The Patriot Post Monday Digest 10-21-2013

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The Patriot Post Monday Digest 10-21-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
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Monday Digest

Oct. 21, 2013

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” –Benjamin Franklin (1776)

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Silver Linings and the Way Forward

By Mark Alexander

There are positive outcomes of the shutdown debacle, opportunities which have the potential to grow the ranks of conservative Republicans in the House and Senate in 2014 and beyond – if, as I wrote, moderate and conservative Republicans will lock arms and take the fight to our Leftist adversaries rather than each other.

First, this is the BIG one.

Obama, the consummate narcissist, having even embraced the name “ObamaCare,” along with every member of the House and Senate whose name is followed by a “D”, suffer a significant reversal of political fortune after ObamaCare is implemented. And this will continue as long as ObamaCare exists.

Why?

Because from October 1 forward, with increasing frequency, Americans of every political stripe who have any issue with health care, whether a hangnail or heart transplant, a delay in a doctor’s office or in critical care for a loved one, will tie blame for their discontent like a noose around the necks of Obama and his Democrats, who were solely responsible for forcing this abomination upon the American people.

Second, the consequences of the “Republican Sequester1,” as Obama dishonestly frames it, and the current partial government shutdown, have had far less impact than trumped up by the Democrats, despite their “make ‘em suffer” strategy of shutting down high-profile operations such as national parks. The consequence is that many Americans have now learned firsthand that the nation doesn’t fall apart when more than 1/6th of “non-essential” government clerks and bureaucrats are not on the job. (Who would’ve guessed!)

Third, there is the opportunity to gain some discernment about political process and to understand that building up toward common goals, rather than tearing down over disagreements, is the only way to continue adding conservatives at every level of government. Democrats have held the House for the better part of the last seven decades, and the Senate for many of those years. It will take more than a few election cycles for the modern Tea Party movement2 to restore the integrity of our Constitution3.

The returns on these silver linings will be significantly diminished unless there is a cease-fire in the foolish and fatalistic “Tea v. GOP infighting4.”

Read the rest of Alexander’s analysis here5.

ECONOMY
Income Redistribution: Persistent Unemployment

Last Friday, we noted a new study showing how food stamps fail to alleviate poverty and hunger6. That isn’t surprising, and neither is another study on the effects of another Beltway sacred cow – unemployment benefits. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research7, “Most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility.”

As bad as the recession was, the “recovery” has been hardly better. And during this time, most states increased unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 99 weeks – i.e., six months to nearly two years. A frequent criticism is that, rather than finding work, recipients opt to continue getting checks for nothing. This is, of course, a broad generalization as many unemployment recipients are hard workers who have simply fallen on hard times not of their own making.

The bigger problem, according to researchers, is that long-term unemployment benefits deter job creation. As The Wall Street Journal put it8, “What brings unemployment down is not mainly the effort made by people to find jobs; instead, it’s the incentive employers have to create jobs. Long-term unemployment benefits deter that job creation.” Unemployment benefits force wages higher – working for a paycheck must be more attractive than free checks – and so make jobs more expensive for employers to create. So even if we concede that leftists have good intentions (a big “if”), their efforts only exacerbate the problem.

CULTURE
Judicial Benchmarks: Ending Discrimination

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides “No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Nothing has been more of a muddle in the courtrooms than weak-kneed jurists’ attempts to reconcile this clear language with the fundamentally discriminatory nature of “affirmative action.” The most recent groundbreaking cases have had to do with public universities.

In the 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court held that racial quotas are unconstitutional but that educational institutions could legally use race as one of many factors to consider in their admissions process. However, the Supremes muddied the water in the companion cases of Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. In Grutter and Gratz, the Court upheld both Bakke as a precedent and the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. Nevertheless, in Grutter, it allowed schools to consider race as a factor in admissions for the purpose of diversity. But in Gratz, the Court invalidated Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy on the grounds that the undergraduate policy used a point system that was excessively mechanistic. Got that?

Fed up with convoluted rationalizing, 58% of Michigan voters supported a definitive policy by supporting Proposition 2, amending the state constitution to prohibit discrimination by race in education, government contracts or hiring. That amendment has been challenged in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action now before the Supreme Court. At issue is a question both bizarre and laughable: Does it violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination for a state to ban racial discrimination?

The plaintiff, the Coalition for Affirmative Action, believes it does, arguing that Prop 2 disproportionately burdens minorities in education. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, in an 8-7 en banc decision, that Proposition 2 “placed special burdens on the ability of minority groups to achieve beneficial legislation.” Dissenting Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote that this logic contradicts “elementary principles of constitutional law” and that under the ruling “for the first time, the presumptively invalid policy of racial and gender preference has been judicially entrenched as beyond the political process.” Well said.

NATIONAL SECURITY
Another Deal in Syria

Amid the chaos in Washington these days, the most urgent crisis of late summer has been completely forgotten. The continuing civil war in Syria (over 100,000 dead) and the crossing of Barack Obama’s “red line” on the use of chemical weapons were at the news cycle forefront not long ago, but as Fox News' Bret Baier observed, “Now, crickets are chirping when it comes to talking about Syria, other than to praise its government for doing all it can with chemical weapons sites.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin took the lead in working out a “deal” for Syria to relinquish its chemical weapons, and the international committee tasked with managing it just won the Nobel Peace Prize – before they’ve done anything. Sunday, the Arab League announced that an international conference seeking to end Syria’s civil war is scheduled for late November in Geneva. According to The Wall Street Journal9, “The proposed conference on Nov. 23 and 24 will attempt to get Syria’s rival sides to agree on a transitional government in that country based on a plan adopted in Geneva in June 2012.” Good luck getting opposition forces to agree on anything involving Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The reverse is also true. Assad’s regime says it refuses to negotiate with “terrorists.”

Regardless of the outcome, the Obama administration has been remarkably silent of late and evidently has no intention of leading – from the front, back or otherwise.