-style domestic terrorists, I find it troubling that so many conservatives are so eager to put the Christmas Bomber into military detention, even though I agree that it is where he belongs.  Even more troubling, though, is the fact that even though I agree he belongs in the military system, I can think of no great principle separating him from McVeigh.

In the absence of such a principle, I find myself in reluctant disagreement with the prevailing wisdom of my fellow conservatives.  The power to commit a person, captured on American soil, to military rather than civilian detention is too great a power to leave in the hands of government discretion.  The potential for abuse as a means to silence political rather than national enemies is too great to be left available to this or any future President.