RUTHFULLY YOURS

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, unlike pretty much all of his rivals for the Republican nomination for president, has had a disciplined and careful plan for winning.

Other contenders were thrown off course by the emergence of Donald Trump as the clear poll leader nationally and in virtually every state, and seemed unable to handle Trump’s ability to overwhelmingly dominate media coverage of the race while sprinkling in putdowns of the other candidates. Cruz, on the other hand, continued to do what he has done since his election to the Senate in 2012, and with his immediate forays into the early 2016 caucus and primary states in the winter of 2013. His approach has been to stay to the right of every other possible Republican contender, and to claim the leadership role in the conservative base’s war with the party’s establishment and leaders in the House and Senate.

When neurosurgeon Ben Carson became a favorite of evangelicals, Cruz’ strategy to win Iowa based on his own strong ties to evangelicals and conservative voters was in jeopardy. With Trump leading the pack and competitive in Iowa, a Carson victory in that state would have relegated Cruz to third place or worse, and damaged any ability to build on Iowa elsewhere. Cruz seemed to understand from the start that taking on Trump was likely to be a loser for whichever candidate took this approach. So Cruz played nice with Trump, and waited for the evangelicals infatuation with Carson to run its course.

In the closing minutes of Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate in South Carolina, Marco Rubio unleashed a torrent of accusations against Ted Cruz after Cruz slammed his participation in the “Rubio-Schumer amnesty bill.”

“[You] had no fewer than eleven attacks there,” Cruz said, pleading for response time. “I appreciate you dumping your opposition research folder on the debate stage.”

“No, it’s your record,” Rubio shot back.

“At least half of the things Marco said are flat-out false,” Cruz snapped.

Not quite. Most of Rubio’s statements about Cruz’s past positions check out, with a few wild exaggerations tossed into the mix. To the tape . . .

1. “Ted Cruz, you used to say you supported doubling the number of green cards. Now you say that you’re against it.”

In May 2013, Cruz introduced an amendment to double “the overall worldwide green card caps from 675,000 visas per year to 1.35 million per year (not including refugees and asylum-seekers).” Cruz’s current immigration plan only mentions “green cards” in the context of punishing companies that misuse the H-1B visa program.

2. “You used to support a 500 percent increase in the number of guest workers. Now you say that you’re against it.”

Indeed, another amendment Cruz offered in May 2013 would have “immediately increase[d] the H-1B cap by 500 percent from 65,000 to 325,000.” But as a presidential candidate, he has called for suspending “the issuance of all H-1B visas for 180 days to complete a comprehensive investigation and audit of pervasive allegations of abuse of the program” and greatly limiting the circumstances in which companies can hire H-1B visa immigrants.

H-1B visas are for “high-skilled temporary workers,” so Rubio could have been a little more precise in characterizing the “guest workers” in question.

3. “You used to support legalizing people that were here illegally. Now you say you’re against it.”

This point is hotly disputed by Cruz and his campaign. Cruz did introduce an amendment that would establish a path to legalization for those here illegally, but he insists he never actually supported the amendment’s substance, and it was meant as a poison pill. But Cruz spent spring 2013 touting the measure, which would have preserved the larger bill’s path to legal status, but not its path to citizenship.

Dear Reader (including those of you born in Canada),

I guess we should start there. I find this birther stuff to be a lot like women’s prison movies: compelling, entertaining, and totally ridiculous.

Other than the presidency, there’s no place in American life where the distinction between “naturalized” and “natural-born” citizenship matters.

But imagine if it did? Imagine that your American-born mother just happened to give birth to you in Canada or Belize while on vacation. Your American-born mom and dad bring you home days later and raise you exactly as they would have had they been in Cleveland the whole time. Now imagine there are also all sorts of jobs you are barred from having. Not only can you not be president, but you can’t be, say, a chiropodist or an embalmer. Pick your restrictions: You can’t go to certain colleges or you can’t get the best ESPN bundle. Americans born abroad can’t buy basset hounds. Unless you were born here, you can’t get cheese on your hamburger. Whatever. It really doesn’t matter.

If that were the case the Constitution would be amended — either properly or through interpretation — to get rid of this distinction instantly (which means this would have happened centuries before the invention of ESPN, but you get the point).

My point is simple: This issue remains unsettled because it matters so little.

Psephology is a branch of political science which deals with the study and scientific analysis of elections. rsk
“Our expert psephologists tell us that Trump is way ahead in many polls. But as I say, I suspect they are measuring fans, not supporters. The difference is between cheering on a successful mud wrestler and appointing a general to lead the army.Donald Trump is an amusing entertainer whose antics have shone a light on some dark corners that needed illumination. He is a sort of Liberace of Liberalism: a recent supporter of Chuck Schumer, of Nancy Pelosi, of Hillary Clinton, who also (until about ten minutes ago) was as pro-abortion as it is possible to be.”

The consensus seems to be that Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio were the only three candidates who emerged standing from the debate last night. Christie got off some good lines as usual, while Ben Carson once again left me wondering what pharmaceutical cocktail he had ingested before mounting the stage, and John Kasich once again made me feel sorry that he had to cope with that species of motor-neuron disease with which he is afflicted.

I also felt a little sorry for Jeb Bush.

He is clearly a competent man whose record as governor of Florida should inspire admiration. Sure, you might disagree with him about this or that — Common Core, for example, or the details of his ideas about immigration — but he is a thoughtful, steady person of good will. He exudes maturity, and it tells us a lot about the texture of our current political situation, I think, that Donald Trump should have been able to score one of his first rhetorical victories of the primary season by charging that Jeb Bush was “low energy.”

The charge stuck, but it was unfair. Jeb is not low energy. He is simply deliberate — a good thing in a statesman.

I say this not because I am a Bush supporter. I’m not, for many reasons. But I think it is worth pausing to acknowledge that he acts with dignity, like an adult. Last night, Chris Christie described Barack Obama as a “petulant child.” That was apt. Obama is notoriously thin-skinned, as are many narcissists, and that combined with his breathtaking incompetence has been a recipe for petulance.

For the last seven years, the nation has suffered under a president who ignores the law and treats the legal process as a political weapon. Yet in the most recent Republican debate, Donald Trump displayed a clownish, similar disregard for the law when he demanded Senator Ted Cruz “get a declaratory judgment” about his eligibility to run for president.

The meritless nature of Trump’s birther controversy was neatly summarized by Susan Carleson in the Washington Times:

As the Supreme Court made clear, there are only two types of American citizenship — citizens at birth, such as Sen. Cruz, and those who become citizens through the naturalization process.

A declaratory judgment is when a judge, in a legitimate contested lawsuit, makes a ruling about which side is correct about a legal controversy.

Trump has some knowledge of this process — because of what he did to Vera Coking.

Vera Coking lived for 30 years in a modest Atlantic City home, until Trump coveted her land. As David Boaz summarizes:

Trump turned to a government agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) — to take Coking’s property. CRDA offered her $250,000 for the property — one-fourth of what another hotel builder had offered her a decade earlier. When she turned that down, the agency went into court to claim her property under eminent domain so that Trump could pave it and put up a parking lot.

Coking wasn’t the only person who faced a declaratory judgment because Donald Trump wanted the government to take their land for his private benefit. He did the same thing to others in Atlantic City, and proposed the same for an amusement park in Connecticut. Trump still supports the abusive eminent domain practices that took the home of Susette Kelo in New London, Connecticut.

A birther lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility was filed today in federal court in Texas. I had previously written that such a lawsuit challenging the eligibility would most certainly lack standing and would be frivolous. The lawyer who filed the complaint, Newton B. Schwartz, Sr., had been suspended from the practice of law by two separate states for disciplinary infractions.
According to the detailed disciplinary ruling against Schwartz in Louisiana, he engaged in legal matters in Louisiana but was never admitted to practice law in the state and never sought temporary admission. (You can read the lengthy disciplinary case against Schwartz here).

Beware the zeal of the reformer. True, the reform impulse has occupied a long and sometimes necessary place in American politics, going back to Andrew Jackson’s fiery allegation that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay stole the 1824 presidential election through a “corrupt bargain.” Four years later, Jackson rode to the White House on the wings of the outrage he had summoned. His refrain—that malefactors of power had undermined American democracy by thwarting the will of the people—has probably been the most catalytic recurrent theme in the country’s politics. Even when the flames of populist passion subside, they seem ever-present through a kind of after-burner of latent protest.

Yet the political reforms generated by these passions often go awry, producing unintended consequences. Sometimes they fall victim to the vicissitudes of human nature and the reality that politics is rarely about good guys versus bad guys. Reformers are human, and often when power comes their way their frailties are exposed.
Let The People Rule

By Geoffrey Cowan
Norton, 404 pages, $27.95

A particularly potent period of reformist zeal followed the tumultuous campaign year of 1968, when activist Democrats infuriated by the Vietnam War flooded the early presidential primary states and obliterated President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second full term. For their pains they got, instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who embraced Johnson’s war policy and cadged his party’s nomination without having entered a single primary. The reformist refrain went up: The party’s nomination process was dominated by backroom bosses who exercised power without regard to voter sentiment.

The reformist answer was to revise party rules in order to encourage states to select national convention delegates through primaries rather than boss-controlled caucuses and state conventions. The result was the nominating system we have today, with generally 80% of national convention delegates selected through primaries.

The nation tuned in to Round Six of the Republican debate mashup Thursday night, and the media is busy micro-covering every last rift between the GOP candidates. In the process reporters are ignoring the far more interesting party crackup going on.

You might not know it, but the Democratic Party is in the middle of an internecine battle that potentially dwarfs that of conservatives. On one side is a real but weakened mainstream Democratic movement that has its roots in Clinton centrism. On the other is a powerful, ascendant wing of impatient and slightly unhinged progressive activists. This split has been building for years, but The Donald has been so entertaining that few have noticed.

Now it’s getting hard to ignore. Polls this week show Bernie Sanders tying or beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Put another way, a self-declared socialist, a man who makes many think of their crazy uncle Bob, is beating a woman who spent eight years planning this run, who is swimming in money, and who oversees the most powerful political machine in operation.

Some of Mrs. Clinton’s struggles are self-imposed. She’s a real-world, political version of Pig-Pen, trailing along her own cloud of scandal dust. Even Democrats who like her don’t trust her. And a lot of voters are weary or unimpressed by the Clinton name. For all the Democratic establishment’s attempts to anoint Mrs. Clinton—to shield her from debates and ignore her liabilities—the rank and file aren’t content to have their nominee dictated.

Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.

Mr. Rubio’s muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.

As speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio did vote for a 2008 bill authorizing the state to come up with rules for a cap-and-trade plan, though he raised questions about its cost and effectiveness. A press release from the House Majority Office at the time described the bill as a “responsible response to concerns about global climate change.”

But since running for U.S. Senate in 2010 as the conservative alternative to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Mr. Rubio has questioned whether climate change is man-made, and opposed potential remedies like cap-and-trade that he says would hurt the economy.

Shifts by Mr. Rubio and some of his rivals on the issue recall an inconvenient past that many in the GOP would like to forget: Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution, as a way to avoid more direct regulation.

Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.

Received wisdom is what “everybody knows” is true without anyone having to think about it. Received wisdom has a lot of defense mechanisms: for example, trading in unexamined assumptions, avoiding contrary evidence, dismissing the need of evidence at all, or demonizing those who question it. Question-begging slogans are another. Mantras like “nothing to do with Islam” or “war on women” substitute for evidence and analysis. Another is “you can’t say that,” used to dismiss or marginalize comments or proposed policies by assuming disastrous consequences, or implying that saying such things is morally repugnant and, to quote Obama’s favorite obfuscation, “doesn’t represent who we are as a country.” In fact, “you can’t say that” is usually an ideological weapon, or an excuse for inaction.

Various “establishments” left or right are founded on received wisdom. They are the original “box” we’re all advised to “think outside” of. The Republican “establishment,” for example, purveys an electoral narrative that says Republicans can’t win nationally unless they “reach out” to women, minorities, and immigrants, and so must avoid alienating these potential Republicans.

We saw the effects of this narrative in 2008, when John McCain gave Barack Obama a pass on his relationship with race-baiter Jeremiah Wright, terrorist Bill Ayers, crook Tony Reszko, and apologist for Palestinian Arab terror Rashid Khalidi. McCain also passed over Obama’s refusal to release his complete medical records and college transcripts. All so McCain wouldn’t appear “racist” and alienate all those fence-sitting black voters who might vote Republican. Mitt Romney was just as timid in 2012. His worst “preemptive cringe” came in the foreign policy debate, when “moderator” Candy Crowley shamefully––and incorrectly––corrected Romney about Obama’s characterization of the Benghazi attacks. Instead of scolding Crowley (can’t bully a woman!) and Obama (can’t appear racist!), Romney just stood there with a deer-in-the-headlights look while Obama smirked.