Libertarians Are Insane

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I’ve been calling myself a Libertarian since 2008. I’m beginning to think I’ve made a mistake.

For me, voting for Hillary is clearly out of the questions since she’s socialist in everything but name and voting for Trump is also off the table since he’s a habitual liar and vindictive bully whose positions vary from strong conservative to left of Hillary depending on his mood and the time of day. Since I generally want the government to get out of my business, you might think the Libertarians would be a perfect fit for me, and I though so too for a time, and yet…

On paper, the Libertarians are great. Looking over the Libertarian platform, I object strong to abortion, but beyond that, I find myself in nigh complete agreement. Personal freedom, economic liberty and minimalist government? Sign me up!

However, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month looking more carefully at the Libertarian movement, and sadly I’ve found that though their official positions are sound, they have an huge problem, the Libertarian Party is infested with druggies, anarchists and social imbeciles.

Let me break it down for you.

Druggies

The Libertarian Party supports drug legalization, and this causes a problem. The problem isn’t the position itself but the fact that this position attracts large amounts of stoners who don’t care about anything other than drugs. This stoner-centric thinking causes Libertarians to spend an unnecessary large amount of time discussing issue. Perhaps the best example of this occurred at the recent Libertarian Party National Convention where the Libertarians got some rare coverage on C-Span. Through the entire televised portion of the convention, the Libertarians only showed one policy video, and what video did they choose as the most important thing they must tell the nation? They wasted six minutes of national air time on a mini-documentary about a pot dispensary. (11:30 to 17:30) I think drugs should be legalized, but instead of emphasizing how it’s your right to get high, why don’t the Libertarians emphasize the fact that there are people dying of terminal diseases every year that are denied the opportunity to try experimental drugs because the FDA hasn’t approved of them? Better yet, why not take those six minutes to talk about an issue of greater importance like the national debt, domestic spying or any one of several dozen other pressing concerns? If there weren’t so many of them stoned, the Libertarians might realize how stupid it is to make pot their central issue.

Anarchists

Libertarianism represents small government not zero government, and yet there’s a sizable and vocal faction of the Libertarian movement usually posting the #TaxationIsTheft mantra that believes all government is wrong. Though the anarchy position is rejected by Libertarian think tanks, anarchist ramblings among the base are significant. These words from libertarian anarchist Christopher Cantwell typify this view. “Libertarians are anarchists, whether they realize it or not…the goal is not to win your elections, the goal is to turn a large enough minority against the legitimacy of the State as to make its continued function impossible.”

I’m all for drastically reducing the size and scope of government, but anybody who thinks that we should all be living in the world of Max Max is nuts.

Social Imbeciles

The Libertarians present themselves horribly. To a certain degree, the lack of polish is understandable. After all, nobody donates money to Libertarians and few people actually are Libertarians, so they’re drawing from a limited pool or resources and you can understand why they don’t necessarily have the political and media sophistication to match the mainstream parties, yet Libertarians problems aren’t just in terms of polish but in a complete misunderstanding of the rules of polite society.

Examples of this can be found everywhere, but the latest and greatest example was brought to light by James Weeks II who while running for the position of Libertarian Party Chair stripped on stage at the National Convention while it was being broadcast on C-Span. To their credit, most of the Libertarians in the room rejected the strip tease and jeered the juvenile display, but if the discussions I’ve seen online are any indicator, a large portion of Libertarians see no problem with Weeks’ strip routine.

When this is allowed to happen and celebrated by a good portion of the community, it either means that the Libertarians don’t even take themselves seriously or they have no understanding whatsoever of social standards, and either way, it’s incredibly damaging to the movement.

Conclusion

In theory, Libertarians hold most of the principles that the United States needs to adopt to get back on the right track, and for my money, the severely flawed Libertarian presidential candidate is still a much better alternative to Hillary and Trump, but I’m not sure I want to call myself a Libertarian anymore because a bunch of people in the Libertarian Party are out of their mind.

(For more from the author of “Equal Pay Day and the Pay Gap Deception” please click HERE)

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Non-Starter Doesn’t Start: David French’s 15-Minutes of Fame

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Writing in the National Review, David French, Bill Kristol’s most recent nominee, withdrew as a potential independent candidate for the office of the President of the United States.

The article is unintentionally illustrative, largely explaining why rounding up the usual Republican establishment suspects for President didn’t work.

Let me begin by noting the snippets within his article that French got right:

“…a pretty darn obscure lawyer…both parties failed so spectacularly…”

French goes on to say:

“Hillary Clinton lies habitually and changes position on virtually every public issue except for her pro-abortion extremism, and she has a suspicious record of making public decisions that favor donors to the Clinton Foundation. Her signal foreign-policy “achievement” was helping launch a war in Libya that not only cost American lives in Benghazi but also helped transform the nation into ISIS’s latest playpen.”

Well, “duh.”

Yes, but French doesn’t mention or perhaps doesn’t understand the origins of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Libyan foreign policy and how the Republican establishment, whose views he seems to endorse, facilitated it.

It was actually the George W. Bush administration and the neo-conservatives, in their delusional quest for “moderate” Islam, who set the stage for the Libyan fiasco.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration, sought a long-term political solution to international terrorism, which they believed emanated from the lack of democratic participation, where resentful individuals, having been excluded from the political process in their own countries, directed their hatred and violence against the West. Bush chose the invasion Iraq as a starting point for the democratization of the Middle East, from where he had expected democracy to spread and, consequently, would both assimilate and contain potential terrorists.

When democracy failed to take hold in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter, Bush initiated an alternative approach, the idea to integrate unspecified “moderate” Islamists into their own countries’ governments. The concept quickly gained popularity, particularly in Qatar, a long-time supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, who sponsored seminars, conferences and meetings, all promoted by the Al-Jazeera Channel to speed up a process that they hoped would reshape the entire region to reflect Muslim Brotherhood beliefs and practices.

If the Bush method had been mostly passive and reactive, the Obama Administration, sympathetic to Islam and arguably infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, formulated a preemptive policy, all of which would lead to catastrophe in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and the rise of ISIS.

In August 2010, Obama, ordered his advisors to produce a secret report, which subsequently determined that, without sweeping political changes, countries across the Arab world were ripe for popular revolt.

The still classified document, Presidential Study Directive-11 (PSD-11), concluded that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting stable but authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa to one backing, what Obama Administration officials considered as, “moderate” Islamist political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish AK Party, now led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

None of the Libyan or related pro-Islamist foreign policy initiatives pursued by the Obama Administration were seriously opposed, and all were fully funded, by the Republican Congress, the same people French is recommending for re-election.

It is just one of hundreds of examples, when the Republican establishment ignored its constituency and fueled a political insurgency.

Sadly, at one point in his article, like many in the Republican establishment and representative of the problem, French seamlessly transforms himself into a Democrat Party shill, denigrates millions of patriotic Americans and parrots the chants of the violent Bernie Sanders street thugs:

“His (Trump) supporters believe it demonstrates “strength” when he mocks the disabled and bullies women. He has attracted an online racist following that viciously attacks his opponents and their families.”

French claims that he gave the idea of running for President “serious thought,” but concluded that he is “not the right person to challenge Trump and Hillary.”

I don’t know David French. He could very well be an excellent candidate for President, but he should have thought of that a year ago and not played the role of a last-minute spoiler to resuscitate the prospect of maintaining the corrupt status quo.

What French and his promoters still don’t seem to understand is that the success of Donald Trump is directly proportional to the failures of the Republican establishment and its unprincipled collaboration with the massively destructive policies of the Obama Administration.

French is correct when he states:

“I believe with all my heart that there is an American movement ready to both resist the corruption, decadence, and dishonesty of the American elite and restore the promise of the American Dream;”

but, like all in the Republican establishment, he appears clueless when he says: “that movement may not emerge for some time.”

Sorry, but that train has already left the station. (For more from the author of “Non-Starter Doesn’t Start: David French’s 15-Minutes of Fame” please click HERE)

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Is the GOP ‘Whigging’ Out?

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With the unbridled enthusiasm of Eeyore, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is attempting to herd angry constitutional conservatives, tea partiers and libertarians back into the Party fold. Good luck with that. It’s been a long time coming, but presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump looks to be the last straw for the Grand Old Party, the one that will likely and finally break the tired pachyderm’s back.

American history tells us that political parties do, on occasion, die. Today’s political drama reminds me of another party that went through a similar crisis more than 150 years ago: the Whigs.

The Whig Party was formed by Henry Clay, partly in opposition to President Andrew Jackson. The Whigs objected to Jackson’s abuses of presidential power and even called him “King Andrew”. The charge sounds kind of like today’s tea party Republicans railing against President Obama’s use of executive orders to go around Congress. And like modern Republicans, the Whigs were demonized by their opponents for supposedly supporting the interests of big business and the wealthy.

The Whigs weren’t a fringe party. They elected four presidents, and won nearly half of all gubernatorial elections in the 1840s. But it didn’t take long for internal disagreements on the issue of slavery to begin to tear the party apart. The Compromise of 1850, which addressed the expansion of slavery into new territories, infuriated abolitionist Whigs so much so that they managed to block President Millard Fillmore from getting his own party’s nomination for reelection. The split handed the presidency to Democrat Franklin Pierce.

Just four years later, the party had virtually disappeared. Some of the displaced Whigs joined the southern Democratic Party, which at the time supported slavery and states’ rights. In the north, most flocked to the fledgling Republican Party that would ultimately elect Abraham Lincoln. A few joined the short-lived American Party, but never gained any electoral success. Going from having a president in office to being virtually extinct in four years is hard to imagine, but that’s what can happen when a governing coalition so dramatically fractures.

Today, it seems like a similar thing is happening with Republicans. What, exactly, does the GOP stand for? Since Ronald Reagan, Republican rhetoric has defended free enterprise, fiscal responsibility and constitutional limits on government power. But the growing gap between Republican political rhetoric and their actual performance in office seems to have finally fractured that voting coalition. Should Republicanism be about limited government, and economic and personal liberty? Or will Donald Trump’s splenetic populism, the kind that embraces protectionism and the aggressive use of executive branch interventions into market decisions, represent a new political coalition?

There are a lot of reasons why the two major political parties are losing their ability to control the behavior of voters. Technology and social media have given voice to the real diversity of citizens’ opinions and preferences. Those differences were always there, but now the individual’s power to be different can more closely compete with the powerful tools available to party bosses. That means new political realignments can now happen at lightning speed.

This same dynamic has been roiling the Democratic Party as well, where 90’s relic Hillary Clinton continues to struggle against Bernie Sanders’ own brand of splenetic (socialist) populism. But the Democrats have always been better apparatchiks, falling into line behind the party’s nominee. Will they coalesce in 2016 against Donald Trump?

Liberty voters, the ones that once made up the core of the Grand Old Party, are now politically homeless. Will they migrate to the Libertarian Party, or will a new political platform for constitutional conservatism emerge?

Meanwhile, the Republicans whig out. As Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican President, once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” (For more from the author of “Is the GOP ‘Whigging’ Out?” please click HERE)

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What’s Good (and What’s Horrible) in the Senate Defense Bill

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The Senate will soon start debating the annual defense policy bill. This bill is particularly critical now when threats are rising, from state-sponsored cyberattacks to Russian aggression, to terrorism at home and abroad.

At the same time, our military is getting smaller and weaker. Unfortunately, the Senate bill is a mix of good and bad policies, and for the sake of our national security, this bill needs to be improved.

The U.S. military today is getting smaller and is struggling to train its people and maintain its equipment due to a combination of high demand and a 25 percent cut to its budget. While we don’t yet know all the details of the recent military plane crashes and the Fort Hood tragedy, we do know that serious and fatal accidents are on the rise. While accidents always happen, senior military leaders believe the rise in the overall rate of serious accidents is due to the lack of funding for training and maintenance.

The Marines are pulling aircraft parts out of museums. The Air Force is cannibalizing planes to keep other planes flying. Three quarters of Navy F-18 fighter aircraft are not ready for combat. And only one-third of Army brigades are prepared for war. In short, our military is not prepared to defend the vital interests of the United States.

Given the threats facing our country and the current status of our military, we should ask one simple question about the Senate defense bill: Does it start rebuilding our military?

The bill, formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017 (NDAA), doesn’t do enough. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is the primary author of the NDAA, and he is keenly aware of this gap, and he hopes to address it by offering an amendment to increase the defense budget by $17.9 billion.

If successful, this amendment would take major steps toward rebuilding the military: it would grow the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, it would buy more ships for the Navy and more planes for the Air Force, and it would provide more funding for training and maintenance for all the services.

If this amendment doesn’t pass, this bill will not start rebuilding our military. There is one problem with the McCain amendment—the defense funding increase does not come with cuts to other parts of the federal budget that are less important. To reinvest in our armed forces while being fiscally responsible, defense funding should be increased and other parts of the budget should be decreased.

While the budget is the biggest issue in the Senate NDAA, there are other provisions in this bill that are a mixture of good and bad. On the good side, the bill takes important steps in line with recommendations from Heritage analysts on military health care, reforming commissaries, and prohibiting military exercises with Cuba.

The bill also takes good steps on expanding the national missile defense policy and investing in space-based missile defense. The bill also prohibits the defense budget from being used for non-defense research, which is doubly important when the military is already short on funding.

Unfortunately, the good provisions are mixed in with a number of bad ones. Perhaps most controversially, the bill contains a provision requiring women to register for the Selective Service and be eligible for a future military draft. In parallel, it creates a national commission on public service, an idea that Heritage analysts have expressed concerns about in the past.

The bill also contains the New Balance provision to prohibit service members from buying running shoes made in other countries, which even New Balance’s hometown paper thinks is a bad idea.

The bill also opens the door to designing and planning a prison in the U.S. to hold terrorists currently at Guantanamo Bay. But the biggest problem is the one outlined above: The bill currently supports President Barack Obama’s proposal for a smaller and weaker U.S. military.

The Senate NDAA contains a number of good provisions as well as some bad ones, but it doesn’t start rebuilding the military. It will take years of strong defense budgets to properly do this. The Senate should start that rebuilding process now instead of going along with Obama’s plan for a smaller, weaker military. (For more from the author of “What’s Good (and What’s Horrible) in the Senate Defense Bill” please click HERE)

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Bill Kristol Asked Me to Run Against Donald Trump

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Well, he didn’t exactly ask me and, well, it wasn’t exactly Bill Kristol in person.

Actually, it was just his voice in the form of a robocall, a computer-controlled autodialer to deliver a pre-recorded message.

“Hi, this is Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. As you know, I have been looking for a candidate to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for President. Congratulations, you are interviewee number…”

Just then a computerized woman’s voice broke into Kristol’s recorded message announcing me as number 2,658, 341 on Kristol’s list of potential candidates.

I don’t know David French’s number.

Kristol’s recorded message continued:

“In order to continue the selection process, I will ask you to answer a series of questions.”

Again the computerized woman’s voice broke in.

“If you are often dissatisfied with the outcome of elections, please press 1.”

“If you own any free-roaming chickens at least one of which knows FORTRAN, please press 2.”

“If your blood cholesterol level is higher than your SAT scores, please press 3.”

The computerized woman’s voice continued.

“If you were surprised to learn during this election cycle that the word ‘conservative’ meant, to many pundits and politicians, conserving the corrupt status quo, please press 1.”

“If, in high school, you were voted ‘Most Likely to be Found Dead in a Motel Room,’ please press 2.”

“If your ancestors came to the United States from Jersey City, please press 3.”

Again the computerized woman’s voice.

If you think conducting elections are okay, but genuine representative government is messy and would like Bill Kristol to choose an establishment candidate for you, please press 1.”

“If you don’t know what ‘apathetic’ means and couldn’t care less, please press 2.”

“If you posted your colonoscopy photos on Facebook, please press 3.”

Then Kristol’s voice returned:

“Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to me. I select Presidential candidates in the order in which they are called. So, please do not hang up and remain on the line until election day, while I contact other potential Presidential candidates.”

But, seriously folks, it makes one wonder who might Bill Kristol have in mind for Vice President and how he will go about identifying that lucky person.

Perhaps he should consider a reality TV show like the “Bachelorette.”

I would definitely consider participating, but, unfortunately I’m still on the phone. (For more from the author of “Bill Kristol Asked Me to Run Against Donald Trump” please click HERE)

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The Case for Reforming Primaries

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Ever since the Democrat Party has succeeded in promoting cultural and economic Marxism over the past half-century, the Republican Party, with rare exceptions, has failed to serve as a counter-balance. Over the past few years, this dichotomy has reached critical mass, in which Democrats are now able to win 50-year culture war battles without even firing a shot. We conservatives are left without a party that fights for conservatism on any level, even among the state and federal officials in the reddest states, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Republican primary voters agree with conservatives on the issues. There are only a handful of Republicans that are willing to fight for anything, but they are too marginalized to affect any change. It is incontrovertibly clear that we need a new party.

The age old question is how do we start a new party out of nothing? The short answer is that we begin by operating as a third party within the Republican Party by defeating incumbent Republicans and replacing them with conservatives who will remain loyal to the Constitution.

The reason conservatives have failed at replacing incumbents is because the ability of the grassroots to knock off incumbents in primaries has been such a dismal failure. I’m here to warn everyone that this cycle of failure will continue unless we succeed in returning the nomination process, at least for congressional elections, to representative forms of state conventions instead of media-driven popular primary contests. That is the only way to place everyone on an equal playing field and elect enough committed conservatives in a short enough time period to either take over the Republican Party nationally or have a large enough platform from which to launch a new party.

The Failure to Win Primaries

The level of betrayal and the degree of perfidy among Republicans elected on a both the state and federal level is so bad that we can’t even fight the most extreme policies of the Left in the most conservative states, much less in Washington, D.C. And yes, despite the “rebellious” electorate looking for change, every single House and Senate incumbent has been re-nominated and the Establishment has won most of the open seats this cycle.

What gives?

Knocking off incumbents in House races in nearly impossible and doing so in a Senate race is virtually impossible. And for a variety of factors, it has become even harder in recent years. Waiting to change the party quickly enough through primary challenges under the existing rigged system would work as well as trying to drink a big gulp with a fork.

It can truly be said that just one individual over the past 100 years has successfully challenged a sitting elected Republican senator from the Right in a direct popular primary and came out stable enough to win the general election. Yes, it happened only once in the century since the progressives replaced party conventions with popular primaries: Alfonse D’ Amato beating incumbent Senator Jacob Javits in New York in 1980. And even that race was an anomaly because Javits was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease before running for reelection. Also, it’s not like D’ Amato was Ted Cruz in terms of his commitment to conservatism.

The only other time a right-leaning challenger won a primary and general election was when Sam Brownback knocked off RINO Sheila Frahm in 1996 in Kansas, but Frahm had just been appointed to the seat a few months prior and was never elected. Bob Smith was knocked off by John Sununu in New Hampshire in 2002, but that proves our point: Smith had lost the support of the party establishment and Sununu challenged him from the Left with the support of the media and the elite donors. Joe Miller in Alaska and Richard Mourdock in Indiana are the only two recent success stories in primaries, but they both failed to close the deal in the general election because they were so weakened and undermined by the party.

Thus, we’ve come full circle whereby the popular vote process put into place last century by the progressives in order to weaken the party establishment and “empower the people” has actually ensured that the party hacks always win and the true will of the people always loses. This is exactly what our Founders feared in a pure democracy over a representative republic.

It is even harder for conservatives to win primaries nowadays for a number of reasons:

1. While in the old days a lot of people were uninformed, now millions of people are misinformed by the mass weapon of dis-information that has become ubiquitous in mass media. Election results in presidential and Senate primaries are directly related to media coverage and name recognition. Further, there is simply no way for a constitutional conservative to talk over the soap opera narrative of the campaign with serious issues. Whether its Megyn Kelly’s endless saga with Donald Trump in the presidential election or “the nursing home scandal” in the 2014 Mississippi Senate primary, conservatives cannot break through the media’s chosen focus of an election and direct people’s attention to the issues and records of the candidates.

2. Everyone wants to know why your ‘ordinary Joe-six pack’ can’t win an election. The answer is simple. With the growth of the country, even a single House district covers over 700,000 people and a Senate seat almost always represents millions. Again, elections are not about ideas, but money and name recognition. In presidential and Senate elections it is all about the media coverage. In House races, it’s all about paid media. Ordinary conservatives seeking to challenge the system simply cannot get their message out even in most open seats, much less when challenging an incumbent, in order to reach “the masses.” With few exceptions, they lack the requisite sources for funding their campaign. “Letting the people decide” party nominees has resulted in letting the media and money decide.

3. Unlike during the few successful primary challenges in the past, incumbent RINOs no longer run as Rockefeller Republicans. They all run as conservatives and have more money to get their message out when they run as self-described conservatives. Indeed, they often paint the challengers as less than conservative. Coupled with name recognition and support from the media, it’s impossible for most voters to connect the right candidate with their preferred views. In fact, I’ve witnessed liberal Republicans who support retaining Obamacare and bailouts win reelection because they have the support of the special interests precisely because of those views, yet they use the money to convince voters that they are just the opposite! This is elective despotism at its core.

4. Even open seats are hard for conservatives to win. Given that almost all Republicans run as conservatives, the one with the most money usually wins the open House seat and the one with the most money and favorable media coverage wins the Senate seat. That almost never works in the favor of a constitutional conservative candidate.

The net result is that conservatives pick off a Senate seat once a decade, knock off an incumbent House member once or twice a cycle, and win perhaps one open Senate seat and 5-7 open House seats per cycle. Because they are too few in numbers to have a significant impact on the party or the legislative process, half of the “good guys” get picked off by the establishment within a year or two in office. What we are doing now is clearly not working. The Left is winning 50-year cultural battles in the bat of an eyelash and all these Republicans, who run on the promise to counter this social transformation, will do nothing to lift a finger and will often side with Democrats depending on the issue. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) was just re-nominated to represent Republicans in North Carolina, even as he sides with the transgendered mafia on one of the most extreme issues. Yet, he has millions of dollars from K Street to run as a conservative and drown out any competition.

The near impossibility of winning against an incumbent and the arduous nature of standing out in an open seat has created a brain drain in which talented and impressive conservatives have no interest in running for office. We have a lot of good long-term and short-term constitutional reform ideas but we can never implement them if we don’t have men and women on the field in elected office.

Direct Primaries: An Enduring Progressive Legacy

Direct primaries are not something that should be defended by conservatives; the practice should be rigorously scorned and overturned. Until the turn of the 20th century, party nominees for president and Congress were chosen at state conventions. Obviously, many of these conventions had their own problems and were often dominated be party oligarchs in what was notoriously referred to as “smoke-filled rooms.” But instead of reforming the convention process to be more in line with representative democracy – a grassroots precinct-level endeavor similar to what Utah uses to this day – the progressives succeeded in transforming the nominating process for congressional elections to direct popular vote contests within a decade.

Until 1912, most states still used the convention method during presidential elections, but that changed with the emergence of Teddy Roosevelt as the progressive leader. As Professor Sidney Milkis, a noted scholar on the progressive era, observed, Roosevelt’s “crusade made universal use of the direct primary, a cause célèbre.” Roosevelt went on to win most of the primaries, but conservative Howard Taft won the states that still had conventions and therefore won the party’s nomination at the national convention. However, Roosevelt’s views lived on through the election of Woodrow Wilson. It’s no coincidence that progressives succeeded at changing the nominating process precisely as the “newly emergent mass media” became dominant in our political culture, as Milkis puts it.

Sound familiar to our time? Mass media and campaign advertisements determining the nominee among “the people?” As one groups of political scientists declared in a 2004 study on the effects of direct primaries, “the direct primary stands as one of the most significant and distinctive political reforms of the Progressive era in America.” While the 17th Amendment is what allowed progressives to ensure half the country would elect senators in line with the views the elites use to manipulate the masses, the institution of direct primaries ensured that even in conservative states only progressive Republicans would be able to survive the money/media/name recognition juggernaut. 100 years later, with a progressive oligarchy in Washington, they can declare mission accomplished.

But Aren’t Conventions Smoked Filled Rooms?

Progressive proponents of direct popular vote primaries complain that conventions allow the party hacks to choose the nominees behind the doors of “smoke filled rooms” without the input of the people. And undoubtedly in some states in the 1800s that is exactly what happened. But the convention model we are speaking of – “the Utah style convention” – achieves the perfect middle ground between the tyranny at both ends of the spectrum from oligarchy to pure democracy.

In Utah, every neighborhood holds a caucus meeting where people who are familiar with each other debate and discuss the races at hand. They select a delegate to represent the precinct at the convention. In the Beehive State, there are 4,000 delegates – all selected by the people in a process that tends to attract high information voters. This is true representative democracy our Founders envisioned, one which would foster an informed patriotism.

The benefits of representative conventions to choose party nominees include the following:

In most states the selection process would be dominated by grassroots activists.

Money and media would play a relatively minimal role in choosing the nominee.

Conservatives could put numerous Senate seats and dozens of House seats in play per cycle in the 25 more conservative states. The threat of numerous senators and House members in the South and Great Plains knowing that a Mike Lee-style conservative could down them at a convention the same way Senator Bob Bennett was defeated in Utah could instantly change their behavior. At present, primary challenges are so unsuccessful they rarely serve as a deterrent in the long-run.

The prospect of winning with a grassroots ground game, without the need for a massive money and media campaign, would attract better conservative talent to run for office.

The requirement to show up for precinct caucuses would automatically end the odious practice of “early voting” in primaries, which not only has a disruptive effect in fluid presidential primaries, but hurts insurgent congressional candidates who tend to surge during the final week – after “voting” has already begun.

Selecting state government officials through conventions would help build up a cadre of state governments that push back against federal tyranny. At present, Republicans control the trifecta of state government in 23 states, yet conservatives cannot count on a single state to consistently fight for conservative values because either the governor or state legislative leaders are part of the GOP establishment black hole.

Our Founders left us a republic – one which was divided between the rights of the individual and the powers of the states and federal government. The federal government itself was divided into three branches, which were supposed to serve as checks and balances against each other. That system has gradually been replaced with a political party system. Conservatives can’t even rely on a conservative party to save us, even as the federalist system has collapsed.

While our Founders obviously prescribed no rules and conditions on party nominations, given that party politics has replaced the original system of governance, shouldn’t we at least replicate their ideal of representative democracy at the party level? Changing back to conventions in states where Republicans reliably win the general election will serve as a back door avenue to repealing the 17th Amendment without going through the nearly-impossible process.

In the long run we must work towards restoring our original republican form of government, but in order to implement those ideas we must first secure our men and women on the field and win over the current party system. Representative conventions are the only achievable means of restoring that system and serving as a force multiplier for more enduring reforms in the future. (For more from the author of “The Case for Reforming Primaries” please click HERE)

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The Key Economic Facts Obama’s Recovery Narrative Ignores

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President Barack Obama took an economic victory lap in Elkhart, Indiana, on Wednesday.

In a major speech he argued his policies have brought the economy back. He blamed remaining economic weaknesses on trends preceding his administration.

This analysis has the economic facts precisely backwards: Economic growth benefitted Americans up and down the income distribution until the Great Recession. Since then, Americans have struggled considerably.

Obama argued his policies have brought the economy back. While labor market conditions have certainly improved from the depths of the recession—the official unemployment rate has even returned to pre-recession levels—these numbers do not tell the whole story.

Millions of working-age Americans stopped looking for work during the recession. Many have not returned to the labor market. The working-age labor force participation rate remains 2 percentage points below pre-recession levels. The government does not count these ex-workers as unemployed— even if they would have jobs in a stronger economy.

This explains why the unemployment rate has officially recovered in the Elkhart metropolitan area despite it still having fewer jobs today than in 2007.

Workers also take significantly longer to find new jobs today. The average jobless worker still spends over six months unemployed. This recovery has gone far slower than the White House promised when proposing Obama’s recovery plan.

Obama argues pre-existing trends caused this economic weakness:

… where we haven’t finished the job, where folks have good reason to feel anxious, is addressing some of the longer-term trends in the economy—that started long before I was elected—that make working families feel less secure. These are trends that have been happening for decades now and that we’ve got to do more to reverse.

This argument rewrites economic history.

Until the recession family incomes were growing up and down the income ladder. Congressional Budget Office data show market incomes for the middle quintile of (non-elderly) households grew by a third between 1979 and 2007.

Other academic economists estimate higher middle class income growth over that period. Market incomes for families in the bottom quintile grew even faster—by more than 50 percent.

Unsurprisingly, most Americans were happy with the state of the economy then. In February 2007, Gallup polled Americans‘ perceptions of the state of the economy. Forty-three percent said “excellent” or “good.” Only 16 percent answered “poor.”

Then the recession hit and the recovery dragged on. Between 2007 and 2011, middle class households’ market incomes dropped by a tenth (the Congressional Budget Office data only goes through 2011). More Americans today tell Gallup they think the economy is in poor shape than in excellent or good condition. It’s hard to blame this newfound dissatisfaction on long-term trends.

The president argued his administration deserves credit for the recovery thus far. If so, he has engineered the weakest recovery of the post-war era. (For more from the author of “The Key Economic Facts Obama’s Recovery Narrative Ignores” please click HERE)

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I’m Guessing That the Days of the Clinton Crime Family Are Numbered

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The Hillary Clinton email investigation is entering a critical phase. The FBI has already interviewed some of Mrs. Clinton’s key aides when she was secretary of state and reports have said they will soon be interviewing Mrs. Clinton herself. At this juncture, it’s not a question anymore of whether any crimes were committed, because it has been well reported that Mrs. Clinton’s reckless use of a private email server and her gross mishandling of classified information was criminal behavior. I believe that what the FBI is really honing in on now, or should be examining, is the revolving-door State Department access that Mrs. Clinton gave her top donors and closest friends.

When the FBI interviews Mrs. Clinton and her aides, they will be able to question her about both the substance of the emails and the use of the private email and server. With respect to the substance of the emails, there has been plenty of focus on the classified ones, but there are also several that pose very serious ethical challenges.

From granting special access to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and Clinton Foundation donors, to assisting her son-in-law’s business contacts, there are numerous examples demonstrating quid pro quo. Here is a look at some of the emails that my organization, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, have documented in this area:

• Hillary Clinton intervenes for son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky: On Aug. 22, 2012, Mrs. Clinton acted on a request from her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, for the State Department to assist one of his business contacts that also had ties to a Clinton Foundation donor. This apparent special access to the State Department was given based upon relationships with Mrs. Clinton’s family members and Clinton Foundation donors.

• Billionaire George Soros’ access to the State Department: On May 12, 2012, Neera Tanden, a longtime Clinton confidante and president of the Center for American Progress, emailed Mrs. Clinton to tell her that George Soros, billionaire activist and major Clinton Foundation donor, said he was “impressed” with the level of access he had to Mrs. Clinton at the State Department.

• Clinton Foundation and the Red Cross: Clinton Foundation donors getting preferential treatment wasn’t the only arena in which foundation and State Department business overlapped. A Jan. 19, 2010 email from Mrs. Clinton to chief of staff Cheryl Mills recommended that the State Department work with the Clinton Foundation and the Red Cross on an education initiative for Haiti. As grounds for her recommendation, she noted that the foundation and the Red Cross have “Unencumbered $.” Mrs. Clinton’s motives may have been pure, but she should have been conscious of the conflict of interest posed by actively pushing the department to work with the foundation.

• Hillary Clinton gives former chief campaign consultant special access: Mrs. Clinton’s political allies also enjoyed special access. Her longtime pollster and chief consultant on her 2008 presidential race, Mark Penn, emailed Mrs. Clinton on Feb. 22, 2010, demanding “why no one called” him to help get corporate sponsors for the Shanghai Expo, an event Mrs. Clinton was deeply involved in at the time. Mrs. Clinton thanked Mr. Penn and forwarded his email to an aide, Kris Balderston, who set up a call with Mr. Penn for the following day. Days later, Mr. Balderston reported back to Mrs. Clinton in an email listing major corporations, including Boeing, Citi and Blackstone, that had agreed to provide financial support for the Shanghai Expo.

These emails demonstrate a disturbing narrative with the way Mrs. Clinton handled State Department business. If someone wanted access to her, they needed to be a top donor to her campaigns or philanthropic efforts. This is not the kind of treatment offered to ordinary citizens.

I know FBI Director James Comey. He is a competent, ethical person, and I am confident he will do the right thing in this case. The challenge, though, is that he can only make a recommendation to the Department of Justice about whether or not to bring a case against Mrs. Clinton.

The decision to bring a case ultimately rests with the Justice Department. It’s a decision the department cannot and should not be able to make, especially after it was reported this week that Hillary Clinton received almost $75,000 in political contributions from Justice Department employees, the most given to any of the current presidential candidates by Justice staff.

Furthermore, I am not sure Attorney General Loretta Lynch has the fortitude to oppose President Obama, who has publicly said Mrs. Clinton’s behavior didn’t put our national security at risk. In fact, the Obama administration recently stated that Hillary is qualified to be president, with White House spokesman Eric Schultz saying Mrs. Clinton “comes to this race with more experience than any other non-vice president in recent campaign history.”

Secondly, in a Fox News interview earlier this year, she wasn’t forthcoming about her role in the decision to prosecute the case. When asked if she was the one who would ultimately decide whether to prosecute Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Lynch answered, “It depends.” The fact that the one person who will ultimately make the decision about an indictment evades routine questioning clearly demonstrates that this administration has shown no ability to be impartial with this investigation, as they have looked the other way at every turn. For this reason, I am renewing my call for the appointment of a special counsel in this case.

We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not citizens who feel they are entitled to disregard them. That was the foundation upon which our country was built. In the coming weeks, we will find out if those principles hold true in this case. (For more from the author of “I’m Guessing That the Days of the Clinton Crime Family Are Numbered” please click HERE)

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Hey Conservatives, Stop Apologizing for the Failures of Liberalism

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A few months ago, while attending a political event, I listened to a former GOP legislator begin her speech this way, “Republicans don’t hate women and Republicans aren’t racists…” Upon hearing this, I was appalled. Although I don’t believe this lawmaker has any malicious intent, her opening set the table for her speech and made it seem as if standing for conservative principles meant something other than what it actually means. As conservatives, we don’t have anything to apologize for. We didn’t do this.

The destructive politics of division, frequently employed by the far-left, are legitimized when we play their game and render apologies for policies we not only had nothing to do with, but policies which we stand in direct opposition to. It’s time to put the far-left back on its heels and go on the offense. We need to immediately start holding them to account for the destruction they have caused and stop offering illogical apologies.

For example, we are enmeshed in the worst recovery from a recession in modern American history. President Obama will be the first president in American history to never reach three percent GDP growth in ANY year of his presidency. To our liberal friends reading this I ask, “Why do you think this is, and what conservative policy do you wish to blame?” I suspect they will not have an answer because there is no answer. The Obama income tax hikes, investment taxes and Obamacare taxes are all liberal wish-list items and have unquestionably dampened our economic spirits. I don’t care which sell out member of the GOP voted for or against these taxes because this is in no way a conservative idea. We stand for vibrant economic liberty and the lowest tax rates possible to support the constitutional role of government, not an ever-expanding welfare state which empties the wallets of hard-working Americans and expands the government’s wallet. There is nothing conservative about this and liberals, not conservatives, should apologize for causing the dreadful economic conditions we are currently experiencing.

Regarding healthcare, what conservative principle was responsible for the exploding costs, cancelled plans, and reduced access to doctors and hospitals? Obamacare created a system where community rating and guaranteed issue (two liberal fantasies because they involve price controls and big government mandates) took an already broken system and smashed the remnants into the ground. Conservatives believe in the awesome power of markets and economic liberty to discipline the human greed impulse. Conservatives rely on individual choice, not government mandates, to keep costs down and quality up. None of this happened in the design and implementation of Obamacare, which garnered exactly zero Republican votes when it passed. The far-left did this to our healthcare system, not conservatives. And the far-left should own it.

Finally, true conservatives are passionate advocates for education liberty. We support choice for parents so that they can remove their children from failing schools and place them in schools which will prepare them for a prosperous future. The far-left absolutely refuses to relinquish an iota of control over their public school monopoly and doesn’t appear to care who suffers because of it. What’s conservative about that? Nothing. If liberals want an apology then they should demand it from other liberals. They did this to our kids, not us.

We have a responsibility to speak truth to power and right now much power rests in the halls of academia and in the mainstream media. It is these institutions that readily embrace the deceptive liberal division politics game and make sure conservatives apologize for their fabricated role in it. I’m done with that, and you should be too. Turn the tables. Start demanding apologies from liberals for the destruction left behind after seven-plus years of Barack Obama and let’s see how they respond. (For more from the author of “Hey Conservatives, Stop Apologizing for the Failures of Liberalism” please click HERE)

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Without Double Standards, Liberals Would Have No Standards at All

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Syndicated talk radio host Chris Plante often says on his show “if it weren’t for double-standards then liberals would have no standards at all.” Unfortunately, Plante is right. The increasingly hostile far-left is becoming more and more brazen about their disdain for the rule of law and common standards. This is deeply troubling because even young children are capable of understanding the benefits of rules and common standards. When a group of kids get together and form a club or play a game, they usually agree on a set of “club rules” or the rules of the game before they begin playing. These commonly agreed upon rules prevent cheating and preserve a sense of fairness and equity. By agreeing on “the rules,” kids understand that the winner of the game they are playing will have won on merit and, in the case of the club, all of those agreeing to be members of the club agree to forfeit absolute control over their decisions within the club for a collective decision making process defined by the agreed upon process.

If kids can agree that rules and standards matter, why can’t liberals do the same? How can we continue to move forward as an ideologically-diverse yet ultimately cohesive and respectful nation when one side of this perpetual ideological struggle writes one set of “rules” for itself, and another set of rules for others?

Here are just a few examples of liberal double standards which will shed light on this problem:

1. The Withholding of Federal Tax-Payer Dollars to States and Cities. The recent transgender bathroom battle in North Carolina has emboldened the divisive Obama administration to start yet another fight over what they loosely define as “discrimination.” Putting aside for a moment that women who prefer to use the bathroom with other women are now being defined as “bigots” by the hostile far-left and their wily and calculating White House allies, President Obama outrageously threatened to withhold taxpayer money from taxpayers in North Carolina to make sure that men can use the women’s bathroom. Let’s use logic to walk through their calculation on this issue.

Liberals who supported this since withdrawn Obama administration threat to withhold tax payer money from North Carolina are doing so because they believe that President Obama’s questionable presidential edicts are the “rules” and if North Carolina doesn’t follow “the rules” then the federal government should punish the citizens of North Carolina by keeping their money out of their state. Keep in mind, this entire sad story is based not on a new federal law prohibiting North Carolina from keeping men out of the women’s bathroom which President Obama is enforcing, but an edict from a President who prefers his pen and his phone to law and order. Now, contrast this with the clear cut violations of easy-to-understand federal immigration laws in the many sanctuary cities in the United States. Again, using the liberal’s own standards against them, that the rules matter, then why aren’t the same far-left activists and Obama administration officials pulling tax-payer money from sanctuary cities? If kids can understand the importance of rules then why can’t our liberal friends?

2. Guns vs. Gay Marriage. As our own Daniel Horowitz recently pointed out in his piece titled “D.C. Attorney General Refuses to Issue Gun Permits, Why is He Not in Jail?,” the hypocrisy of far-leftists who celebrated the jailing of Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis for refusing to sign gay marriage certificates is now on full display as they ignore the conduct of Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine. Let’s use logic again to walk through this and demonstrate the far-left’s disrespect for the rules and common standards.

Liberals who celebrated the jailing of Kim Davis did so proclaiming that she is a public servant and that she should do her job and sign the gay marriage certificates in violation of her religious beliefs because, pursuant to the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, those were the rules. And, although the words “gay marriage” are absolutely nowhere to be found anywhere in the Constitution, many liberals were adamant that Davis should follow the rules or go to jail. Now that the shoe is on the other foot regarding an issue liberals oppose on ideological grounds (the right to bear arms which is actually written into the Constitution) , and with Washington D.C. repeatedly losing in federal courts in their efforts to prevent their residents from protecting themselves, I haven’t heard a peep from a liberal calling for any D.C. city official to be jailed for not following the rules.

The reasons for this blatant hypocrisy on the part of liberals is obvious to many who have studied the history of far-left ideology. The far-left cannot exist within a set of rules which limit its power. While conservatives passionately fight to limit the power of government using the Constitution, the far-left insists on erasing any objective standards of conduct for government. The far-left’s core focus has always been acquiring an ends using whatever means necessary to do so. And if reaching an ends means changing the rules or ignoring the rules then so be it. I’m proud to be a conservative because I believe in a set of rules that will limit conservatives in power too from breaking the rules we all agree to live by. Liberals who insist on double-standards and winning the game, while sacrificing the integrity of the game, should hang their heads in shame knowing that they did so only by cheating and throwing their morals out of the window. (For more from the author of “Without Double Standards, Liberals Would Have No Standards at All” please click HERE)

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