Judge Raymond M. Kethledge (by Abdul El-Tayef/WPPI)Criminalizing Politics
Kimberly Strassel has written a timely, bold, and important book explaining why a great many people are supporting Donald Trump for President. You wouldn’t know it from the book’s title, however, because the title — The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech — reflects Ms. Strassel’s mission, which is to reveal the full extent of the threat to free speech and small d democracy brought on by the coordinated efforts of the political left since 2010 to silence conservative opposition.
Trust Us, We’re the IRS
I am a faithful subscriber to the Washington Post: morning after morning, it makes for merriment. Its editorial and op-ed pages, for instance, have been given over for weeks to the regurgitation of ACA defenses cranked up in New Haven or in the PR offices of the country’s health care lobbies (interspersed with an occasional George Will column). Then yesterday, the Post (printed version) conveniently supplied a long piece detailing “Five Myths About King v. Burwell”—written by a pro-ACA advocate in the litigation, who nonetheless earnestly professed to sort “fact from fiction” in the case. That was a good one.
Falling Down
All the participants in this discussion seem to agree that James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, still offers valuable insights, a quarter century after its initial publication. At the same time, we all seem to agree that Wilson’s book didn’t prepare readers for the scale of dysfunction we now see in the federal bureaucracy. We have some disagreement, however, about the explanation of current patterns and what’s most disturbing about them. John McGinnis stresses that federal officials – or at least, a lot of staff attorneys in the Justice Department – are too committed to left-wing visions and too ready to let…
More Responses
Jeremy Rabkin has written a fine essay about the continuing relevance of James Q. Wilson’s 1989 book Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from Wilson’s analysis in my own writing on the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. His framework showed why the…
It’s Bureaucracy’s twenty-fifth birthday. To celebrate, let’s state some basic facts that correspond with James Q. Wilson’s thinking. Americans want a lot from their government. We want more than we’ve wanted before. It doesn’t ultimately matter where these desires come from (rising standards of living? the inner logic of democracy? interest groups? politicians?). What matters…
The 25th anniversary of James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It marks an appropriate occasion to reflect on the contributions of this work to our understanding of bureaucratic behavior and performance, and the extensive—and, at least in some areas, growing—presence of the administrative state in the lives of American…
Victim of a Practice Audit
Over at Instapundit, I read yesterday that the IRS defended its Breitbart audit with this statement: “The IRS stresses that audits are based on the information related to tax returns and the underlying tax law — nothing else.”
Glenn aptly writes “And who could hear this without laughing?” Actually, I know from personal experience it is false, because a while back I was subject to a “practice audit.”
Does This Government Deserve Continuity?
A Justice Department attorney casually remarked to Judicial Watch’s president Tom Fitton that the “Lois Lerner e-mails” that provide crucial evidence of the U.S. government’s effort to suppress conservative political activity probably survived efforts to destroy them because “the federal government backs up all computer records to ensure the continuity of government in event of a catastrophe.”
Time to Rethink the Chevron Doctrine
These are interesting times, constitutionally speaking. In the past two weeks, federal courts have ruled both ways on Obamacare. In the D.C. Circuit, a panel ruled that the law allows for subsidized health insurance in exchanges created by state governments, but not in the “backstop” exchange created by the federal government. Meanwhile, the Fourth Circuit says that the statute allows subsidies in both.
Who is right?
Lawlessness, Small and Large
Albert AnastasiaA reporter for The Nation magazine looking for a partisan “color” story cornered me at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, asking what I thought of Chris Christie. I took the chance to remind his magazine’s audience that both parties in American politics have been adopting similar habits of lawlessness, and that continuing to confirm those habits has dire consequences.
Taking Down D’Souza and Other Abuses of Power
In 2004 leftwing filmmaker Michael Moore released his film Fahrenheit 9/11, a searing attack on the legitimacy of George Bush’s election to the presidency in 2000, and his handling of events before, during, and after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2011 on the World Trade Center. Moore was unequivocal in his stated hope that the movie would “help unseat a president.”
Fahrenheit 9/11 was produced by Moore’s production company Dog Eat Dog Films, a corporation. At the time – before the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—it was illegal for corporations to spend money “in connection with any election to any political office,” and illegal for an officer of a corporation to consent to such an expenditure.
Imagine if fourteen months after the election, Moore had been indicted by a Bush-appointed federal prosecutor for violating the prohibition on corporate spending. Imagine if Moore was arrested, cuffed, criminally charged for his activities, had his passport confiscated, and bail set at $500,000–what would have been the reaction from the America’s liberals? Of the press? Of Senator Barack Obama?
Live Not by Lies
Being human, politicians lie. Even in the best regimes. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian regimes however, is that they are built on words that the rulers know to be false, and on somehow constraining the people to speak and act as if the lies were true. Thus the people hold up the regime by partnering in its lies. Thus, when we use language that is “politically correct” – when we speak words acceptable to the regime even if unfaithful to reality – or when we don’t call out politicians who lie to our faces, we take part in degrading America.
