What the 14th Amendment says is that “The validity of the public debt … shall not be questioned.”  By their plain meaning, these words say nothing about the debt ceiling (which didn’t even exist at the time) or how the country’s debts will be paid.  They say only that the validity of the debt shall not be questioned.

To explain what those words mean, consider an analogy.  An American family with a mortgage and credit cards has used tools of debt to build up a lifestyle at the edge of — or beyond — their financial means.  The charges are accurate: the student loans covered earning a degree; the mortgage bought a house; and the credit card bought furniture, electronics, other items, and maybe even a utility bill or two.  Out of cash, and with credit cards at their limit, the family receives a bill in the mail.  The family now has a “crisis” to work through:  How do they handle the bills?

One choice that the family has is to pay some bills right away and put off others until later.  Another choice is to find new sources of debt to cover the bills.  Yet a third choice would be to throw the bills in the trash and, when the bill collectors call, tell them you don’t actually owe that money for some reason or other.

The 14th Amendment takes Option 3 off the table, but leaves the other two alone.

The Public Debt Clause was written at a time when the country had just amassed what was then a significant amount of public debt.  The Clause was written to provide certainty as to how the government would manage those obligations.  What it said is that the United States would not tear up its bills.

But other than telling its creditors to pound sand, the government can do nearly anything it wants with its debt.  A great many proposals have already made their way into the debate, some of which are more fact based than others.  Unfortunately for the author, thinking that the Constitution has already solved the problem falls squarely into the “others” category.  Our looming “disaster” will have no such easy answer.

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall plan to return to the Moon by 2022 and develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, in order to promote exploration, commerce, science, and United States preeminence in space as a stepping stone for the future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The budget requests and expenditures of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall be consistent with achieving this goal.

So if I’ve got this right, our national debt is spiraling out of control, and Representatives Mr. Posey(R-FL), Ms. Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Mr. Wolf (R-VA), Mr. Bishop (R-UT), and Mr. Olson (R-TX) want to build a moon base.  Maybe we could just think of it as taking our grandkids’ money to build them the Most Awesome Tree House Ever.

Of course, in reality, a moon base could be a decent investment for our country.  If Mr. Posey, Ms. Jackson-Lee, Mr. Wolf, Mr. Bishop, and Mr. Olson all took a dozen or so of their colleagues with them, we might end up with a higher percentage of legislators who actually care about solving the nation’s problems, rather than just wasting the nation’s time.

In his statement, President Obama writes:

Section 2262 of the Act would prohibit the use of funds for several positions that involve providing advice directly to the President.  The President has well-established authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch, and to obtain advice in furtherance of this supervisory authority.  The President also has the prerogative to obtain advice that will assist him in carrying out his constitutional responsibilities, and do so not only from executive branch officials and employees outside the White House, but also from advisers within it.

Legislative efforts that significantly impede the President’s ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisers violate the separation of powers by undermining the President’s ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed.  Therefore, the executive branch will construe section 2262 not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.

Sadly, much of this statement is misleading or false.

To begin with what is true, the President is right that he has a “well-established authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch.”  That is, of course, his primary job.  He is also correct that he has the authority “to obtain advice in furtherance of this supervisory authority.”  Indeed, the Constitution guarantees that the President “may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments.”

The sleight of hand Obama then tries to perform is to blend the line between “officer” and “advisor”.  Under the Constitution, an “Officer[] of the United States” is an individual who has been appointed “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.”  In other words, the President has the right to get advice from his cabinet.  However, it is not the cabinet that is at issue in this legislation, and the President’s attempt to lump the people targeted by the provision in with his cabinet is disingenuous.

Section 2262 of HR 1473 reads:

None of the funds made available by this division may be used to pay the salaries and expenses for the following positions:

(1) Director, White House Office of Health Reform.
(2) Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.
(3) Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury assigned to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry and Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy.
(4) White House Director of Urban Affairs.

None of the positions listed have gone through the confirmation process.  They are, by definition, not “Officers of the United States.”  Their jobs are nowhere guaranteed by the Constitution, nor is their pay.  The President has no right, under the Constitution, to their advice.

The President, of course, is free to consult with whomever he chooses, including with the four individuals listed in HR 1473.  The taxpayers, however, have no obligation to pay for the advice the President receives.  Those four individuals are more than welcome to continue advising the President for free, and Obama is certainly welcome to pay them out of his own pocket.  But it is no longer permissible for those individuals to receive compensation for salary or expenses from the US Treasury; and the President is wrong if he believes otherwise.

Current circumstances in government — which the liberal media won’t let us forget — are that Democrats control the Senate and the White House.  Even if the vote in the House of Representatives is unanimous, the Senate can still simply vote down the legislation or fail to vote on it at all, and President Obama is sure to veto anything that somehow manages to get as far as his desk.  Republicans haven’t got enough power to overturn a veto in either the House or the Senate.  Put it all together, and the chance that any Obamacare repeal actually happen is effectively zero.

So, why introduce the bill now?

Political cover:  Voting for the repeal right now gives legislators an opportunity to bolster their conservative credentials without actually doing anything.  This bill is excellent for liberal Republicans (and moderate Democrats) who need to bolster their conservative credentials but don’t want to risk actually pulling the law to the right.

For conservatives, however, it’s results that matter, and this bill at this time promises none.

When the only possible benefit is to the voting record of moderate leftists, I can’t help but feel like the American people are being set up.  Come next election, I’m sure we’ll see politicians who voted repeatedly to expand government power and further soak the tax paying public in red ink will be on the airwaves patting themselves on the back for having taken a stand with their vote against Obamacare.  They will do what they can to become indistinguishable from the true conservatives, and this vote will loom large in the picture they’ll paint.

And then, what happens two years from now?  “We tried to repeal Obamacare once, but it went nowhere.  Oh well.  Sorry.”  If they say anything at all.

With no chance of actual success, the upcoming vote on repealing Obamacare is nothing more than symbolic.  It looks good, and is sure to please the conservative electorate who came out in November hoping for just such a repeal, but the only people who benefit are leftists.   The goal for now, which I think the people understand, should be to defund Obamacare immediately and save the repeal until the voters can create a true conservative majority 2012.

The story begins, modestly enough, with radio signals.  Back when radio was first being invented, the number of radio frequencies available was nowhere near the number of frequencies that we have today.  With broadcasters wanting to get into the business of broadcasting on what was then a rather limited spectrum, it suddenly became important to have some way for them to share the air without stepping on each others’ signal.  Somehow, the government ended up owning the airwaves, and the FCC (then called the Federal Radio Commission) was chartered to parcel them out to interested parties.  The FCC accomplished this by keeping ownership of the airwaves and granting licenses for their use.  With that decision, America’s first command and control economy was born.

From that point forward, the FCC has been in the business of choosing broadcasting winners and losers.  The agency began by granting licenses to nonprofit organizations, colleges, churches, and the like.  There was no advertising model back then, and organizations profited from having radio stations by using them to promote their particular causes.  That all changed when the FCC decided that advertising driven, for-profit radio was the wave of the future.  By giving higher priority in obtaining/renewing licenses to for-profit “commercial” radio, the FCC ejected nonprofit “propaganda” radio from the market (and, thus, from existence).

The FCC has been in the pocket of commercial radio broadcasters ever since.  Time and again, the FCC has conspired to kneecap or completely destroy technology which would tend to compete with its chosen winners.

In one early example, AT&T wanted in on the radio game.  They devised a technology which would allow for broadcast over its telephone network; essentially, it’d be like cable TV for radio.  The FCC kept AT&T away by offering them a monopoly over telephone service in exchange for killing their cable radio plans, then made it illegal for anyone else to ever try cable radio again.  Many years later, the FCC would try to do the same thing with cable television.  They would ultimately fail — today, most people watch TV over cable or satellite — but they effectively froze the technology for decades and continue to impose requirements designed to make the life of non-broadcast providers as difficult as possible.

Then, of course, there are the technology requirements.  Back in the earlier days of television, signals were sent on various channels of VHF or UHF frequencies.  Because of the different cost structures involved, UHF failed spectacularly.  The FCC, under the control of a chairman who couldn’t find anything on TV he wanted to watch, changed UHF licensing requirements to include a mandate for “better” programming.  He also got Congress to mandate UHF receivers on all televisions, since most at the time didn’t have one.  UHF still failed, and the FCC chairman, if he were alive, would probably still be lamenting the thousands of channels available on cable which still have almost nothing worth watching.

More modern mis-innovations also abound.  The CableCARD program is such a disaster that almost nobody even knows it exists.  The V-chip is only slightly less useless.  And the digital TV mandate was only “successful” (for the 10% of TVs that aren’t hooked up to cable or satellite) after being delayed for months an heavily subsidized by the government with taxpayer dollars.  Future possibilities also include mandating FM tuners in cell phones; technology almost guaranteed to blend in perfectly with the scrap heap of waste generated by the FCC.

In sum, the FCC promotes technology nobody wants and kills technology that’s actually useful.  The economic model is textbook command and control; even the idea of private property doesn’t exist in the FCC’s world.

The FCC has quietly been one of the most destructive bureaucracies in the history of America.  They are living proof that Marxism can take hold in America if the people are not vigilant.  They have selected winners and losers, they have decided which business models live and which models die, and they have almost always chosen wrong.  These are the people who want to take over the Internet:  Bumbling bureaucrats who have never made a correct decision, but who believe themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of an entire sector of the economy.

So much digital ink has been spilled about the Bush Tax Cuts that it’s hardly worth adding much more.  The general consensus seems to be that Republicans would have been better off dropping the deal and trying again for a better package in the new year.  That may be true, but it could also have guaranteed a tax hike.  For now, at least, I’m willing to write that episode off as a lose-lose-lose scenario for Republicans, Democrats, and the American people.  In any case, there are far clearer examples of how out of touch Republicans still are.

The first of these examples is the CALM Act, a law passed to authorize and mandate the FCC to create regulations about how loud commercials can be during television programming.  The law itself is a trifle of a thing, but it was passed by Congress and signed by the President without a single recorded vote.  The clear implication is that Republicans are still complicit in the expansion of government power.  Without objection, another tendril has been injected into American enterprise from the chambers of Congress.  Laws like this are precisely what we voted against a mere six weeks ago.

Another example is a food safety bill passed by Congress to give more authority to the FDA, supposedly to help combat food-borne illnesses.  In reality, it’s a $1.4 billion injection of 17,800 government bureaucrats into the US economy.  The bill would give the government the authority to mandate food recalls and to arbitrarily review the records of farms and food producers.  This measure could certainly be taken up in Congress next year — there is no food-borne illness crisis — but is instead being rammed through the Senate late on a Sunday one week before Christmas.  All without the benefit of a vote, and all, apparently, with Mitch McConnell’s blessing.

This past Election Day, the American people could hardly have been more clear that they are tired of seeing more government at every turn.  So far, although Harry Reid set himself up for failure, the only thing he seems to be failing at is failing.  Nothing important would have been lost had Republicans held the line and shut down the Senate until the new session next year.  Instead, they seem to be as complicit as ever in the expansion of government over the American people.

The real conservatives can’t get started soon enough.

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.

At the same time, the renewed push against earmarks highlighted a potential conflict between the calls to eliminate the spending items and demands by many Tea Party supporters for greater fidelity to the Constitution. It is the Constitution, after all, that put Congress in charge of deciding how to spend the taxpayers’ money. In pledging not to let individual lawmakers designate federal money for local purposes, the anti-earmark contingent is in effect ceding more power to the executive branch over how taxpayer dollars are spent, presumably not the outcome desired by the new crop of grass-roots conservatives.

His statement is apparently meant to tell conservatives that a win on the issue of earmarks is really a loss for the Constitution.  His argument is built on a rather silly looking straw man and his conclusion is, constitutionally speaking, insane.

Beginning with the straw man, it appears as if the author is generally assuming that whatever money is spent on earmarks will be spent by the government in one way or another.  In his view, Congress is going to authorize the same amount of money one way or another, with the only question being who in the government is going to have the authority to decide how to spend it.  Were that to be the actual argument, it may indeed be wise to earmark money as a way to impose some constraints on the President.  The debate, however, isn’t about that.

Earmarks have been jumped on by liberals and conservatives alike as examples of government waste (at best) and corruption (at worst).  The problem isn’t that Congress is choosing where to spend the money rather than the President; the problem is that the government is deciding where to spend that money rather than leaving it in the hands of the taxpayers who earned it.  The goal and point isn’t to change how federal bureaucrats spend the money, it’s to stop the bureaucrats from spending the money at all.  The job isn’t done until the number of dollars spent by the government goes down.

On the matter of the Constitution, it actually specifies a lot less about who gets to decide how government money is spent than the author imagines.  The Constitution, of course, gives the job of creating a budget to Congress, and the President is bound by any budget that Congress is able to pass into law.  The Constitution, however, offers no particular level of specificity that Congress must meet in order to have satisfied its duty.  As far as the Constitution is concerned, it is enough for them to create a budget that says the President has some number of dollars to spend in the furtherance of his duties.

What the Constitution is very specific about, however, is the list of categories for which money may be spent.  These categories are not defined by Congress, but are actually written into the Constitution itself.  Congress may, of course, add some specificity to the given categories, but they may not, under the Constitution as written, go outside of what the Constitution says.  It’s hard to find a single earmark that fits within this constitutional framework.  Put more bluntly, it’s hard to find a constitutional earmark.

Of course, Congress hasn’t cared too deeply about the constitutional limits on their spending power for quite some time.  Both major parties have a long history of using earmarks to pay off political favors, and no incumbent is eager to dismantle a system which tends to add to their power.  To make matters worse, spending decisions are largely immune from challenge in court, leaving few checks or balances on earmarking.

The American people, on the other hand, care a great deal about what the Constitution has to say.  While it doesn’t explicitly say “No Earmarks,” it also doesn’t provide the government any authorization to pay political debts with the people’s money.  Whether the dollar value is high or small, earmark is spending mostly unconstitutional waste that needs to be stopped — stopped in Congress, stopped in the White House; stopped everywhere.

The recent history of marijuana legislation in America has spent the past several years moving in an interesting direction.  Advocates of marijuana use have made modest success in positioning marijuana as a sort of medical utility drug, particularly for people like cancer patients and others who suffer from some sort of otherwise supposedly untreatable pain.  Across the nation, a number of states have passed laws allowing for limited medical marijuana use.  Though laws do vary some from state to state, most such laws allow people to grow their own personal supply of marijuana and use the plant for their own purposes as long as they have a doctor’s prescription.  Of course, the FDA finds no medical benefit from smoking and, to the extent that there are benefits, we know how to isolate the active ingredients from the marijuana plant, and some of them have been reformulated into manufactured pharmaceuticals.

Based on this history, it’s easy to see the game that marijuana advocates are playing.  The ultimate goal is to legalize the drug.  By supporting medical marijuana, advocates for total legalization are able to get people familiar with the drug by, in effect, reintroducing it into good society.  More importantly, legalizing marijuana makes enforcement of marijuana laws significantly more difficult because there is easier access to the drug supply and because it’s harder to identify legal from illegal users.  Indeed, it seems to be an open secret that medical marijuana advocacy is, for the most part, a proxy for legal marijuana advocacy.

When it comes right down to it, the history of marijuana in America has not been favorable to people who want to use the drug for recreational purposes.  California has had a medical marijuana law since 1996, making it one of the oldest medical marijuana laws in the country.  Practically speaking, it’s doubtful that anyone in California who wants to smoke marijuana will have much difficulty purchasing it.  In theory, those facts, combined with the general political landscape of California, should have made the state a prime candidate give the final victory to marijuana proponents.  Yet, when presented with the question head on, the people of California joined the countless majorities before them who would rather not have people smoking marijuana without a compelling need.

In the end, this result should hardly be surprising.  Modern history has not been kind to smokers of any variety.  The national persecution of tobacco users continues to spread to bars and restaurants as people have decided that they prefer to breathe clean air rather than air filled with other people’s emissions.  Whatever the science may say about second hand tobacco smoke, it seems to me that the main reason people don’t want to be around the stuff isn’t its damaging properties, but is simply how unpleasant it is to breathe.  Marijuana smoke has a different scent, but the unpleasantness remains.

There may eventually come a day when the conversation about marijuana becomes honest enough to be taken seriously.  But trumpeting the idea of marijuana as a medical wonder drug, or cheering the economic “stimulus” from legalizing and then punitively taxing marijuana use are not the kind of honesty that the American people expect or deserve.  Nor is it helpful to present an imagined future history which runs counter to the clear reality that, when given a chance to legalize marijuana, the American people just say no to drugs.

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.