When in October 2009 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked about the constitutionality of the individual health insurance mandate, her response was a question, twice asked, “Are you serious?” Are you serious?” Lest one think hers was a momentary lapse, Pelosi’s press secretary later reiterated the point by saying of the question about the provision’s constitutionality, “That is not a serious question.”

Madam Speaker, the question posed to you was a serious one.  It is a question so serious, in fact, that it should be question at the beginning, middle, and end of any legislative debate.  It should animate our public conversations, and it should motivate our national legislators to remember the oath they take upon assuming office.  That oath, as follows, is itself serious about the Constitution:

“I, (name of Member), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.  So help me God.”

The original oath of office, adopted in 1789, was even more to the point:  “I do solemnly swear (or affirm),” a member of Congress used to say, “that I will support the Constitution of the United States.”

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln, not yet 30 years old and still eight years away from his own election to the House of Representatives, said that the Constitution and “reverence for the laws” should “be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;— let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.”

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We’ve got a star driven panel this week as Pat Sajak, and Jonah Goldberg join the show. It’s a fascinating conversation as they talk polling and how they ask the delicate questions, movie marketing, why Obama’s agenda polls terribly, but he himself doesn’t. Also, dogs, liberal economics, Jonah Goldberg’s unintentional impression of a Cylon, the predictable (and gratuitous) Star Trek reference and much more. All this, and Ethel Merman bringing up the rear. Yes, you read that right. Listen in!

For links mentioned in this episode, or to comment, please visit us at Ricochet.com.

Five years ago when Congress was considering a requirement that nasal decongestants be placed behind the counter to combat their use in methamphetamine production, I was one of many policy analysts who argued against this restriction.

I believed it would do little to curb meth use, make the purchase of cold products by law-abiding citizens time consuming and inconvenient, and shift methamphetamine production to Mexican drug cartels.

Since the bill passed, seizures of domestic labs dropped while meth use rose, and consumers now wait behind prescription customers just to buy cold pills. Mexican drug cartels increased in power and violence while becoming the primary supplier of methamphetamine to the U.S.

Unfortunately, I was correct on all counts.  Yet here we go again.

Government is limited in its ability to fight the war on drugs, leading bureaucrats to pick low hanging fruit.  To fight abuse of marijuana, prescription drugs, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and over-the-counter drugs, it must find producers, identify distributors and catch users – all of whom operate in the shadows.

Cough medicine on the other hand, is easy.  There it is, in plain sight, on store shelves.

In an effort to pass a ridiculous regulation and then declare a victory in the drug war, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering a rule that would require a physician’s prescription for your favorite off-the-shelf cough medicine.

Yes, I know; I can’t believe it either.

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This week brought more Subprime Stimulus from an administration attempting to ignite the economy with a burnt-out match.  The Obama proposal to allow the expensing 100 percent of investment in plant and equipment is fine, but something that might’ve occurred to the administration years ago as an obvious first step, in the sense of, you know, just walking through a door before breaking a wall down instead.

Apart from this belated revelation regarding enterprise and the calculus behind why some people might wake up one day and decide to hire other people, Obama’s economic program fundamentally consists of fostering a compulsory “Declaration of Dependence” on the part of America’s wealth-creating sector. Washington is all about the institutionalization of Government Steering While the Market Rows.

Despite bad economic news and Obama’s policy of talking about business like a dog, it’s only 2010, and America’s real wealth is yet to be created if we correct course.

However if policymakers don’t confront regulation as well as spending, they are missing most of the story behind today’s expanding state.

Congressional reformers need to institute massive, unprecedented doses of economic liberalization. America requires massive deregulation in sectors like basic manufacturing, telecommunications, electricity, frontier science, and energy and the elimination of policymakers that stand in the way, regardless of party.  We have to re-appreciate how it was that the U.S.—now only 235 years old—became richer than the rest of the world in a historical eye-blink, and how that remarkable achievement can be recaptured.

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One year ago today, we launched BigGovernment.com. As you probably know, our first posts dealt with the video sting of ACORN, orchestrated by the new citizen journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. It had an impact.

It also marked a new chapter in on-line media. Most of the conservative on-line media are scorekeepers. The provide opinion, but don’t really move the ball forward. I know that sounds both hyperbolic and self-serving, but consider: after the second day of our video release the U.S. Senate voted to defund ACORN and the Census Bureau severed all ties with the embattled organization. All of this happened before either the Washington Post or New York Times had devoted a single column inch to the burgeoning scandal. I’ve been in Washington D.C. for 16 years. Nothing politically happened until one of those papers weighed in. Until last year. The game totally changed and, even today, neither the JournoList-supporting Post nor the hemorrhaging Times understands this. Newsweek is dead. USA Today is shedding staff as fast as it can while Time clings to life as something to glance at on an airplane and every other part of the legacy media retires to “background noise.”  Simply put, no one cares about them anymore.

There was a time that news organizations like the Post and the Times could set the national agenda. They were the arbiters of what was news and what was “important.” A wink from one of their reporters would set off a national debate. If they ignored a story, well, it went nowhere. They were the “casting couch” of all possible news. Those days are over.

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On this date, in 2009, BigGovernment.com was launched. With your support, we have made a difference. Thanks for everything. We expect the next year to be even better.

From the Associated Press:

The minister of a Florida church said he has canceled plans to burn copies of the Quran because the leader of a much-opposed plan to build an Islamic Center near ground zero has agreed to move its location. The agreement couldn’t be immediately confirmed.

The Rev. Terry Jones said Thursday that Americans oppose the mosque being built at the location and that Muslims do not want the Quran burned. He said instead of his plan to burn the books on Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11, he will be flying to New York to speak to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf about moving the mosque.

“We are, of course, now against any other group burning Qurans,” Jones said during a news conference. We would right now ask no one to burn Qurans. We are absolutely strong on that. It is not the time to do it.” (more…)

While Harry Reid may have allowed the energy tax hikes to die on the floor of the Senate, liberals nationwide have continued their attacks on the energy industry. The Gulf oil spill is barely a fond memory of a moratorium and Democrats are already seizing on the incident to push a host of job-killing, industry-kneecapping taxes and regulations designed to do what they failed to do legislatively: take down the American energy industry.

First the regulations: starting in January, the EPA will begin enforcing a little known provision called the “Tailoring Rule” – a new series of regulations that allow the EPA to dole out permits to carbon-generating companies “allowing” them to pollute in certain amounts, strictly regulated by environmental watchdogs. These regulations don’t just touch the usual suspects, but also renewable energy sources that don’t immediately fall into the “green” category as defined by environmental groups – sources like Maine’s biomass industry, which creates usable energy from environmental waste. Under the EPA regulations, the biomass industry, which was viewed – and treated – up until now, as carbon neutral, would face a host of regulations directed at greenhouse gas producers – regulations that would greatly raise the cost of doing business and could have dire economic consequences for Maine and beyond.

And then there’s the taxes.

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Recently the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned “flavored” cigarettes, preventing the sale of clove and (the hitherto unknown) “chocolate” cigarettes. These “candy flavored” smokes hook teenagers by masking, according to one anti-smoking activist, “the taste of the poison.” And earlier this year, the FDA prevented the branding of cigarettes as “light” or “medium,” instead forcing manufacturers to rechristen them with innocuous names like “Marlboro Gold” and “Marlboro Blue.”

At the end of September, the FDA will announce the formation of a Menthol Subcommittee, which will review the available scientific literature on the health effects of menthol cigarettes. But are menthol cigarettes any worse for smokers than “non-flavored” cigarettes? Are they harder to quit, as anti-smoking activists suggest? Or is the government campaign against menthol simply another step on the road to the complete abolition of cigarettes?

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Oops.

Massachusetts Democrat Senator John Kerry was his Party’s 2004 nominee for President.  Two hallmarks of his losing campaign were his incredible stiffness – he managed to make 2000 Democrat nominee Al Gore look lively – and his notorious assertion that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

This linguistic whiplash was part of a Kerry pattern, and led to his being branded “Senator Flip Flop.”

We are still learning just how long-standing and ingrained this Kerry pattern is.

Mike Riggs at the Daily Caller has an amazing document from the Senator’s past.  A 1998 Congressional letter to then Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman William Kennard onto which Senator Kerry signed.  The letter reads in part:

“The overarching policy goal of the 1996 Act is to promote a market-driven, robustly competitive environment for all communications services.  Given that, we wish to make it clear that nothing in the 1996 (Telecommunications) Act or its legislative history suggests that Congress intended to alter the current classification of Internet and other information services or to expand traditional telephone regulation to new and advanced services.”

Meaning Senator Kerry was stating that the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not authorize the FCC to apply its oppressive Title II telephone regulatory regime to the Internet.

Oh what a dozen years will do to Senator Flip Flop’s outlook on things.

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The New York Times’ headline said it all: “Democrats plan political triage to retain House – Fear Republican Wave.”  Indeed, there will be a wave of losses for the Democrats stretching from coast-to coast this Fall.   No clearer indication of that is the declared Democrat strategy for the Fall election:  “We are going to have to win these races one by one.”  That same strategy was declared by the Republicans in the 2006 election – an election that cost Republicans the House.  Amidst even stronger resentment today, the Democrats won’t win 435 different elections either and will lose the House.

The truth about Congressional elections is that a not insignificant percentage of the population barely knows the name of their Congressman or Congresswoman.  Far less know the details of the actual policy views of their representative.   By the time they get to the ballot box, however, most voters know how they feel about the direction of the country, the economy and have a general opinion about the job the President and Congress are doing.  That’s why so many prognosticators pay attention to the Generic Congressional ballot, consumer confidence, the Presidential approval rating and Party identification.

Further, while it is true that incumbents have a significant edge in ordinary years, when it comes to Congressional elections in this mass-media era, large swings in one direction or another are based on the pervasive feeling about the Partys in general, i.e. the Party brand  - not the individual candidates.  Put another way, we no longer live in an age where all politics are just local.

So in 1994, the Republican’s took over Congress not so much because Republicans had so many better candidates – although they likely did on the margin – but that the Contract with America presented an attractive brand for the Republican Party as whole and the direction it wanted to take the Country. The Democrats, on the other hand, were branded as tax-raisers.   In 2006, the view the country had of free-spending Republicans as a whole was not so flattering and the Republicans wound up losing the House.

At a large meeting of Republicans insiders in early 2006, I specifically asked a Congressional election strategist whether the Washington Republicans intended to run 435 different elections that Fall or run one national election.  The answer to my question was exactly what I did not want to hear.

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Now that elections are around the corner members of Congress who voted for the healthcare reform bill are spending a lot of time back-peddling, avoiding the topic all together or digging themselves in a deeper hole by claiming that Americans will have better healthcare with choice of doctors, and expanded coverage at an affordable price.

Let’s look at the facts:

• The bill was written by and for Big Pharma and the medical insurance industry. Senator Max Baucus a member of the congressional brain trust who brought us the healthcare reform bill admitted he never fully read it and has no idea what is even in it. Now he admits to having no clue what was in the bill he helped shove down our throats…. Unbelievable? Surprising? No just business as usual.

• Those on Medicare were told that they would see no change in their benefits and would be able to keep their physician. In fact, 11 million senior citizens will see premiums go up because of cost cutting including the removal of Medicare advantage. Furthermore, since there has been a decline in the number of physicians who currently are accepting new Medicare patients or who take Medicare at all, it is likely that seniors will not be able to keep their doctor and will pay more for less.

• The nomination of Donald Berwick to head CMS means a philosophical shift of our healthcare system to the British model of medicine that puts a premium on cost and not the needs of the individual. An example of this is the decision by the FDA remove Avastin from the medication available to treat advanced cancer because it is deemed that the good of extension of life is outweighed by the cost of the medication. Medicare has already stopped covering the use for Avastin to treat  ovarian cancer in Colorado.

It is clear that the relentless drive to reform the health care system was a cynical political push for a win at all costs. We were told what we wanted to hear and there was no attention paid to the consequences. Every single card was played – from the class card to the race card, and getting us to fight among ourselves achieved the goal of distraction. Now that the smoke has cleared it is pretty obvious that in the name of expanding healthcare to approximately 30 million more people, we have sacrificed what is best about our healthcare system – individualized patient care, the doctor patient relationship, and the drive towards innovation. However, the costs have not changed.

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Yet another story not from The Onion. From WGN Chicago:

The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.

On a conference call today with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and other congressional leaders, President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality announced the selection of John Goss to lead the near $80 million, multi-pronged federal attack against Asian carp.

“This is a serious challenge, a serious threat,” Durbin said. “When it comes to the Asian carp threat, we are not in denial. We are not in a go-slow mode. We are in a full attack, full-speed ahead mode. We want to stop this carp from advancing.” (more…)

It’s no secret that Democrats and organized labor have long shared a love affair that’s lasted for decades and burns even stronger under the Obama administration.  As more and more legislation has been enacted over the years in the interest of protecting workers, including state and federal safety and environmental regulations, voluntary union membership in the private sector has decreased.  Yet, public sector unions have grown under big government policies.  And they continue to grow.

Creating union jobs has become far less of a worker protection issue and far more a political tool for vote pandering.  With 12% of the overall workforce, labor union leaders invest their members’ dues in Democrats and rally their members to turnout at the polls and check off the box for those candidates.  Democrats in turn reward the unions with bigger government – more public sector jobs, more government projects, more schools and other facilities…more spending means more union dues.  And more union dues means more money to spend on political campaigns.  And so the cycle goes.  All too often, big government is a reflection of special interest paybacks, not of well-intended policy.

But for the other 88% of us equally hard working Americans who, primarily by our own choice, are NOT union members, where does that leave us?  Usually, with more taxes and without much of a voice.  And nowhere near as much voting power as Big Labor has amassed over all these years.

But all that is about to change, thanks to The Concord Project.  Finally, a tool for liberty-loving Americans that’s sure to bring out the community organizer in all of us.  And give the average voter a fighting chance against powerful unions and overbearing lefty groups during election season. (more…)

When John Boehner was first elected Republican leader, he said he felt like the dog that caught the car. This is a metaphor for someone who works hard to achieve a major goal, only to be confronted with the age old question “What do we do now?” If Republicans take back the House and Senate, the party will actually be the dog that caught the car.

Victory at the polls means Republicans will inherit an angry electorate that has been voting for change since 2006.  The country is at a crossroads. In one direction there is big, centralized government that usurps the rights of states, local communities, and individual Americans. It’s the job of the Republican leaders to outline another direction, but that direction is not yet clear to them.  This must change before the next election.

Americans punished Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Conventional wisdom said the country wanted change. The truth is that Americans saw no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Republican brand has gone stale and paved the way for a new era of big government and socialism. As Newsweek boldly proclaimed in early 2009, “We are all socialists now.”

Thankfully, the prospect of this socialist era enduring is slim. The American public has learned what socialistic polices really mean. A budget deficit that was $161 billion when the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 and four years later projected to be $1.47 trillion; and a national debt held by the public that was $5 trillion and four years later projected to be $9.2 trillion. This and a lot more, including a projected $2.6 trillion cost to implement the Democrats’ healthcare bill, have soured the experience of most Americans with a Socialist Golden Age.  As Margaret Thatcher said, “…Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” We just didn’t know that the White House and the Democratic Congress would run out of other people’s money so soon, or that they could accelerate our financial mess so rapidly.

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Edging closer to his death-bed, Fidel Castro seems to be trying to atone for his sins. He is even saying that the “Cuban Model” doesn’t work. These near death-bed confessions may ease his mind, but they do nothing for the millions who suffered under his rule.

As if the work of disgraced Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) on the housing and banking sectors, and subsequently therefore the larger economy weren’t enough already, I see this heads-up from the American Policy Center passed along to me. Apparently we suffer from too little government, not enough planning, and a few “Sustainability” offices are needed to more gently minister to how you and your families lead your lives and can better do so to meet the state’s desires.

This is not unexpected. As I wrote about this creeping “livability” agenda in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America:

Team Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America” were immediate, widespread, and sweeping. The National Journal featured a debate about “livability” after someone there noticed that “the Obama administration and leading congressional Democrats appear to be making the creation of ‘livable communities’…a central transportation policy goal.” However, the “livability” and “happiness” indexes fetishized by the Left are code for coerced inconvenience, discomfort, or merely sameness, trading off individuals’ liberties to remove distinctions brought about by unfair quirks such as differences in ingenuity or hard work. But our superiors know that these differences are really only the product of a world in which the successful have won life’s lottery, so the spoils need to be spread around a bit.

Livability and the like serve as the rationale for all manner of intrusions. Innovation Newsbriefs in October 2009 noted that it was “the Administration’s intent to increase the federal role in shaping local development patterns and influencing travel behavior. ‘Smart growth’ planning and shifting more automobile travel to public transportation have been long-standing goals of progressive planners and assorted anti-sprawl activists, but these goals may now become a matter of federal policy under the Administration’s ‘livability’ initiative.”

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood did Obama no favors by candidly defending against inquiries about this, stressing that it’s no big deal. In fact, he pointed out, “about everything we do around here is government intrusion in peoples’ lives.” (House Majority Whip James Clyburn helpfully added soon thereafter, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.” (What a team.) (citations omitted)

Dodd’s bill isn’t going anywhere, one would assume. Except that it has been reported out for full Senate consideration by the Banking Committee he still somehow chairs. It is one lame-duck tantrum away from being reality (two, if you count the House where the numbers make most things possible until January).

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Members of the American Federation of Teachers, along with AFSCME, SEIU and several other national labor unions, are showing their true political stripes by joining the “Labor for Palestine” movement.

These groups are not just calling for a Palestinian homeland in the Middle East and a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli standoff. They’re suggesting that the creation of Israel has been a disaster for the Palestinian people.

It’s clear that they don’t share the commitment to Israeli security that American presidential administrations – Republican and Democrat – have maintained since 1948. They are radically anti-Israel, and they offer no apologies for that. The following passage can be found on the Labor for Palestine website:

The establishment of Israel in 1948 inflicted on the Palestinian people a continuing campaign of displacement, discrimination, exploitation and brutality that has continued to this day.

The anti-Israel rhetoric is just the tip of the iceberg. The group suggests that American foreign policy was to blame for the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. In other words, 3,000-plus people deserved to die due to American support for the continued existence of Israel.

The group also protests recent U.S. military actions in the Middle East – calling them an endless “war of terror,” – and suggests that Iran may be the next innocent victim of American “colonialization.”

Their allies — including racist demagogue Pam Geller, the Anti-Defamation League, Rudolph Giuliani and prominent Neocons — promote bigotry to fuel increasingly unpopular U.S. wars against the Muslim world, while shielding Israeli apartheid from growing international isolation.

Workers, abroad and at home, have long paid the price for these disastrous policies. On 9/11, we suffered blowback from decades of U.S./Israeli war, occupation and colonialism.

9/11, in turn, has been the pretext for an endless bipartisan war of terror. This war has devastated Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen and other countries.

It has left thousands of G.I.s dead or maimed. It has tortured prisoners and undermined civil liberties. It has squandered trillions of dollars.

Now it targets Iran.

For these reasons, it is essential for trade unionists and all workers to stand up in defense of the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

Excuse me?  The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were “blowback” for the “US/Israeli war?”

The leadership of these unions can’t possibly believe that a majority of their members buy into this left-wing rhetoric.  They ought to denounce the radicalism within their ranks, or risk being tainted with it.  Or does AFT President Randi Weingarten really believe we deserved what we got on 9/11?

Meanwhile teachers, many of whom are professionals and work hard every day, ought to demand better than the radical positions of their union leaders.