Constitution Prof's War Against It

"As a general rule, politicians tend to whipsaw between two poles," writes libertarian Bart Hinkle. "Conservatives try to increase economic liberty but show less regard for civil liberties. Liberals care deeply about civil liberties while trying to restrict the economic kind. But the Obama administration is remarkable for its degree of disdain for both."

Hinkle's excellent short piece is well worth reading in its entirety for its succinct cataloguing of the ways in which this Administration is undermining and/or subverting the First, Second and Fourth Amendments. Concludes Hinkle, with a bit of humor,

From a civil-liberties perspective, Obama has carried forward nearly every one of the war-on-terror powers that led liberals to denounce George W. Bush as a goose-stepping fascist, and in fact has made many of them worse. When he retires from public life, perhaps he will return to teaching the Constitution. That should be much easier work — given how little of it there will be left.

Penalize Politicians for a Change

"As scandals explode across Washington — from the IRS scandals, to the Benghazi scandal, to the HHS donations scandal, to Pigford and more — one thing that I've noticed is that the people involved don't seem to suffer much," writes Glenn Reynolds. "There are consequences, but not for them."

The problem, says Reynolds, is that politicians don't have skin in the game. They will take 'responsibility', but not 'blame'.

What's the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are "responsible," do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.

But when you cut the linkage between outcomes and experience, you make learning much more difficult. When you were a toddler learning to walk, you fell down a lot. This was unpleasant: shocking, at least, and often painful. Thus, you learned to fall down a lot less often.

But imagine if falling down didn't hurt. You wouldn't have learned not to fall, or at least, you would have accumulated a lot more bruises along the way.

Given the low penalties for failure it faces, our political class is one for whom falling down is usually painless and even — given the surprisingly common tendency of people who have presided over debacles to be given promotions rather than the boot — actually pleasurable. The leaders move society's arms and legs, but we're the ones who collect the bruises.

Reynolds, a law professor, offers a few recommendations to remedy the situation:

I'd favor some changes that put accountability back in. First, I'd get rid of judicially created immunities. The Constitution itself creates only one kind of immunity, for members of Congress in speech and debate. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, courts have interpreted this grant of immunity, explicitly in the Constitution, more narrowly than the judicially created ones).

I'd also cut all payments to members of Congress whenever they haven't passed a budget. If they can't take care of that basic responsibility, why should they get paid? Likewise, I'd ban presidential travel when there's not a budget. He can do his job from the White House.

I'm willing to consider other changes: Term limits that kick in whenever there's a deficit for more than two years in a row. Limitations on civil-service protections to allow wronged citizens to get offending bureaucrats fired. Pay cuts for elected officials whenever inflation or unemployment are above a threshold.

But the real lesson is this: We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down. The best solution of all is to take a lot of that power back. When the power is in your hands, it's in the hands of someone who feels it when you fall down. When it's in their hands, it's your pain, their gain. That's no way to run a country.

Let Liberals Stew in the Juices of Scandal

"Our focus must be on getting out the truth, gathering evidence and accumulating a clear picture of who did what, with subpoenaed documents and sworn testimony.  There is every sign there is plenty more to come when it comes to evidence of political abuse, some of it crossing the lines of legality.  In the process of discovery, it is easy for process crimes to occur (ask Scooter Libby) and for the squeeze to be put on people implicated in conspiracy to obstruct justice or other process crimes. They reveal who told them what to do. You follow the evidence upward. It takes time. And that's a good thing," writes Thomas Lifson at American Thinker.

He argues that liberals should stew in the juices of scandal, be put on the spot and forced to either "tie their future to Obama, a sinking ship, or declare themselves on the side of truth and the American People."

Noonan: Stonewalling IRS Corruption and Abuse

"'I don't know'. 'I don't remember'. 'I'm not familiar with that detail'. 'It's not my precise area'. 'I'm not familiar with that letter'.  These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate," writes Peggy Noonan in the WSJ, who argues that "if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken."

That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.

So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?

Noonan recounts the story of Catherine Engelbrecht—a nice woman, a citizen, an American.

Whelton: Death by Media

Was President Obama led astray by his friends in the media? Yes, writes Clark Whelton in City Journal:

They intended no harm to the president, needless to say. But by withholding the criticism that prods public officials into doing a better job, by choosing not to print negative stories and commentaries about the Obama administration, the press corps tempted the president and his staff with visions of invincibility. The pro-Obama news crew—with a boost from the Nobel Peace Prize committee—confirmed the president’s exalted view of himself. They are in part responsible for encouraging Obama to think that he could tamper with the truth about Benghazi and get away with it. ...

And with each alibi they provided, with each news story they slanted to assist Obama at the polls, they deprived the president of the honest feedback that public officials may not want but desperately need. A biased press corps steadily pushed the president closer to the precipice where he now precariously stands.

In the morning, those who have engaged in whorish behavior—or in this case, those rewarded with invitations to insider Washington parties and access to private e-mail lists—are somehow astonished by a lack of respect. Members of the media, including Associated Press reporters, after favoring and flattering Obama for years, were stunned to discover that Obama’s Department of Justice was treating them like tarts and had targeted the AP with secret subpoenas.

The end of the affair is always painful and poignant. Unaccustomed to sunlight, fleeing suspicions of malfeasance and outright criminality, the Obama administration is pleading guilty to incompetence and ignorance. Benghazi? Hey, who knew the Libyans to whom we had been secretly running guns would turn them on us? We didn’t want to make things worse by calling the cops. Besides, we knew the media would let the story die. The IRS? Shock. Outrage. Never heard of the place.

An independent press is a compass, a vital part of the American system of checks and balances. It can provide the ship of state with mid-course corrections. But a compass that swings any way the helmsman wants is worse than useless. It points the way to disaster.

Jennifer Rubin (WPost): Benghazi Big Deal After All

"The spin that the American people aren’t interested in Benghazi or that it’s only Republicans who think something is fishy isn’t faring too well in a plethora of other polls," writes Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post.

The newest Post/ABC poll finds: “Last year’s deadly attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is shaping up as a real political problem for President Obama, with concern extending well beyond the conservative base. More than half of Americans say his administration is trying to cover up the facts of the attack.” Asked if the White House is engaged in a cover-up, 56 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of independents say yes.

From the latest Fox News poll (figures for independents are in parenthesis):

"Tricky Dick" to "Slippery ba'Rock"?

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, many true believers on the political right remained in denial that President Richard Nixon — 'Tricky Dick' as he would be remembered — had any knowledge of the illegal activities of his underlings. True believers on the political left are having the same problem today with the multiple scandals swirling around President Barack Obama. Will this president discredit his followers and perhaps be remembered as '"Slippery ba'Rock"?

In "A Crisis of Authority," WSJ's James Taranto writes:

Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left’s response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

Cataloguing several examples of denial and deflection by the political left's true believers, Taranto ponders the deeper meaning behind the Obama scandals: