After President Clinton took a drubbing from voters in the 1994 Congressional election, he realized his policies weren’t working.  He promptly declared, “The era of big government is over,” and he then went about making good on that declaration:

• He reduced spending by a miraculous 3 1/2 percent of GDP.

• He attacked entitlement spending and abolished the ballooning open-ended welfare system.

• He signed what amounted to the biggest capital gains tax cut in American history.

• He delivered the only four budget surpluses in four decades.

• And he produced a period of prolonged economic expansion.

President Obama faced a similar cross-road as he delivered his fourth State of the Union Address to Congress.  If he had followed the example of his successful Democratic predecessor, he could have redeemed his presidency, revived the economy and rallied the country.

Instead, he succumbed to the basic ingredient of hubris: that the more we invest in our mistakes, the less willing we are to correct them.

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Long ago, Jefferson warned, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”  The exceptions to that rule have been few and far between recently, and ought to be celebrated when they occur.

One did this past week with the announcement that supporters of the so-called “Stop On-Line Piracy Act” and the “Protect Intellectual Property Act” have indefinitely postponed their measures after an unprecedented protest across the Internet.

SOPA and PIPA pose a crippling danger to the Internet because they use the legitimate concern over copy-right infringement as an excuse for government to intrude upon and regulate the very essence of the Internet – the unrestricted and absolutely free association that links site to site, providing infinite pathways for commerce, discourse and learning.

It is not the Internet per se that has set the stage for the next quantum leap in human knowledge and advancement – but rather the free association at the core of the Internet.  And this is precisely what SOPA and PIPA directly threaten.

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In all this debate, I fear both parties have missed a critical point.

Both versions of this bill impose a permanent new tax on every mortgage backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

To pay for an additional two months of tax relief under the Senate version or 12 months under the House version, more than $3,000 of new taxes will be imposed on every $150,000 mortgage backed by Fannie or Freddie.

A family taking out a $250,000 mortgage will pay $5,000 more in taxes–directly and solely because of this bill– hidden in their future mortgage payments.

This is atrocious public policy.

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Mr. Speaker:

I rise in opposition to Section 1021 of the underlying Conference Report (H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act).

This section specifically affirms that the President has the authority to deny due process to any American it charges with “substantially supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban or any ‘associated forces’” – whatever that means.

Would “substantial support” of an “associated force,” mean linking a web-site to a web-site that links to a web-site affiliated with al-Qaeda?  We don’t know.  The question is, “do we really want to find out?”

We’re told not to worry – that the bill explicitly states that nothing in it shall alter existing law.

But wait.

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Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) made the following statement to the House Chamber on October 26, 2011:

Mr. Speaker:  The government’s continuing failure to address our nation’s gut-wrenching unemployment stems from a fundamental disagreement over how jobs are created in the first place.  We are now in the third year of policies predicated on the assumption that government spending creates jobs. We have squandered three years and trillions of dollars of the nation’s wealth on such policies, and they have not worked because they cannot work.

Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy until it has first taken that same dollar OUT of the economy. True, we can SEE the job that is saved or created when the government puts that dollar back into the economy.  What we can’t see as clearly are the jobs that are destroyed or prevented from forming because government has first taken that dollar OUT of the economy.  We see those millions of lost jobs in a chronic unemployment rate and a stagnating economy.

Government can transfer jobs from the productive sector to the government sector by taking money from one and giving it to the other.  That’s at the heart of the President’s plan to spend billions of dollars to hire more teachers and firefighters and police officers.  But these temporary government jobs come at a steep price: every dollar spent sustaining one of these jobs is a dollar taken from the same capital pool that would otherwise have been available to productive businesses to invest in creating permanent jobs.

Government can also transfer jobs from one business to another by taking capital from one and giving it the other. That’s how we got Solyndra.  We put a half-billion dollars at risk to create 1,100 jobs (that’s $450,000 per job).  Now that half-billion dollars are gone and so are the jobs.  And who pays for these losses?  Other businesses and their employees – meaning fewer jobs created.

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When the President ordered the attack on Libya without Congressional authorization, he crossed a very bright Constitutional line that he himself recognized in 2007 when he told the Boston Globe “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

The reason the American Founders reserved the question of war to Congress was that they wanted to assure that so momentous a decision could not be made by a single individual. They had watched European kings plunge their nations into bloody and debilitating wars and wanted to avoid that fate for the American Republic.

The most fatal and consequential decision a nation can make is to go to war, and the American Founders wanted that decision made by all the representatives of the people after careful deliberation. Only when Congress has made that fateful decision does it fall to the President as Commander in Chief to command our armed forces in that war.

The authors of the Constitution were explicit on this point. In Federalist 69, Alexander Hamilton drew a sharp distinction between the American President’s authority as Commander in Chief, which he said “would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces” and that of the British king who could actually declare war.

To contend that the President has the legal authority to commit an act of war without Congressional approval requires ignoring every word the Constitution’s authors said on this subject – and they said quite a lot.

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March 23, 2011

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I have read your letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate dated March 21, 2011 concerning your order that United States Armed Forces attack the nation of Libya. You cite the authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 and your “constitutional
authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.”

The Constitution clearly and unmistakably vests Congress with the sole prerogative “to declare war.” Your letter fails to explain how a resolution of the United Nations Security Council is necessary to commit this nation to war but that an act of Congress is not.

The United Nations Participation Act expressly withholds authorization for the President to commit United States Armed Forces to combat in pursuit of United Nations directives without specific Congressional approval. The War Powers Resolution states that the President’s power to engage United States Armed Forces in hostilities “shall not be inferred . . .from any treaty heretofore or hereafter ratified unless such treaty is implemented by legislation specifically authorizing the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities…”

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The Subcommittee on Water and Power held an oversight hearing last week in Washington to examine the FY 2012 budget request for the Bureau of Reclamation. Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock made the following opening statement at the hearing:

With today’s hearing, the Water and Power Sub-Committee will begin the process of restoring abundance as the principal objective of America’s Federal water and power policy. We meet today to receive testimony from the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Service on their plans for the coming year. We do so in conjunction with our responsibility under the Federal Budget Act to provide guidance to the House Budget Committee as it prepares the 2012 budget and with our responsibility under House Resolution 72 to identify regulations and practices of the government that are impeding job creation and burdening economic growth.

In my opinion, all of these hearings and all of the actions stemming from them must be focused on developing the vast water and hydro-electric resources in our nation. The failure of the last generation to keep pace with our water and power needs has caused chronic water shortages and skyrocketing electricity prices that are causing serious economic harm.

In addition, willful policies that have deliberately misallocated our resources must be reversed.

California’s Central Valley, where 200 billion gallons of water were deliberately diverted away from vital agriculture for the enjoyment and amusement of the 2-inch Delta Smelt is a case in point. These water diversions have destroyed a quarter million acres of the most fertile farmland in America, thrown tens of thousands of farm families into unemployment and impacted fruit, vegetable and nut prices in grocery stores across America.

In Northern Arizona, 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity – enough to power a million homes – has been lost due to environmental mandates for the humpback chub.

In the Klamath, the federal government is seeking to destroy four perfectly good hydroelectric dams at the cost of more than a half billion dollars at a time when we can’t guarantee enough electricity to keep refrigerators running this summer. The rationale is to save the salmon, but the same proposal would close the Iron Gate Fish Hatchery that produces 5 million salmon smolt each year.

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Last year I voted to extend the PATRIOT Act for one year. I regret that vote and was glad to have been able to correct it, although I am pained that the House voted otherwise yesterday.

During this past year, I have become convinced that the provisions of the so-called PATRIOT Act are an affront to the Bill of Rights and a serious threat to our fundamental liberty as Americans.

The Fourth Amendment arises from abuses of the British Crown that allowed roving searches by revenue agents under the guise of what were called “writs of assistance” or “general warrants.” Instead of following specific allegations against specific individuals, the Crown’s revenue agents were given free rein to search indiscriminately.

In 1761, the famous colonial leader, James Otis, challenged these writs, arguing that “A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.” Two hundred and fifty years later, the PATRIOT Act restores these roving searches.

In the audience that day in 1761 was a 25-year-old lawyer named John Adams. He would later recall, “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the child, ‘Independence’ was born.”

The American Founders responded with the Fourth Amendment. It provides that before the government can invade a person’s privacy, the executive branch must present sworn testimony to an independent judiciary that a crime has occurred, that there is reason to believe that an individual should be searched for evidence of the crime and specify the place to be searched and the things to be seized. The John Doe roving wiretaps provided under the bill are a clear breach of this crystal clear provision.

The entire point of having an open and independent judiciary is so that abuses of power can be quickly identified by the public and corrected. The very structure of this law prevents that from occurring.

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As Chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee of Natural Resources, my colleagues and I are excited and eager to undertake the mission outlined in House Resolution 72: to identify the federal regulations in this field that are impeding job creation and slowing the economy.

The only problem is deciding where to begin.

A generation ago, the principal objective of our water and power policy was to create an abundance of both. It was an era when vast reservoirs and hydro-electric facilities produced a cornucopia of clean and plentiful water and electricity on a scale so vast that many communities didn’t even bother to measure the stuff.

But that objective of abundance has been abandoned in favor of rationing shortages caused by government.

The result is increasingly scarce and expensive water and power that now undermines our prosperity as a nation.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the Central Valley of California. The last Congress sat idly by as this administration deliberately diverted 200 billion gallons of water away from the most abundant agricultural region of our nation – all to satisfy the environmental left and its pet cause, a three inch minnow called the Delta Smelt.

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Representative Tom McClintock  delivered the following remarks in the House of Representatives in opposition to H.R. 5297.  The bill will be voted on by the House.

House Chamber, Washington, D.C.  M. Speaker:

The proponents tell us that this bill will increase lending to small businesses.  To do so they are creating a $30 billion slush fund to make loans to smaller banks, therefore encouraging smaller banks to make loans to small businesses.  Or so they say.

It is a splendid example of what I like to call McClintock’s Second Law of Political Physics: the more we invest in our mistakes, the less willing we are to correct them.

It’s apparently escaped the proponents’ attention that we are already doing precisely what the proposed new small business lending fund would do through the TARP’s existing Capital Purchase Program.

That’s the conclusion of the Special Inspector General of TARP, Neil Barofsky. He wrote to the Financial Services Committee on May 17th and said: “in terms of its basic design, its participants, its application process, and perhaps, its funding source from an oversight perspective, the (Small Business Lending Fund) would essentially be an extension of TARP’s (Capital Purchase Program).”

So if this scheme actually worked, we wouldn’t need this bill – banks would already be lending like crazy.  The problem is, it doesn’t work.  But some members can’t bear to face the American people and admit that they’ve squandered billions of dollars of working families’ hard-earned money.  So instead they bring us more of the same.

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Representative Tom McClintock (R – California) delivered the following remarks on the House floor in response to the address to Congress by President Calderon of Mexico.  Excerpt:  “I rise to take strong exception to the speech of the President of Mexico while in this chamber today. The Mexican government has made it very clear for many years that it holds American sovereignty in contempt and President Calderon’s behavior as a guest of the Congress confirms and underscores this attitude.”