Growing Constitutional Crisis

"A growing crisis in our constitutional system threatens to fundamentally alter the balance of powers — and accountability — within our government," write liberal academic law professor Jonathan Turley (George Washington Law) and conservative U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc) in a Washington Post op-ed.

This crisis did not begin with Obama, but it has reached a constitutional tipping point during his presidency. Indeed, it is enough to bring the two of us — a liberal academic and a conservative U.S. senator — together in shared concern over the future of our 225-year-old constitutional system of self­governance. [snip]

In our view, the gridlock in Washington is not simply the result of toxic divisions. The dysfunctional politics we are experiencing may in part be the result of a deeper corrosion — a dangerous instability that is growing within our Madisonian system.

That dangerous instability concerns:

1. The growing shift of authority to federal agencies — "what is essentially a fourth branch of government" — that has "dramatically reduced [Congress's] ability to actively monitor, let alone influence, agency actions."
2. The refusal of courts to review constitutional disputes because of an overly constricted view of the standing of lawmakers to sue and other procedural barriers.
3. The rising share of federal spending that is not under [Congress's] control.

Boehner Considering House Lawsuit Against Obama

Speaker of the House John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, is considering a lawsuit on behalf of the U.S. House of Representatives against President Obama, "challenging the executive actions that have become the keystone of the administration," reported RollCall last week.

Boehner told the House Republican Conference during a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that he has been consulting with legal scholars and plans to unveil his next steps this week or next, according to sources in the room. [snip]

Boehner’s legal theory is based on work by Washington, D.C., attorney David Rivkin of Baker Hostetler LLP and Elizabeth Price Foley, a professor of law at Florida International University College of Law.

Rivkin said in an interview that in addition to proving institutional injury, the House would have to prove that as an institution, it has authorized the lawsuit. A vote by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group would do so.

The suit would also have to prove that no other private plaintiff has standing to challenge the particular suspension of executive action and that there are no other opportunities for meaningful political remedies by Congress, for instance by repeal of the underlying law.

“Professor Foley and I feel that if those four conditions are met, the lawsuit would have an excellent chance to succeed. This is particularly the case because President Obama’s numerous suspensions of the law are inflicting damage on the horizontal separations of powers and undermine individual liberty,” Rivkin said.

Rivkin and Foley have argued in op-eds that most of Obama’s executive orders have been benevolent — that is, they have exempted classes of citizens from the law, for instance through deferred action for childhood arrivals. Therefore, no individual has standing to sue because the actions have helped people. Congress as an institution, however, can sue because the actions flout the laws it has have passed.

They have argued that short of impeachment, there is no other check to the president’s issuance of executive actions.

In Stopping a Lawless President, George Will argues a lawsuit remedy is preferable to an impeachment proceeding:

Advocates of extreme judicial quietism to punish the supine people leave the people's representative no recourse short of the extreme and disproportionate "self help" of impeachment. Surely courts should not encourage this. The cumbersome and divisive blunderbuss process of impeachment should be a rare recourse. Furthermore, it would punish a president for anti-constitutional behavior but would not correct the injury done to the rule of law.

Study: All Employment Growth Since 2000 Went to Immigrants

"Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal)," report Center for Immigration Studies scholars Steven A Camarota and Karen Zeigler in a new study.

Among their findings:

• The total number of working-age (16 to 65) immigrants (legal and illegal) holding a job increased 5.7 million from the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2014, while declining 127,000 for natives. 
• In the first quarter of 2000, there were 114.8 million working-age natives holding a job; in the first quarter of 2014 it was 114.7 million. 
• Because the native-born population grew significantly, but the number working actually fell, there were 17 million more working-age natives not working in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000.
• Immigrants have made gains across the labor market, including lower-skilled jobs such as maintenance, construction, and food service; middle-skilled jobs like office support and health care support; and higher-skilled jobs, including management, computers, and health care practitioners.
• The supply of potential workers is enormous: 8.7 million native college graduates are not working, as are 17 million with some college, and 25.3 million with no more than a high school education.

The authors drew these conclusions with regard to the Senate's 'Gang of Eight' bills and current immigration debate:

With 58 million working-age natives not working, the Schumer-Rubio bill (S.744) and similar House measures that would substantially increase the number of foreign workers allowed in the country seem out of touch with the realities of the U.S. labor market.

Three conclusions can be drawn from this analysis:

First, the long-term decline in the employment for natives across age and education levels is a clear indication that there is no general labor shortage, which is a primary justification for the large increases in immigration (skilled and unskilled) in the Schumer-Rubio bill and similar House proposals.

Second, the decline in work among the native-born over the last 14 years of high immigration is consistent with research showing that immigration reduces employment for natives.

Third, the trends since 2000 challenge the argument that immigration on balance increases job opportunities for natives. Over 17 million immigrants arrived in the country in the last 14 years, yet native employment has deteriorated significantly.

Payne: Millennials New 'Sins'

"If you speak to the average 20-something or Millennial about the concept of sin," writes Daniel Payne @ thefederalist.com, "you may be treated to a kind of quasi-Unitarian dismissal of the concept, a sort of uncomfortable rejection of the notion of ecclesiastical proscription in any sense: 'I’m very spiritual,' you’ll hear a lot, 'but not religious'."

Yet the Millennials, having sloughed off the religious notions of their parents and grandparents—at least one-third of Generation Yers are more or less without religion—have taken it upon themselves to adopt a new set of mandates and dictates to guide their lives.

Call them the “new sins,” a number of commandments by which one might stay on the narrow way. The old interdictions now cast aside, a new series of injunctions must be obeyed: and like most religions and denominations, adherence to these commandments is held sacrosanct, any deviation from them fairly blasphemous.

Read The New Sins of 'Nonjudgmental' Millennials for Payne's take on Millennials'

• climate change dogma;
• the church of gay sex; and
• the priestly class of Washington DC.

Professors Silent on Obamacare

In an impromptu focus group we recently did with college students, one student said:  

In the beginning a lot of people on campus were talking about it [the Affordable Care Act]. Then it became a joke, and it just seemed to die away. It’s not a hot topic anymore.

A recent IBD editorial, Professors Suddenly Don't Like Obamacare Either, may explain why the campus has gone silent about Obamacare:

After years of singing the praises of universal health care, college professors are now shocked at how badly it has turned out — for them.

Adjunct professors are steamed at the way their employers are interpreting the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate, which forces them to cover full-time but not part-time workers. Typical of liberals, they blame their employers instead of the job-killing law they supported.

Starting Jan. 1, ObamaCare makes employers offer all full-time workers health insurance or pay a fine. In response, hundreds of colleges have simply cut instructors' course loads to dodge coverage. Others are thinking about laying off untenured faculty by the thousands.  [snip]

The American Association of University Professors says it's "dismayed" by the ObamaCare-tied cutbacks, calling them "reprehensible." A Stark State College adjunct professor facing cuts at his Ohio institution whines that it should cover part-time workers, too. "It goes against the spirit of the law," says the English prof.

Complained another adjunct: "The university canceled one of my courses. The reason was to avoid having to give me any benefits due to the Affordable Care Act."

Welcome to the real world.

Microsoft: Future Bleak with Unlawful Data Collection

"Microsoft's top lawyer continued his months-long public campaign to pressure the United States government to reform the secret data collection practices revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013," reports CNET.

Speaking Tuesday morning at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, the company's general counsel, Brad Smith, called on Congress and the White House to stop what he described as "the unfettered collection of bulk data" by the government and argued for the reform of the secret FISA court.

"I want law enforcement to do its job in an effective way pursuant to the rule of law," he said. "If we can't get to that world, then law enforcement is going to have a bleak future anyway." ...

"By the end of this decade there will be 50 billon devices connected to the Internet of Things around the world," Smith said. "This issue is going to become more important, not less."

In his Brookings appearance, Smith said the technology industry was "fundamentally united" in opposition to the government policies that Snowden's disclosures revealed about the extent of the National Security Agency's cyberspying operations. Beyond the obvious questions about privacy and civil liberties, he also suggested there was a business urgency to fixing the problem sooner rather than later.

"We are in a business that relies on people's trust," he said. "We're offering a world where you should feel comfortable about storing (your information) in the cloud...You need to have confidence that this information is still yours."

Where might all this be heading? One idea Smith broached was a dashboard where people can see what data exists about them, how it's getting used, as well as "some way for people technologically to have control." It's unclear whether Microsoft is already working on such a product...

Even Bigger ObamaCare Lawsuit in the Pipeline

"The D.C. Circuit is due to rule any day now, quite possibly today, on Halbig v. Sebelius," writes Michael Cannon, adding that "Newsweek calls Halbig 'the case that could topple Obamacare'."

For a little background. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers refundable “premium-assistance tax credits” to qualified taxpayers who purchase health insurance “through an Exchange established by the State.” The PPACA contains no language authorizing tax credits through the 34 Exchanges established by the federal government in states that declined to establish one themselves, nor does it authorize the Internal Revenue Service to treat those federally established Exchanges as if they had been “established by the State.” Offering benefits only in compliant states was proposed by numerous Republicans and Democrats in 2009, for obvious reasons: Congress cannot force states to implement federal programs, but it can create incentives for states to act, such as by offering health-insurance subsidies to residents of compliant states.

Halbig is one of four cases challenging the IRS’s decision to rewrite the statute and offer tax credits in the 34 states with federal Exchanges. The plaintiffs are individuals and employers who are injured by the IRS’s overreach because, due to the PPACA’s many inter-locking pieces, issuing those illegal tax credits subjects them to illegal penalties.

Cannon adds links to "some materials for those who want to hit the ground running" when the ruling comes down.

What If IRS Went Rogue on its Own?

Writes Jonah Goldberg: 

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there's no evidence that it did. That's good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn't target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.

Goldberg's Of the Bureaucrats, by the Bureaucrats, for the Bureaucrats reminds us why government bureaucracies at every level must be cut back.

UPDATE:  In How to Control the IRS and America's Untouchable Caste of Bureaucrats, Mark Fitzgibbons argues that citizens ought to be able to bring liability lawsuits against law-breaking bureaucrats:

In America’s first 100 years, federal officials could be sued in state courts for acting beyond their authority. In his book Creating the Administrative Constitution, Yale law professor Jerry Mashaw chronicles how this helped temper bad behavior.

Law professor Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit is among those who believe that government officials need more civil and criminal liability for their bad acts. There are some private remedies on the books, but they are too weak to be effective.

The National Organization of Marriage sued the IRS for illegally disclosing its donors, and recently settled for $50,000. Taxpayers paid the penalty, and lawbreakers within the IRS suffered no adverse consequences.

The way to control this epidemic of government law-breaking is to allow citizen victims to sue, and legislate personally liability for bureaucrats guilty of willfully illegal conduct.

If the GOP were serious about tackling government abuse, it would initiate legislation now and even add private remedies to its platform. That would have wide support from the public.

Until government bureaucrats face the consequences of meaningful remedies, they will continue to act like America's untouchable class.

Pullman: The Age of Mafia Government

The Obama administration's scandals aren't aberrations, argues Joy Pullman @ thefederalist.com. They're mafia-style governance. She highlights the striking similarities between the way the Obama administration and its progressive allies operate and the American mafia.

Racketeering And Extortion
At the heart of every mafia enterprise is a racketeering operation, in which businesses and private citizens are forced to pay the mafia to protect themselves from harm. Potential harm includes both what The Mob inflicts and that from outside sources, such as gangs or swindlers. Often, a protection racket arises in areas where the rule of law is weak, because in those areas the police and judiciary cannot or will not provide the protection from criminals everyone needs.

The analogies to government should be obvious, but one includes the pervasive feelings among business executives that, if they don’t donate to political campaigns or “nonprofit organizations” run by ex-government officials or other political cronies, their industry or even specific business is likely to wind up on the wrong side of some business-crushing regulation pretty quickly.

The Hobby Lobby case the Supreme Court is about to decide any day now is yet another example of the Obama administration’s demand that people follow its rules or pay crushing extortion fees (preferably both). Both the fines for not complying with Obamacare and the expense of doing so are simply protection money, paid to the administration directly with fines or indirectly through expensive healthcare purchased from Obama campaign donors. The administration doesn’t care about sick people or poor people, just like the mafia doesn’t care about actually protecting people. What both care most about is power.

Pullman continues with people wind up mysteriously dead, no one talks, and the boss has no idea what's going on. The article, also posted at RealClearPolitics, is worth reading in its entirety.

IRS Losing Liberal Allies

The Obama Administration may have the IRS's back right now, but what the federal agency will do when it loses the Administration's protection is a satisfying thought experiment, especially when reading John Dickerson's Slate.com piece, Paul Ryan Just Hammered the IRS: Almost Everyone Thinks the Agency Deserves It.

Anyone who has ever kicked a trash can across a room after trying to get the Internal Revenue Service to explain a tax rule, or been through one of its exfoliating audits, gained a champion in Rep. Paul Ryan on Friday...

If you are audited, the IRS wants you to move fast. Not only do you have to keep your records for years, as Ryan says, but the IRS wants you to move quick like a bunny. And the entire process has one subliminal message to it: “I don’t believe you.”

That is exactly what Ryan said to the IRS commissioner, who took umbrage. Now he knows how it feels.

Others are expressing skepticism:

• Newark [NJ] Morning-Ledger editorial:  "Hyperpolitical rhetoric has taken the IRS investigation to a place where only a special prosecutor may be able to restore faith in a truthful outcome."
• The Economist: The IRS Scandal: A Dog Ate My Emails
• Dallas Morning News editorial: Last Straw for IRS Should Lead to Special Counsel
• Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial: "IRS Excuses for Obstruction Suggest Cover Up"

The radical left isn't giving up yet, but one has to wonder what the conversation around the Kool-Aid cooler is today in the face of the IRS commissioner's conflicting testimony and this interesting revelation: that the IRS's contract for email archiving, begun in 2009, was conveniently ended about the same time the computers of Lois Lerner and six other IRS officials linked to the scandal crashed.

Experts Weigh in on Upcoming Hobby Lobby Decision

"The Supreme Court is set to make a decision in the famous Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case by June 30," writes Claire Healey, "and religious employers are poised to see whether they will be allowed an exemption for their beliefs."

Adele Keim of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and Heritage policy analyst Sarah Torre discussed the implications of the HHS mandate and the case at a Thursday event co-hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Keim began the discussion by describing the background of the Hobby Lobby case. David and Barbara Green, the founders of the Hobby Lobby store chain, are devout Christians who object to the mandate because of its provision for companies to include the morning-after pill in the healthcare plans.

"Religious liberty is a human right, and all people deserve it," Keim said.

Keim explained that those against the HHS mandate are winning. In for-profit cases, courts have voted 40 times to protect religious liberty, while voting for the mandate only six times. At the non-profit level, 23 injunctions have been granted, while only five were denied. 

Rep. Lummis argued "there are many reasons to repeal this law, reform this law, replace this law." Sarah Torre "described other legislation bolstering Hobby Lobby's case, especially the Religious Freedom Restoration Act..."

Editorial: IRS Excuses for Obstruction Suggest Cover-Up

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

This is not a partisan witchhunt. It is an inquiry to determine whether a federal agency conspired with elected members of a political party to influence the outcome of an election. And it already screams of a cover-up.

This fiasco is an inevitable byproduct of the staggering amount of power the IRS has built off the complexity of its tax code, which allows the agency to intrude on almost every facet of our lives, from child care to health care to political activism. Holding Ms. Lerner and others accountable — whether through mass firings or criminal prosecutions — won’t be enough to rein in the IRS. The best way to prevent the IRS from abusing its power is to take away its power through massive tax reform and simplification.

Abused taxpayers and elected representatives need not make the argument. The IRS is taking care of that all by itself.

Video - Rep Paul Ryan to IRS: I Don't Believe You

At a Capitol Hill hearing today into the IRS Targeting, Rep. Paul Ryan "blasts IRS commissioner" saying, 'I don't believe you'. The YouTube video below courtesy of the Washington Free Beacon:

Klein: Poll Bad for Obama, Worse for Liberalism

"A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Americans with shattered confidence in President Obama's ability to lead may be bad news for him, but it's worse news for liberalism," writes Philip Klein @ Washington Examiner.

True, there are some issues, such as global warming, in which the poll showed the public closer to the liberal view. But not on the overarching question that has been at the center of American politics since the New Deal era.

According to the poll, just 46 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that, “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” compared with 50 percent who agreed with the view that, “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” In February 2009, right after he was sworn into office, the same poll found 51 percent thought government should do more and just 40 percent who thought it was doing too much. ...

It found that just 14 percent blamed the [Dept of Veterans Affairs] problems on “poor management by the Obama administration” compared with 61 percent who blamed “longstanding government bureaucracy.”

To the extent that Americans see problems as connected to Obama’s incompetence, it still provides an opening for another Democrat to implement the liberal agenda. But if Obama-era failures make Americans more skeptical about federal bureaucracy in general, it makes things that much more difficult. ... Obama set out to convince Americans that government could work, and as of this point in his presidency, he has failed.

Toensing: Doesn't Hillary Clinton Know the Law?

"Does the former secretary of state not know the law?" asks Victoria Toensing in the WSJ. "By statute, she was required to make specific security decisions for defenseless consulates like Benghazi, and was not permitted to delegate them to anyone else." Yet,

In her interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer last week, Hillary Clinton said "I was not making security decisions" about Benghazi, claiming "it would be a mistake" for "a secretary of state" to "go through all 270 posts" and "decide what should be done." And at a January 2013 Senate hearing, Mrs. Clinton said that security requests "did not come to me. I did not approve them. I did not deny them."

Toensing outlines the requirements of the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999 (SECCA) signed into law by her husband, President Bill Clinton, on November 29, 1999, and concludes with this observation.:

Mrs. Clinton either personally waived these security provisions as required by law or she violated the law by delegating the waiver to someone else. If it was the latter, she shirked the responsibility she now disclaims: to be personally knowledgeable about and responsible for the security in a consulate as vulnerable as Benghazi.

Lois Lerner's Vanishing Emails - A Crime in Progress?

That's the question editors at National Review Online are asking.

The matter at hand is a serious one. While IRS employees were openly campaigning for Barack Obama on agency time — a violation for which a handful were given largely symbolic reprimands — the very branch of that awesomely powerful law-enforcement agency charged with handling the affairs of nonprofit and tax-exempt groups was illegally targeting organizations based on their political affiliations while Democratic elected officials, Michigan senator Carl Levin among them, hectored the agency to do more.

This was not a lapse in judgment or a series of unfortunate events. This was an organized campaign to use IRS resources — including its ability to launch criminal prosecutions — for political purposes. We know from other Lerner e-mails that have been released that the IRS was, at the suggestion of Rhode Island Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse, looking for a way to “piece together” a criminal case against the groups it was targeting. Lerner and lawyers at the Justice Department discussed coordinating with the Federal Election Commission in this crusade. It is worth noting that the “crime” with which Lerner et al. wanted to charge those conservative nonprofits was failing to adequately disclose what political activities they would be engaged in — even though under the law they are explicitly permitted to engage in political activity.

We have no doubt that Lois Lerner’s hard drive has in fact been compromised. We’d be shocked if it hadn’t been. Goodness knows what else is being done with evidence while Congress proceeds at its customary majestic pace. The question here is not only the crime that has been committed but whether there is a crime in progress.

An Encouraging Post-Obama Economy?

If the Obama economy is depressing to you, Mark Perry's graphic—which suggests an amazing U.S. post-Obama economic potential—should cheer you up.

Perry has compiled this map of the 50 US states renamed for countries with similar GDPs (Gross Domestic Product):

The map above was created by matching economic output in US states in 2013 to foreign countries with comparable GDPs, using BEA data for GDP by US state and GDP by country from the International Monetary Fund, via Wikipedia here. For each US state (and the District of Columbia), I tried to find the country closest in economic size in 2013 (measured by GDP), and for each state there was a country with a pretty close match – those countries are displayed in the map above and in the table below. Obviously, in some cases the closest match was a country that produced slightly more, or slightly less, economic output in 2013 than a given US state.

It’s pretty amazing how ridiculously large the US economy is, and the map above helps put America’s GDP of $16.8 trillion in 2013 (and more than $17 trillion in Q4 2013 and Q1 in 2014) into perspective by comparing the GDP of US states to other country’s entire national GDP.

In one example, Perry argues that California produced $2.2 trillion of economic output in 2013, just slightly below Brazil's $2.24 trillion, with 80% fewer people! He calls that "a testament to the superior, world-class productivity of the American worker."

Now imagine what all the United States could produce if the nation had an administration with even a smidgen of economic good sense.

Putting 'Limited Government' in Perspective

The conservative view of limited government is less about chopping down trees—metaphorical or otherwise—and more about trimming back the overgrowth to give room for businesses, community organizations, and religious institutions to grow and flourish.

Lucy Schouten, Small Government: Only One Side of the Coin

Ms. Schouten offers several examples "of  private-sector solutions that have solved problems in both the public and economic spheres using innovative methods."

Research: Little Known Heart Condition Affects Mostly Educated Young Women

From the UK Independent:

A debilitating and poorly understood health condition which causes the heart rate to accelerate rapidly upon standing up predominantly affects young, well educated women, new evidence has shown.

The reasons for the association remain mysterious.

PoTS is believed to affect around one in 558 people, based on figures from the USA, but many doctors are still unaware of its existence. It is often misdiagnosed, or attributed to an associated condition such as anxiety, panic disorder, or chronic fatigue.

The new study, published in the online journal BMJ Open today, assessed 84 members of the national support group PoTS UK, and 52 patients diagnosed at an NHS clinic in Newcastle.

Many had been forced to change jobs or give up work by the condition, which causes fatigue and makes many basic, everyday tasks exhausting and difficult.

Researchers said that increasing awareness of the condition would be crucial to improving diagnosis rates and understanding.

Think Twice Before Killing Coal

"When it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking," argues Robert Bryce at NRO.

The green Left continues to push the claim that the reason there’s been no major action to cut carbon dioxide emissions is that some evil cabal — quarterbacked by climate “denialists” who have a “hostility to science” — has been blocking change. (By the way, that’s exactly what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed on June 9.)

The reality — as shown by the numbers — is far different. Coal, oil, and natural gas continue to supply about 87 percent of all global energy because those sources are able to provide the vast amounts of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford. And for developing countries in particular, coal remains the fuel of choice because it is cheap and abundant, deposits are geographically widespread, and its price is not influenced by an OPEC-style cartel.

We can discuss the need for more action on climate change. But in doing so, we must also recognize that the U.S. has been leading the world in reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. Between 2005 and 2013, according to the BP numbers, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell by 8.7 percent. For comparison, emissions in Germany, which has spent about $100 billion on subsidies for renewables, have fallen by 4.6 percent. But the numbers in absolute terms are even starker. Since 2005, U.S. emissions have fallen by 563 million tons. That’s 17 times the reduction seen in Germany, where emissions have fallen by 40 million tons since 2005.

Meanwhile, since 2005, China’s emissions have grown by 71 percent, or about 3.9 billion tons, which is about six times the total reductions achieved in the U.S. and Germany. In the Middle East, emissions have jumped by about 600 million tons, an increase that effectively cancels out the combined reductions achieved in both the U.S. and Germany since 2005.

The punch line here is obvious: Numbers don’t lie. And when it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking.

Beltway Journalism's Blind Spot

"It’s now clear why the primary defeat of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, came so completely out of the blue last week," writes David Carr in the NYTimes. "Beltway blindness that put a focus on fund-raising, power-brokering and partisan back-and-forth created a reality distortion field that obscured the will of the people."

But that affliction was not Mr. Cantor’s alone; it is shared by the political press. Reporters and commentators might want to pause and wipe the egg off their faces before they go on camera to cluck-cluck about how Mr. Cantor, Republican of Virginia, missed signs of the insurgency that took him out. There was a lot of that going around, and the big miss by much of the political news media demonstrates that news organizations are no less a prisoner of Washington’s tunnel vision than the people who run for office.

Strassell: What Dave Brat Taught Conservatives

"With Washington determined to take a lesson away from Dave Brat's rout of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, let's make sure it's an enduring one," writes Kimberley Strassel at WSJ. "Let's talk 'reform' conservatism."

It happens that Mr. Brat, an economics professor, spent the bulk of his campaign rallying voters to a traditional free-market, pro-growth economic agenda. It centered on a tough criticism of crony capitalism and a clarion call for a flatter and more efficient tax code.

Mr. Brat reprised his themes for Fox News's Sean Hannity the night of his victory, explaining: "We need to take free markets seriously. That means we have to put an end to all these tax credits and tax deductions and loopholes. [Michigan Rep.] Dave Camp had a good bill which simplified the tax code and had a Reagan-esque 10 and 25 percent rate. That made sense and it was going to be pro-growth." This clearly resonated with the 56% of voters who chose to rout a sitting majority leader.

Brat's win, argues Strassel, "is surely awkward for a new wing of the conservative movement that has taken to arguing that the whole free-market, supply-side, Reaganesque agenda is passé." She links Mr. Cantor's "Making Life Work" agenda to the new reformers' manifesto, 'Room to Grow," the central premise of which is that "conservatives need to embrace government to endear themselves to the 'middle class'."

Mr. Cantor never endorsed the more dramatic proposals of the "reformers," though he spoke broadly kind words about "Room to Grow." His "Making Life Work" agenda made him a poster boy of that new GOP impulse to focus on populist initiatives that cater to the middle class.

Mr. Brat openly derided "Making Life Work," referring to its "catchy little phrases to compete with Democrats for votes." As he told Mr. Hannity: "I do not want the federal government trying to make my life work." Mr. Brat also ably tied together the cronyism/complexity/growth arguments to make the case for real tax reform (rather than Democrat-lite tax spending).

The hallmark of conservative policy innovation is the use of markets to limit government and expand citizen freedom and choice. That's reform. The lesson of the Brat-Cantor race is that the traditional reform concept is still popular (and populist). At least when it's delivered with economic understanding and conviction.

Lois Lerner's IRS E-Mails - the Saga Continues

"The Internal Revenue Service told Congress Friday it has lost a trove of emails to and from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the agency's Tea Party controversy, sparking outrage from congressional investigators who have been probing the agency for more than a year," reports Fox News.  "The IRS said it cannot locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year."

Scott Johnson @ powerlineblog.com posted two comments related to this news story. The first is an anonymous email he received from a Department of Justice lawyer:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.

Keep up the good work.

PS.

I’m serious about your keeping any identifying information out of the media. Things are very, very bad.

The second draws a historical connection between Lerner's missing emails and President Richard Nixon's missing 18 1/2 minutes of Oval Office tape recordings:

The charge that Richard Nixon “endeavored” to misuse the IRS made its way into the second of the three articles of impeachment voted against him by the House Judiciary Committee. Nixon’s efforts to misuse the IRS were futile. They went nowhere. Nixon and his henchmen desired the IRS to “screw” their political opponents, but their efforts were a pathetic failure.

Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield astutely complained that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.” As we have come to see, Caulfield was on to something... 

Economist: Why Everything You Heard About [Eating] Fat is Wrong

"The case against fat [in diets] would seem simple," writes the Economist, in a review of a new book entitled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz.

Fat contains more calories, per gram, than do carbohydrates. Eating saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, which in turn is thought to bring on cardiovascular problems. Ms Teicholz dissects this argument slowly. ...

... the vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research—the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few—describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky.

The opinions of academics and governments, as presented, led to real change. Food companies were happy to replace animal fats with less expensive vegetable oils. They have now begun abolishing trans fats from their food products and replacing them with polyunsaturated vegetable oils that, when heated, may be as harmful. Advice for keeping to a low-fat diet also played directly into food companies’ sweet spot of biscuits, cereals and confectionery; when people eat less fat, they are hungry for something else. Indeed, as recently as 1995 the AHA itself recommended snacks of “low-fat cookies, low-fat crackers…hard candy, gum drops, sugar, syrup, honey” and other carbohydrate-laden foods. Americans consumed nearly 25% more carbohydrates in 2000 than they had in 1971.

In the past decade a growing number of studies have questioned the anti-fat orthodoxy. Ms Teicholz’s book follows the work of Gary Taubes, a science journalist who has cast doubts on the link between saturated fat and health for well over a decade—and been much disparaged for his pains. There is increasing evidence that a bigger culprit is most likely insulin, a hormone; insulin levels rise when one eats carbohydrates. Yet even now, with more attention devoted to the dangers posed by sugar, saturated fat remains maligned. “It seems now that what sustains it,” argues Ms Teicholz, “is not so much science as generations of bias and habit.”

Interestingly, government pushed the high-carb/low-fat food pyramid on an entire generation. Now we're told we have an obesity epidemic. Teicholz's book, which contains "well over 100 pages of notes and citations" and "covers decades of nutrition research," may explain why low-carb diets are increasingly successful and popular in reversing weight gain.