Rick Perry To “Activist Judges”: Save Me
Rick Perry appears to be riding into the sunset, but he is not leaving the stage without exercising a true politician’s prerogative of cheerfully sacrificing any principle, no matter how strongly stated, when it becomes inconvenient.
If there’s one thing we know about Perry — one dry-gulch bedrock to his cowboy constitutional philosophy — it’s that he just hates them activist judges and all the perverted things they have done to the Fourteenth Amendment. “[T]he Fourteenth Amendment is abused by the Court to carry out whatever policy choices it wants to make in the form of judicial activism,” he lamented in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. In particular, courts “should be particularly protective of our founding structure — a unique structure of dual sovereigns that placed power as close to the people as was practical so that the people could govern themselves.”
Surely that would mean that the people of Virginia should have a right to determine what level of support a candidate needs to be a serious presidential candidate, deserving of a place on its primary ballot? Or should that decision be made by “unelected judges”?
Well, actually, unelected judges are suddenly looking right good to Gov. Perry.
Perry last week failed to qualify for the Virginia Republican Primary ballot, both a humiliating blow to his dignity and a concrete setback to his hope of remaining in the presidential race after his expected low showing in Iowa.
Well, that don’t sit right with Perry, and now he is shopping for a judge who will agree. In a lawsuit filed Monday, Perry asks the federal courts to step in on his behalf. Nothing too startling about that — if Perry feels the Virginia authorities had cheated him in some way that violates federal law or the Constitution, he has every right to invoke these sources of law in a court. But what’s remarkable is the second count of his suit, in which he asks the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to invent a new constitutional norm about how many signatures a state can require for its ballots. (Newt Gingrich so far has not filed a suit, and his campaign contented itself with a characteristically nuanced statement comparing the long-announced ballot-access rule to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.)
To qualify for the ballot, a presidential candidate has to collect the signatures of 10,000 registered Virginia voters who would attest that they intend to vote in the GOP primary. It’s steep — the 2008 Republican primary attracted just shy of 500,000 voters, making this a requirement of 2 percent of the votes cast — but hardly a staggering burden in a commonwealth of more than 5 million registered voters.
Perry didn’t fall a little short of his goal. He fell real short. By his own admission, he filed more than 6,000 valid signatures — 40 percent less than the required total.
In his suit, Perry makes two claims. One has some support in the caselaw — he says that by requiring the signature gatherers to be eligible Virginia voters, the state violates a line of cases that say that the First Amendment protects the right to use out-of-state personnel to gather signatures on some ballot petitions.
But the second claim comes screaming out of the clear blue Texas sky. “Virginia’s requirement that a presidential primary candidate collect signatures from 10,000 qualified voters, including 400 qualified voters from each Congressional district in the Commonwealth… violates freedom of speech and association protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution,” Perry’s complaint alleges.
I’m no election-law specialist, but I don’t know any caselaw supporting this. Perry sure doesn’t cite any. In the context of minor-party ballot access, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that (as it determined in Anderson v. Celebrezze) states have “undoubted right to require candidates to make a preliminary showing of substantial support in order to qualify for a place on the ballot….” In 1986, it approved a requirement that the Socialist Workers Party get signatures amounting to 1 percent of the voters in the state to qualify for the ballot. Perry was required to get 2 percent of the ballots cast — or, to put it another way, one-fifth of one percent of the eligible voters. His signers had to state that they intended to vote in the Republican primary, which limits the field somewhat, but the opportunity was still there.
Why is 10,000 too many but 6,000 is not? What’s the rule? Texas requires 4,500, meaning 300 each from at least 15 Congressional districts. Is that reasonable, but 10,000, including 400 from each of 11 Congressional Districts, is not? Perry’s suit is a request — a desperate plea — for a court to invent a rule. Even if you or I might see a problem with the signature requirement (I admit I don’t), this is precisely the kind of federal court meddling in local affairs that he thumps his chest against when it benefits criminal defendants, gay men and lesbians, or religious dissenters.
Why is there never an activist judge when you need one?
By: Garrett Epps, The Atlantic, December 29, 2011
Mitt Romney Must Clarify Defense Of Individual Mandate
I sympathize a little with former Gov. Mitt Romney on the issue of the individual mandate. In effect, the conservative movement pulled the rug out from under him.
He copped the idea from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Conservative legal scholars didn’t cry foul when Romneycare passed in 2006. Tea Party enforcer Sen. Jim DeMint didn’t seem to have a problem with it. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich explicitly supported it as late as 2008.
But when it became a central element of Obamacare, it suddenly became the thin end of the socialist wedge.
Still, Romney stretches things with his recent defense of the mandate:
What we did was right for the people of Massachusetts, the plan is still favored by 3 to 1 and it is fundamentally a conservative principle to insist that people take personal responsibility as opposed to turning to government for giving out free care.
Is the mandate really a reflection of the principle of personal responsibility?
Doesn’t the purist case for personal responsibility look more like the one made by Rep. Ron Paul in the Tea Party debate, in which Paul said freedom is about letting people suffer the consequences of risky behavior?
Put it this way: If Romney and Paul both say they’re for insisting on personal responsibility, they can’t both be right.
What we have here are two subtly different conceptions of “personal responsibility.”
When Romney uses the phrase, he means that, in the decision to purchase a major medical insurance policy, there’s a self-evidently “responsible” choice: You get coverage, even if you’re young and healthy.
When Paul uses it, he means you should be free not to buy it—and the rest of us shouldn’t have to foot the bill if your luck turns rotten.
Romney the technocrat probably thought of the individual mandate in terms of Cass Sunstein (currently serving in the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) and Richard Thaler’s “nudge theory” of human behavior: Government can encourage people to make better choices through wiser “choice architecture” instead of blunt instruments.
The problem for Romney, of course, is that lots of conservatives now believe the mandate is a blunt instrument—and lustily cheer at Paul’s more exacting definition of personal responsibility.
If Romney wants to continue to use the phrase to win over conservative skeptics, he’s going to have to clarify what he means by it.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, December 28, 2011
Romney Describes Healthcare Mandate As Conservative Principle
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the insurance mandate included in the Massachusetts healthcare law he signed is fundamentally a conservative principle.
Speaking Wednesday on “Fox and Friends,” Romney defended the Bay State’s healthcare law, which includes a version of the individual mandate, as inline with the Republican world view. The individual mandate was the centerpiece and most controversial aspect of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which has widely been blasted by Republicans as governmental overreach.
“I’m happy to stand by the things that I believe. I’m not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign,” Romney said. “What we did was right for the people of Massachusetts, the plan is still favored there by 3 to 1 and it is fundamentally a conservative principle to insist that people take personal responsibility as opposed to turning to government for giving out free care.”
On Tuesday, Romney and rival Newt Gingrich jabbed at each other over the matter after The Wall Street Journal uncovered a 2006 memo in which Gingrich said he “agreed entirely” with Romney’s healthcare bill.
Buzzfeed also uncovered a 2008 video in which Gingrich passionately defended the idea of an individual mandate and called it “immoral” for those who can afford to have insurance not to buy it.
“I knew that [Gingrich] supported the plan in the past, and I believe he supported it until he got into the race this year, but maybe before that he changed his view,” Romney said. “Look, our plan was right for our state, and in my view it was based on conservative principles that frankly came from Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation, which was that instead of people relying on government to provide their care, they should take personal responsibility.”
But Gingrich said he now realizes that there are aspects of the law that are “unacceptable,” and that unlike Romney, he has the courage to say so.
“There are a lot of details of ‘Romneycare’ that are unacceptable,” Gingrich said Tuesday on CNN. “And the difference between me and Romney is I’ve concluded — and I’m prepared to say publicly — I’ve concluded, just as the Heritage Foundation did, that the idea didn’t work. Romney’s still defending the mandate that he passed.”
Both Romney and Gingrich have vowed to repeal Obama’s healthcare law if elected president.
Romney is battling Ron Paul for the lead in polls of Iowa voters less than a week before that state’s GOP caucus. Gingrich had been in the lead, but has faded under attack from Romney and other GOP candidates.
By: Jonathan Easley, The Hill, December 28, 2011
How The Media Made Ron Paul
Ask just about any candidate’s hardcore supporters whether the media is giving their guy a fair shake and chances are you’ll be greeted with an emphatic “No!” and all sorts of supposedly egregious examples to prove the point.
But this sentiment is particularly pronounced among Ron Paul’s backers, who have flooded message boards, comments sections and journalist inboxes all year with claims that the press is essentially conspiring to ignore the Texas congressman and his libertarian message — and that the only thing separating him from front-runner status in the GOP presidential race is a level of coverage commensurate with the other major candidates.
The Paul-ites haven’t been entirely wrong. It’s now clear that Paul has significantly expanded his support from four years ago, could win Iowa (and maybe even New Hampshire), and is positioned to gobble up a significant chunk of delegates and perhaps give his party’s establishment the scare of a lifetime. But even though the warning signs have been there for months, the press didn’t seem to notice until very recently. What Paul’s loyalists haven’t appreciated, though, is how helpful — vital even — the media’s lack of interest has been to their candidate’s rise.
Just consider the current uproar over the racist political newsletters that were sent out under Paul’s name (and used to fund his political activities) in the early 1990s. The story is hardly new, but to many voters it feels new because — like Paul himself — it’s been ignored by the press all year.
This is a perk of being dismissed by the press as a fringe figure. In 1996, when he made his comeback bid for a House seat in Texas, Paul briefly had to confront the newsletters, but once he was elected and became an entrenched incumbent, the issue was largely dropped by the local press (old news) and ignored by the national media, who saw him as just a gadfly backbencher. And when he ran for president in 2008, it didn’t come up until very late in the cycle, when some staggering fundraising numbers briefly compelled the political world to notice him. But almost as soon as it exploded back then, the story went away, with the media regarding Paul’s relatively weak early primary showings as proof that his base of support was very loud and very narrow and that he wasn’t worth taking seriously.
And that, more or less, was how the media treated Paul’s current campaign until the past few weeks.
In a way, this was understandably infuriating to Paul and his supporters. Over the summer, for instance, he nearly won the Iowa straw poll, netting the third most votes in the event’s history — evidence, in hindsight, that he really had grown his Iowa support since ’08. But reporters and commentators (present company included) were largely dismissive of the accomplishment, seeing it mainly as further, unneeded proof of the devotion of Paul’s army and not a sign that something might be stirring.
But the virtual press blackout also meant that the newsletters weren’t being mentioned, and that Paul wasn’t facing the intense day-to-day scrutiny that took a toll on other GOP candidates when they enjoyed breakthrough moments this year. It allowed him to present himself to audiences on his own terms and helped him become something of a sympathetic figure. In effect, Paul was able to take advantage of the many nontraditional means of communicating with voters that now exist without those voters being subjected to screaming mainstream press headlines about Paul controversies and gaffes. How many of the new supporters Paul gained these past few years didn’t know anything about the newsletters until this month?
Paul has argued that major media outlets have ignored him because they are “frightened” by his unconventional views, particularly his foreign policy noninterventionism. This is not a baseless assertion, but it’s probably overstated. Certainly, a compelling case can be made that the most important media entity in Republican politics, Fox News, has gone out of its way to treat Paul as a nobody because of his rejection of the GOP’s “war on terror” orthodoxy.
But for most of the political press, the explanation is simpler: Paul’s noninterventionism (and the blatant hostility toward him from key GOP voices like Fox) imposes a unique ceiling on his intraparty support and makes it very easy to dismiss him as a serious contender for the nomination. The experience of 2008, when Paul briefly succeeded in making the press second-guess itself only to wind up an asterisk in the primary season, reinforced this impression. To his credit, Paul once again forced media second-guessing this time around, with his rise to first place in Iowa polling this month — a development that almost immediately prompted Fox News to change gears and shower attention on him and his newsletters and for the rest of the political media to pursue the newsletter story as well, with disastrous results for Paul.
This saga could cost Paul much of the new support he’s won since ’08, will make expanding his base much further all but impossible (even if he does win Iowa next week), and will probably cement his status as a fringe figure. The fallout will be more permanent than it was in 2008 or in 1996 because this time the whole political world is watching. And the reason the whole political world is watching is because Paul managed to reach polling heights that no one believed were possible. And he only reached those polling heights because from January 2008 until December 2011 the media pretty much ignored him.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, December 27, 2011
Why Romney Decided to Go Glenn Beck
A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney abruptly changed his main campaign message. Before that point, he had been lambasting President Obama as a likable failure, well intentioned but sadly unable to revive the economy. When asked if Obama was a socialist, Romney would deny it outright, insisting he was merely in “over his head.” But starting December 7, Romney began to paint Obama as a sinister radical who had not failed, but had succeeded all too well, in transforming the basic nature of America.
At the time, I thought Romney’s sudden switch was a response to Newt Gingrich’s sudden (and apparently short-lived) challenge from the right, positioning himself to speak more directly to the fears of a freaked-out Republican electorate. But I now think Romney’s campaign has concluded that his old campaign message wasn’t strong enough for the general election. Conservative columnist Kimberly Strassel has a column passing on research findings from American Crossroads, a Republican independent expenditure group. Crossroads surveyed a large number of swing voters and concluded that they couldn’t beat Obama merely by portraying him as having failed:
“To lock down voters in the middle, Republicans are going to have to convince them that Obama isn’t just a flawed and ineffective leader, but that he has an agenda and motivations that they don’t share,” says Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads
Strassel presents these findings as advice that Romney needs to take. But I think it’s pretty obvious that Romney has already taken it. His tone toward Obama has grown harsher, and he is now openly (and falsely) calling Obama a socialist who is promoting total economic equality. I’m actually pretty skeptical of this research – the political middle clearly seems to be voters who like Obama but blame him for the poor economy without having a strong ideological understanding of why the economy has failed. But, whatever its merits, this seems to be the strategy Romney has embraced.
The tension between the previous version of Romney and the newest model sprang to the fore when he visited the Wall Street Journal editorial board for a weekend interview. In it, Romney carefully presented himself as an ideologue rather than a technocrat:
[Romney] concludes with even more force, “America doesn’t need a manager. America needs a leader. The president is failing not just because he’s a poor manager. It’s because he doesn’t know where to lead.”
Voters will have to judge the quality of that vision, and how it compares with President Obama’s. But there’s no doubt it’s a contrast with Mr. Romney’s visit to our offices in 2007, which became legendary for its appeal to technocratic virtue.
In that meeting the candidate began by declaring “I love data” and kept on extolling data, even “wallowing in data,” as a way to reform both business and government. He said he’d bring in management consultants to turn around the government, mentioning McKinsey, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Romney seemed to elevate the power of positive technocratic thinking to a governing philosophy.
So it is also notable that now Mr. Romney describes the core failure of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda as faith in “a wise group of governmental bureaucrats” rather than political and economic freedom.
Romney’s problem is that he is, as Jodi Kantor’s New York Times profile shows, a technocrat at heart. He approaches public policy from a data-driven standpoint, searching for solutions that do the most to increase human welfare. This inevitably estranges him from the conservative tradition, which in its essence is a philosophical belief in limited government that holds firm regardless of empirical effects.
It was Romney’s technocratic inclinations that caused him to look at a problem like health care and wind up embracing essentially the same solution that the Obama administration did, which is why conservatives distrust him. The irony is that Romney approaches campaigning the way he approaches governing, obeying the data above all else. If the data tell him to start wildly accusing Obama of abolishing all economic inequality, then that is what he will do.
By: Published in New York Magazine, Daily Intel, December 27, 2011
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