Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, and current leading Libertarian candidate for president is set to name William (Bill) Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, as his running mate today. While Weld certainly has some fiscal conservative bona fides from his time as governor, he also has a statist streak, which should give libertarians, especially those who are delegates to the Libertarian convention, pause.
James Antle summed up whether or not Weld is a libertarian best, in a 2005 profile at the American Spectator. Antle wrote “does the strange combination of thorough economic conservatism and social liberalism make Weld a libertarian? Not unless libertarians also support expansive environmental regulations, gun control, and affirmative action.”
Here are five statist positions of Bill Weld that should give libertarians pause.
Gun Control
Weld is a gun grabber. He gave his support to gun control measures in Massachusetts. As the New York Times reported at the time:
With voters growing increasingly fearful of gunfire on the streets, Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts reversed course this week and proposed some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country.
Mr. Weld, a Republican who will run for re-election next year, called for a statewide ban on assault weapons — a proposal he opposed during his 1990 campaign — as well as a waiting period for buying handguns and a prohibition on handgun ownership by anyone under 21. His proposed legislation would also limit the number of handguns an individual could buy and would impose tough penalties for illegal gun sales and gun-related crimes.
“The purpose of this common sense legislation is to remove deadly guns from our streets and to take weapons out of the hands of many teens who themselves are becoming deadly killers,” the Governor said.
Eminent Domain
Like Donald Trump, Bill Weld believes in the power of the state to take land for private developers. When running for governor of New York, the patrician Weld explained when he would use the power of eminent domain to seize private property for the good of a select few. The New York Sun reported:
At a Crain’s Business Breakfast in Midtown, Mr. Weld said he would support the use of eminent domain for the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, as well as in cases of building affordable housing in certain neighborhoods, depending on “the character of the neighborhood you were razing.”
The benefit to the public created by such private projects would justify the use of eminent domain, he said.
During a Manhattan Institute breakfast on March 1, Mr. Weld said a recent Supreme Court decision that permitted eminent domain to spur economic development “has put alleged collective needs ahead of individual liberty and property rights, and increased tax revenue ahead of the pursuit of individual happiness. It’s a decision I would expect in Communist China.”
The proposed Atlantic Yards project, which would include affordable housing and a new basketball stadium for the Nets, “is clearly okay,” he said yesterday, because “that whole project is imbued with public interest… A major public asset is involved there and it’s not simply an effort to increase the tax base.”
Affirmative Action
When debates swirled around ending many federal affirmative action programs during the 1990s, then Governor Weld stood firmly with the statists who wanted to keep them. The Washington Post reported:
Further complicating the affirmative action issue is that some of the nation’s most prominent moderate Republicans have spoken out against efforts to eliminate it. Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, Ohio Gov. George V. Voinovich, Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld and Gov. John Engler of Michigan are among those who support many affirmative action programs.
Environmental Regulations
Weld was a supporter of stricter environmental regulations being promulgated by the EPA. In 1997 he joined Governor Whitman of New Jersey in pushing the EPA to establish “stricter limits on smog.”
In 1994 Weld led his administration in pushing for the EPA to require an electric car mandate. The New York Times reported:
In Massachusetts, the Environmental Affairs Secretary, Trudy Coxe, said that the state Legislature adopted the California plan and that the measure was signed by then — Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. Gov. William F. Weld, a Republican, supports the program, she said.
Among the stipulations that New York and Massachusetts agreed to is a requirement that 2 percent of the cars offered for sale in the 1998 model year be electric.
Full Throated Endorsement of Barack Obama
Only a statist would have ever endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain, who was hardly an orthodox conservative in 2008. Obama was already known to be a radical leftist in 2008, when Weld endorsed him. There is nothing remotely libertarian about Barack Obama.
Here’s Weld’s full-throated 2008 endorsement.
Long story short. Bill Weld is not a libertarian; he’s a liberal Republican from the Northeast. There is a big difference. (For more from the author of “5 Statist Positions That Should Make Libertarians Run From Bill Weld” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/4456052320_e693acc9d5_b.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-19 22:30:282016-05-19 22:30:285 Statist Positions That Should Make Libertarians Run From Bill Weld
Fear of low wages seems to be a driving force behind many a government intervention in the market these days. All three major presidential candidates want to isolate the United States from international trade to allegedly protect American jobs and high wages. President Obama is extending overtime pay eligibility to millions of workers. The Left’s support for coercing workers into joining labor unions is supposedly about maintaining high wages. Minimum wage hikes are popping up all over the country. And the mythical gender wage gap remains a hot topic for misguided faux-feminists everywhere.
But if these Democratic politicians and pundits are really so concerned about wages, why do they do everything in their power to stifle the one factor that we know is tied directly to higher wages? Productivity.
When you get paid a wage, it’s because you’re able to produce something that others value. The more other people value it, or the more quickly you are able to produce it, the higher your wage can be. Professional actors don’t earn millions of dollars because what they do is particularly difficult or labor intensive, it’s because they are providing a service to a large number of viewers simultaneously, and those viewers are willing to pay to see them. Film actors make more than stage actors, simply because their audience is bigger. Their labor is more productive, meaning it provides more value to a greater number of people.
Because business owners don’t like to lose money, no one is going to voluntarily pay you more than the value of what you can produce. Otherwise, they could simply save money by firing you, and that’s what they would do.
This simple truth seems to have eluded many on the political Left who believe you can mandate wages irrespective of productivity. Instead of passing new laws and regulations on employers, anyone truly interested in promoting higher wages should be focused on making people more productive, so that they can earn more for doing the same amount of work.
How can we do that? There are a couple of ways. First, we can allow people to become more productive by increasing their skills and education. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has crushed the life out of primary and secondary education through policies like Common Core and an opposition to meaningful school choice.
And while the president would no doubt tout his support of “higher education for all” as a step towards increasing productivity, what he has in fact done is steered students away from technical and vocational schools, despite a widespread demand for jobs like welders, plumbers, and electricians. Due to the increasing scarcity of these skills, it is possible to make six figures with a two-year degree, but you’d never know it from listening to the elites trying to funnel more and more students into liberal arts colleges, where they will have to take out expensive student loans to earn a degree few employers value all that much.
Another way to improve productivity is to embrace technological advances. Yet, like Luddites terrified of change and advancement, we have seen progressives systematically try to destroy not only the opportunities for innovation, but even the new technologies that already exist. From the Internet sales tax, to the FDA dragging its feet on approving new medical devices, to increased regulations on Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and other disruptive technologies, the government does everything it can to prevent improvements in the way of doing business.
This is bad for productivity. These innovations allow workers to produce more value with less effort, in less time, which in turn will allow them to earn more money. Instead of cracking down on these new technologies, we should get government out of the way and allow human invention to flourish.
So the next time a progressive tells you they’re concerned about low wages, don’t believe them. What they’re really concerned about is protecting the interests of certain groups — labor unions, green energy companies, well-connected incumbents — at the expense of everyone else. (For more from the author of “Here’s Why Progressives’ Wage Pandering Is a Load of B.S.” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/New_McDonalds_restaurant_in_Mount_Pleasant_Iowa-1.jpg7441024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-19 22:12:392016-05-19 22:12:39Here’s Why Progressives’ Wage Pandering Is a Load of B.S.
The Obama administration’s bathroom directive, ordering local school districts to allow transgender students to use the restrooms of their choice, has caught congressional Republicans off guard.
The response has been a mix of pessimism, frustration, and a call for the states to defy the directive at the local level.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., ventured into the fray Tuesday with a strongly worded letter to Department of Education Secretary John King Jr. Lankford wrote that the department’s directive “conflates an individual’s gender identity with the widely accepted and longstanding understanding of sex without support in Title IX.”
The new guidelines, released Friday by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, instruct local schools to extend Title IX protections, which prohibit sex-based discrimination, to transgender students.
The Oklahoma senator slammed King for advancing “substantive and binding regulatory policies” that didn’t go through the regular rule-making process or through an act of Congress.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, decried the directive and told The Daily Signal that “Obama has again abused his executive authority to disrupt the lives of millions of Americans.”
The bathroom directive, Lee said, underscores the need for reforms that “would defang the Department of Education.” But an aide to the senator noted that there were “no immediate plans” to advance reform.
Republican leadership has not tangled with the administration over the issue directly. Instead, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has maintained that states, not the federal government, should take point in crafting policies that best address the issue at the local level.
A Ryan aide told The Daily Signal that the speaker “believes this is a state and local issue and the federal government should respect that.” When asked if Ryan planned to offer a rebuttal, the aide predicted the speaker would let any legislative fix work its way through the committee process.
Ryan’s counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has remained quiet on the issue and didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
1. Push States to Ignore Obama’s Directive
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., advised states and local school districts “to just disregard the president’s directive.”
“It’s not a rule,” the Freedom Caucus board member told The Daily Signal. The administration “hasn’t gone through the rule-making process because it’d have to come through our [congressional] oversight. You would actually have to change a rule for it to have the effect of law.”
Many conservatives in both the House and the Senate see the bathroom battle as a conflict best suited to the terrain at the state level. Asked what recourse public schools have now, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., said he couldn’t “imagine what it is.”
“I would love to see some local school districts, mine included, just say ‘No, we’re not going to do it,’” Mulvaney, who is also a Freedom Caucus board member, said. “If that means having to figure out how to do without federal funds, then God bless them. You have to fight at some point and Congress is not showing the ability to fight back during this administration.”
While President Barack Obama’s directive does not carry the force of law, it’s been widely received as a veiled threat to local districts: comply or lose federal funds.
2. Clarify What Title IX Means
Heritage Foundation scholar Ryan Anderson explained that Congress could clarify federal law to stop what he considers “the Obama administration’s unlawful rewriting of Title IX.”
That would require the legislature, he said, to “reaffirm that ‘sex’ does not mean ‘gender-identity’ in statutes passed decades ago.”
3. A Voucher System
But there is some discussion in conservative circles about a potential fix—albeit a long-term one.
Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., imagines a voucher system specifically for families who have concerns with social issues.
“For any school that accepts federal funds, and the strings that come attached,” Lummis told The Daily Signal, “the families who send their children to those public schools should be able to receive a voucher to go to the school of their choice if any matter of social mores is inconsistent with their realm.”
The Wyoming lawmaker aims, she said, to introduce the plan as a standalone measure and gauge how much bipartisan support it attracts this year. As a standalone bill, that plan faces an uphill trek to passage in the current political climate.
What’s Next
Mulvaney interprets Republican leadership’s silence as a reluctance to challenge Obama on the issue through the legislative process. That would require tying a bill to a must-pass piece of legislation, Mulvaney said, and risking a government shutdown.
“We all know that there’s too many Republicans who just abhor the thought of any discussion of a shutdown during an election year,” he said, “so we won’t fight.” (For more from the author of “3 Ways Conservative Lawmakers Could Respond to Obama’s Bathroom Directive” please click HERE)
Now that the crowded 2016 field of mostly GOP beta males is tripping all over themselves to genuflect to their vanquisher Donald Trump – and what an embarrassment to the cause of manhood they are – all eyes are on Ted Cruz.
Will he, too, bend at the knee to Trump’s chocolate bunny?
Or will Cruz continue on the righteously ornery path that has taken him from political nobody to conservative superstar in only four years?
For now, Cruz is playing it smart. There’s no point in showing your hand if you’re Cruz, because right now there is no pressure on you. You’re no longer a candidate, and it is always the candidate’s obligation to woo the voters, not the voters’ task to contort their souls into pretzels on behalf of the candidate. That means the onus is on Trump, not Cruz, to unify.
If you’re gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right. You gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em.
But at some point in the coming weeks and months there will be a cash call, and I hope the man I’m proud to call a friend, and whose courage of conviction I admire, has the political savvy to realize that what may seem like a tough call for him really isn’t a tough call at all. Once you remove the peer pressure and group think, which Cruz has already made a career out of defying, and plan out the long-term consequences.
If I was in Cruz’s inner circle at this moment, here are the seven things I’d be telling him:
1. There is more at stake for you in this decision than anyone else.
With the possible exception of Scott Walker, who will rightfully be given a chance to resurrect himself because of his record in Wisconsin, none of the 16 GOP candidates not named Trump have a guaranteed political future except Cruz and Fiorina. For they are the only two non-Trump candidates who definitely ended the race with more political capital than what they started with.
Furthermore, this election cycle painfully revealed the paucity of principled conservative leaders to rally and inspire us. Therefore, Cruz owes it to both the people who gave him his political capital, as well as conservatism, to not be pennywise and pound foolish here. The list of people waiting in the wings should he sell his birthright tomorrow for a pot of stew today isn’t long or credible, thus Cruz blowing his political capital has far-reaching implications for millions of patriots in desperate need of leadership.
2. This is not 1976, and you’re not Reagan.
As a first-born son of the Reagan Revolution, Cruz was fond of comparing 2016 to 1980. Clearly that’s not the case—2016 turned out to be 1789 instead. Now he should resist the temptation to cast this as 1976 and himself in the Reagan role. See that as giving an impassioned speech at the convention that sets him up for the future, all the while claiming to be the loyal soldier for the good of the party in the meantime.
The reality is the only people who care about the good of the party are the folks Trump conquered, and don’t forget that before Trump arrived they hated Cruz the most. Once Trump is gone, Cruz will return as public enemy number one to these people. Cruz should learn from what happened with Trump in this campaign: you don’t endear yourself to foes you’ll have to destroy later. Besides, anyone who would consider voting for Cruz four years from now is more interested in a fighter than a unifier anyway.
3. Remember one of the 10 Commandments of Political Warfare: Don’t ever betray your base.
The only Republican with a future, whose base is likely to be disappointed if he kneels before Zod, is Cruz, for obvious reasons. Many of those people consider themselves “principle before party voters,” and they took Trump’s dirt bag attacks on Cruz’s family almost as personally as Cruz did. Cruz voters will be among the last to hold the line on #NeverTrump, and a chunk of them will never give up the ship. If Cruz endorses Trump he risks splitting his future base like no one else does. The dumbest thing to do when you have the biggest base heading into the future is to split it.
4. This is a rare opportunity in politics when the morally righteous thing to do is also the most politically expedient.
It’s rare in politics to be politically rewarded for doing the most principled thing, but that is the case here for Cruz. And it will be much easier for him to win over people mad at him for not “unifying” later than it would be to reunify his base if he were to endorse. Look at all the voters who don’t care Trump is a progressive and a Hillary donor. Look at all the other candidates groveling before the same Trump they once insulted. These are soulless people that will come to your beck and call in the future if you’re winning. But Cruz’s odds of winning diminish if he splits his base.
5. You will tarnish your brand, at least to some degree, because all the reasons to endorse Trump tarnish it.
How do you credibly endorse someone you called a “pathological liar” for the highest office in all the land after writing a book called “A Time for Truth”? How do you endorse a guy for president who dishonored your wife, called you a whoremonger, and claimed your dad was a presidential assassin? That’s pretty much the most beta thing ever. I’m going to point this out now as a friend, in the hopes that our enemies in the D.C. Cartel and media may not have to do it later.
6. You will open the door to being out-flanked as the insurgent once again in your next presidential run, as you were in this one.
The biggest reason Cruz could not beat Trump is that Trump out-flanked him as the insurgent candidate (and yes, the media had a lot to do with that but not everything). If Cruz endorses Trump, he risks this happening to him again in the future. Except in 2020 it won’t be another megalomaniac celebrity candidacy if Trump loses, but a new hotness like fellow Senator Ben Sasse.
Sasse has been AWOL near as I can tell on pretty much every major fight since he got to the Senate, but he clearly sees an opportunity with #NeverTrump and is wisely exploiting it. By the way, that’s not a criticism but a compliment. The GOP needs more politicians who see morally righteous causes as political opportunities, not fewer. Sasse also comes from a neighboring state to first-in-the-nation Iowa, and has already given a major political speech here in my backyard, so you can see him working.
In 2020, Sasse will have even more Senate experience than Cruz ran with in 2016, and he won’t have the stench of Trump on him. Freeing him up to go after a sizable bloc of primary voters that should be Cruz’s, unless he opens the door for a Sasse type later by endorsing Trump now. If Cruz does, someone like a Sasse could turn around and do to Cruz in Iowa four years from now what Cruz did to past caucus champions Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in 2016.
7. You literally gain nothing from this politically and it’s a one-sided waste of political capital.
Look at all the others who have assumed the position for Trump, and what have they gained politically for it? Answer: zilch. And at the cost of their integrities to boot. They now owe all their futures to Trump winning in November, and won’t have one if he loses.
Don’t be that guy.
Whatever you may think Trump will promise or hint at now, you know he won’t deliver later, but just mount Cruz’s scalp on the wall as another trophy. Like President Trump is going to spend one day fighting tooth-and-nail to confirm “Lyin Ted” to the U.S. Supreme Court. Come on, man.
On the other hand, the fertile political ground is the yet politically untapped #NeverTrump real estate. Cruz can have that all too himself, and it’s got long-term prospects. If Trump loses in November, Cruz becomes the immediate frontrunner in 2020. And if Trump wins, Cruz becomes the face of the principled opposition to what would likely be the most feckless presidency in the history of the republic.
Cruz learned early on there is hefty ROI potential on remaining principled in an era of cowards and charlatans. Now is the time for him to stay that course. (For more from the author of “Seven Reasons Cruz’s Tough Call on Trump Really Isn’t a Tough Call at All” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/6236460239_9c01ab4f52_b.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-17 02:16:232016-05-17 02:16:23Seven Reasons Cruz’s Tough Call on Trump Really Isn’t a Tough Call at All
The cool kids in public policy circles these days are all about “criminal justice reform.” Their most immediate cause célèbre is the passage of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (S.2123). While we’ve covered this issue from many angles in the past, I felt a need to summarize the basic problems with its entire premise, as well as the specific legislation that, barring an outcry from the public, will come to the House and Senate floors this spring.
Astoundingly, some Republicans are trying to make the case that this is really part of a conservative agenda. Here is a list of talking points from their playbook to allure conservatives into supporting this bill and the broader effort in regards to criminal justice “reform.”
Myth # 1: The Prison population keeps growing even though crime is declining.
Fact:
The D.C. intelligentsia argues our criminal justice system is in dire need of reform. But ask anyone outside the beltway, and they’ll give you a different definition of “broken.” Many Americans would agree that current laws are too lenient on criminals and disregard the victim all too often. It was the tough reforms put into place during the Reagan years and in the ‘90s that produced the sharpest decline in violent crime on record. Those reforms, coupled with more aggressive policing, led to the only positive social trend in public policy in recent memory. That trend is now being reversed precisely as incarceration rates decline and Obama and his allies ratchet up the war against law enforcement. While correlation doesn’t necessarily prove causation, the correlation is indeed striking, and in conjunction with the defanging of local police departments, the release of tens of thousands of federal prisoners can only result in exacerbating this negative trajectory.
The sentencing aspect of our criminal justice system is not broken. What is broken is the legal profession that exploits existing loopholes to plead down a number of serious charges and endanger society. Add in the revolving door and recidivism of criminals, especially for juveniles who all too often receive a slap on the wrist, and you get a criminal justice system that is more lenient on criminals than it should be. There are major issues with the collapse of the civil society, but incarceration didn’t precipitate that societal collapse; it is merely a reflection of the collapse. There are countless violent criminals who are not in prison thanks to the legal profession.
Let’s examine history: Violent crime began exploding in the ‘60s, rising from 161 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 1960 to 597 in 1980. It was around this time that the prison population began rising sharply, but mainly on a state level. The federal mandatory minimum laws pushed by President Reagan were implemented in 1984 and 1986. There is always a lag time between the rise in incarceration and the drop in crime, but the correlation is striking. Violent crime kept rising for another decade, topping out at 758 in 1991 before the fever finally broke. But the years of tougher sentencing finally paid off. Crime dropped like a rock for two decades and stood at 376 per 100,000 people in 2014. While that is a dramatic drop, it is still historically high and has not erased the full growth in crime that began in 1960. But the important question is where the trajectory is headed. While crime has consistently dropped through 2014, there are signs of a turnaround. At the same time, incarceration peaked about eight years ago and has steadily gone down both on a state and federal level.
Also, further portending a downward trajectory of incarceration in the coming years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), federal prosecutions have dropped 25.4 percent from November 2010 through November 2015.
Hence, the pattern is continuing. The spike in crime precipitated the rise in incarceration, which helped decrease crime. Now that the prison population is decreasing, with another 46,000 federal inmates (one-fourth of the entire federal prison population) and countless state inmates slated for early release over the next year or two, it would not be surprising if we experience another era of rising crime. Either way, the notion that we could just revert to pre-1980 incarceration levels without first healing our broken and violent society is plain suicide.
Myth # 2: There are millions of people incarcerated in American prisons for no good reason.
Fact:
While there are approximately 1.5 million people incarcerated in American jails, prisons, and other institutions, only 195,900 are federal inmates (a ten-year low). And only 159,000 in the federal system are housed in actual prisons. The rest are in privately managed facilities, home confinement, short-term detention, long-term boarders, residential reentry centers, pre-trial/pre-sentence holding, etc. At least 25% of the federal prison population is comprised of illegal aliens and possibly more who are noncitizens. We should save money by releasing those criminals and deporting them. It is extremely misleading to conflate state numbers when promoting federal legislation dealing with the federal criminal code and the federal prison population. Moreover, as this is being written the Justice Department is already in the process of releasing over 46,000 federal prisoners in one of the largest prison releases in American history, even without this legislation. This comes on the heels of several waves of releases since 2007, which has engendered a steady drop in the federal prison population.
Incidentally, the two decade-long drop in violent crime is showing signs of reversing as jailbreak initiatives succeed throughout the country. In the nation’s 25 largest cities, the murder rate jumped 14.6% in 2015, which is the largest single-year spike since 1960, according to the left-leaning Marshall Project.
That Republicans would be promoting legislation to release many of the remaining 150,000 of the most hardened federal criminals by using the talking point of mass incarceration is dishonest, illogical, and irresponsible.
And as for the 1.3 million in state and local prisons, only 15.7 percent have been convicted on drug charges and 75% of those are for trafficking, not possession. Thus, just 3.6 percent of the total state prison population is comprised of individuals convicted for simple drug possession.
Further, the entire notion of focusing on the prison population instead of protecting society and decreasing crime is inherently a far left principle. Sure, we have a lot of people in prison, but there are even more criminals left on the streets. That is because we have systemic social problems in this country. As Heather MacDonald noted last year in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “the U.S. homicide rate is seven times higher than the combined rate of 21 Western nations plus Japan.” This needs to be dealt with at the systemic level instead of treating the symptom by letting everyone out of jail and endangering the public.
Myth # 3: Incarceration costs so much money and criminal justice “reform” will save billions.
Reality:
While incarceration costs have grown with the increase in the prison population (which is already on a downward trajectory), how much money have we saved as a society from the massive decrease in violent crime corresponding with the same time period? Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, former Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, wrote in the Washington Post in 2008:
The cost of new crimes goes beyond prisons. The most conservative estimate for the cost of violent and property crimes in the United States is $17 billion a year — and that’s just direct, immediate cost. This leaves out such costs as crime victims’ struggle to be made whole.
In April, during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, the Senate passed a resolution including this very finding from Sedgwick. Even CBO admitted that an earlier version of the bill would have increased the deficit on net by $1 billion.
Just look at the effects of California’s Proposition 47, which reduced penalties retroactively for drug and property crimes and led to the release of 30,000 criminals. According to a new report, California wound up spending $2.2 billion more on prison costs per year. At the same time, violent crime spiked by 12.9 percent and property crime rose by 9.2 percent in California’s largest cities. Shoplifting is now rampant in the Golden State. And remember, state convicts are on average not as violent as those sitting in federal prisons.
The reality is that the recidivism of criminals not only costs human lives; its fiscal costs outweigh the price tag of incarceration: In the 2011 case, Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court upheld an activist lower-court mandate that California reduce its inmate population to alleviate overcrowding. Justice Samuel Alito dissented due in part to public-safety concerns, citing a prisoner-release program carried out in Philadelphia in the 1990s.
Although efforts were made to release only those prisoners who were least likely to commit violent crimes, that attempt was spectacularly unsuccessful. During an 18-month period, the Philadelphia police rearrested thousands of these prisoners for committing 9,732 new crimes. Those defendants were charged with 79 murders, 90 rapes, 1,113 assaults, 959 robberies, 701 burglaries, and 2,748 thefts, not to mention thousands of drug offenses. [Brown, (Alito, J., dissenting, slip op. at 14)]
Myth # 4: This bill will only release low level, non-violent drug offenders.
Fact:
This is one of the biggest falsities of the leniency industrial complex (as Sen. Grassley used to refer to them before he became one of them). This bill will retroactively release thousands of hardened criminals, many of whom are illegal aliens. In fact, it doesn’t address simple possessions at all. Those in the soft-on-crime caucus are dishonestly conflating state reform efforts dealing with simple marijuana possession with high-level federal offenses. They want to give the impression that there are thousands of people rotting in federal prison for simply smoking a joint. These politicians are well aware of the fact that those serving time in federal prison on drug offenses are either illegal aliens or big time traffickers of large quantities of dangerous drugs, including cocaine, meth, and heroin.
Consider the following:
According to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, as of March 2016, there were 514 federal inmates serving a sentence for “simple possession,” of which 95.5% are non-citizens — meaning only 24 U.S. citizens are serving federal sentences for simple possession, and many, if not all, likely involved more serious charges that were pled down.96.7% of all “simple possession” defendants were sentenced in the southwest border districts — virtually all in Arizona. No mandatory minimum penalty applied in any of these cases, and the median sentence was 6 months. The median weight of the drugs involved in the border district cases was 21,700 grams, or approximately 48 pounds. This demonstrates that these individuals were not simple possessors or users, but rather traffickers convicted of lesser charges. Even on a state level, as noted above, drug possession accounts for only 3.6% of state prisoners in light of recent efforts to go soft on drug possession on multiple fronts.
Only 17 possession cases were sentenced in non-border districts; of those, a mandatory minimum penalty applied in only 8 cases, and the median sentence was 24 months.
In FY 2015, 52.7 percent of those sentenced for federal crimes were Hispanics, even though blacks account for 52% of violent crime in the country. This indicates that much of the problem with the federal prison system is related to immigration.
Many of those convicted on drug charges have plead down to lesser charges but have been involved in violent crime. There is a reason increased incarceration has contributed to at least 25% of the two-decade long reduction in crime. A relatively small population of criminals commit most of the crimes and by locking them up for drug trafficking, these same individuals predisposed to commit violent crimes were taken off the streets.
Under current law, there is a “safety valve” that has allowed 80,000 convicted drug offenders to escape the mandatory minimums. In FY 2014, 28.5% of all drug trafficking offenders escaped the mandatory minimum via the safety valve. This is why the length of time for drug sentencing is already shrinking across the board. Those remaining in federal prison today under the mandatory sentencing guidelines are undoubtedly hard-core criminals with longer rap sheets.
According to a report released last year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 76.9% of drug offenders who were released from prison in 30 states from 2005-2010 were arrested again within five years. One can only imagine the effect of releasing felons from federal prison who are, on average, more violent than those in state prisons.
Myth # 5: We have a big government culture of over-criminalization that threatens liberty.
Fact:
Absolutely. There are plenty of frivolous regulatory crimes on the books. And none of that is addressed in this legislation or in any of the ongoing “bipartisan” negotiations. This is all about promoting the ACLU’s agenda for hardened criminals. As it relates to our culture of violent crime, witnessed by the recent spike in crime across the nation, we do not do enough to combat it. Ordered liberty is built upon government doing a few things well, one of which is law enforcement. Returning to pre-Reagan crime levels where people are restricted in their movements and activities due to the paralysis we are now seeing in places like Baltimore, represents the highest level of tyranny. Crime, lawlessness, and fiscal dependency policies undermine liberty in the inner cities, not sentencing and incarceration.
Myth # 6: Drug laws disproportionately hurt blacks.
Fact:
The number of blacks serving in prison for drug trafficking is as disproportionately high to the white population as it is for other violent crimes. The reality is that predominantly black inner cities are riddled with violent crime and drugs and are merely one symptom of the problem. Once again, the goal here should be to address the root cause of the problem instead of treating the symptom.
Even if you release all drug offenders in state prisons, the percentage blacks comprise of the prison population would decrease from 37.5% to 37%. According to IBD’s analysis of the BJS statistics, “Blacks under 18 account for just 23% of the nation’s drug offenses, but a shocking 52% of all violent crime — including 51% of murders, 69% of robberies, 34% of rapes and 43% of aggravated assaults.”
Moreover, the trajectory of incarceration by race is headed in the other direction. According to Professor Keith Humphreys, since 2000 the imprisonment rate for black females has dropped by 47 percent while the rate among white women has increased by 56%. Incarceration of black males has declined by 22% over the same time.
Besides, focusing on outcomes as opposed to equality of actions and opportunity should be a nonstarter with conservatives and libertarians. The sad reality is that drugs and incarceration are symptoms of the violent crime problem we have in this country, and in the black community in particular. Black victims will be the most harmed by the dismantling of more aggressive policing, tougher sentencing, and more incarceration.
One of the more attractive libertarian arguments is that the federal government shouldn’t be involved in criminalizing drugs and should devolve it to the states. We can have that debate, but that is neither the discussion of this bill nor the broader effort it belies. This bill keeps the feds involved in all aspects of drug laws; it merely lets those who have already been convicted out of jail without devolving responsibility to the states. The goal of this bill is not to prospectively clean up the federal criminal code but to focus singularly on reducing prison population retroactively at any cost.
Meanwhile, Congress is completely ignoring Obama’s violation of federalism by ignoring his racist investigations of local police departments. In fact, Congress has given Obama’s federal power grab tailwinds by creating a $50 million slush fund for the DOJ to help defang the police with a carrot and stick approach to hands-off policing. The pending legislation is full of social engineering interventions at the federal level encouraging states to decrease their prison population across the board.
Myth # 8: We don’t need mandatory sentencing to get criminals to cooperate.
Fact:
During the hearing on this bill last year, a number of the Democrat and Republican proponents suggested that there are other ways to pressure criminals from cooperating with authorities other than mandatory minimums. But once again, this is all rooted in their unflinching trust in liberal judges. There is simply no way to deter criminals without mandating a floor for sentencing that cannot be manipulated by the legal profession.
Republican supporters of this bill willfully ignore the lessons of the ‘60s and ‘70s with liberal judges.
Myth # 9: This bill doesn’t repeal mandatory minimums, it just gives more discretion to judges
Fact:
Sections 102 and 103 repeal the mandatory minimums by expanding the current statutory safety valve and creating an entire new one for judges to use. As if this weren’t enough, both sections include a “judicial waiver.” So if a defendant’s criminal history is so serious that he is excluded from even the now massively expanded safety valves, the judge can disregard his criminal history if the judge believes thinks it “overrepresents the seriousness” of his past crimes. This argument is reminiscent of those proponents of amnesty who would extol the virtues of illegal immigration and amnesty, then proceed to passionately deny their bill was indeed a form of amnesty. It also mirrors the framework of the Gang of Eight bill, wherein every seemingly strict rule and requirement was followed by a broad grant of discretion to the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive it. By definition, a mandatory minimum supersedes liberal discretion of a judge. By no longer making it mandatory for a number of categories, there is no enforcement mechanism. Sure, a judge could theoretically still issue the same sentence, but that is no longer a mandate. Republican supporters of this bill willfully ignore the lessons of the ‘60s and ‘70s with liberal judges.
Myth # 10: The war on drugs failed and is stupid, so as long as this is about drug sentencing, I don’t care.
Reality: This is where understanding of the broad politics behind this effort and where it is headed is just as important as examining the first piece of legislation. Much like with immigration, the lead messaging from the Alinsky left revolves around an area of broad consensus. The lead messaging ship in the amnesty armada was, “Do you want to deport valedictorians attending Ivy League schools?” In this case, the first bill is messaged as tearing down “draconian” drug sentences. But if you look broadly at where the left is headed with this effort, and yes, it is the Left steering this ship – not conservatives and libertarians – they seek to dismantle the entire tough on crime regime that has led to the miraculous decline in crime. From the Justice Department’s plan to ban the use of the word “felon” to Obama’s effort to block inquiries into ALL criminal records for job applications and rentals of private landlords, the sentencing bill is merely the down payment on going soft on all areas of law enforcement.
Anyone who thinks this will end with drug laws is not paying attention to the players on the field. And ultimately, this is about getting felons to vote and creating a permanent Democrat majority, which will make it impossible to implement any other libertarian priority.
What should scare people the most is that S. 2123 and its House companions are just a down payment on dismantling law and order in this country – the first ship out to sea. And it is the least offensive version of what we might expect to come. Just like with immigration, they introduce their agenda with many tough-sounding caveats and talking points: amnesty will only apply to those as pure as the wind-driven snow, they will have to pay taxes, learn English, assimilate, etc. Likewise, in this case they are beginning with messaging pertaining to so-called nonviolent drug offenders. But once these policies are operational and the general sense of liberalization reigns supreme in the courts, this will open the floodgates for the much broader ACLU agenda.
With the tide of crime rising throughout this country, isn’t it time to ask: Where is the safety valve for law abiding Americans from this broader effort to coddle criminals? (For more from the author of “BUSTED: The 10 Most Dangerous Myths About Criminal Justice Reform” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/8581420679_2e095b7922_o.jpg28484288Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-17 02:12:202016-05-17 04:14:55BUSTED: The 10 Most Dangerous Myths About Criminal Justice Reform
Retired U.S. Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus wrote an article entitled “David Petraeus: Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists.”
Thank you, sir, for the clarification. Up until now, I had believed Barack Obama; that Islamic terrorism was caused by climate change.
Petraeus’ premise is that “inflammatory political discourse…against Muslims and Islam…including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion… will compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens… directly undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”
Let us first dispel a universal myth and the fundamental flaw in Petraeus’ argument. There is no such thing as gratitude in foreign policy; only interests.
In every one of the “alliance” cases Petraeus cites: Sunni Muslims in al Anbar province, the Iraqi Shiite government, the Afghan Northern Alliance, the nation of Indonesia – all of them worked with the United States because of mutual interest, not happy talk.
NATO exists and operates on the basis of mutual interest and even after a decade of vitriol and their mutually exclusive ideologies, Hitler and Stalin still concluded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Petraeus is concerned that political rhetoric will inhibit our ability to root out entrenched terrorist, like in Libya, which would not have become entrenched with terrorists except for the foreign policy malpractice of the Obama Administration and CIA Director Petraeus, arguably compounding “the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.”
The Islamic State, ISIS, has made no secret of its intention to infiltrate Europe and the United States through “refugee” migration or other means for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts.
In his Congressional testimony, FBI Director James Comey admitted that there is no way to screen the tens of thousands of Muslim refugees the Obama administration plans to accept into the US.
Yet Petraeus considers any effort to halt uncontrolled Muslim immigration as “blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion,” “demonizing a religious faith” or “toying with anti-Muslim bigotry.”
Petraeus employs all the familiar false propositions made popular by Democrat Party operatives, the liberal media, and, more recently, by the Republican establishment as a not-so-well-disguised repudiation of potential courses of action outlined by Donald Trump.
It reads less like a valuable contribution to the foreign policy literature than a left-wing academic polemic or an audition for a cabinet position in the Administration of Hillary Clinton.
Petraeus equates prudent self-defense measures to hate-speech and considers potential ISIS infiltration an acceptable risk in order for “moderate” Muslims to feel good about themselves.
And just exactly who are these “moderate” Muslims Petraeus wishes to appease?
Is it the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood Qatar, or Sunni Islamist Turkish President Erdogan to whom, collectively, the Obama Administration has recklessly outsourced our Middle East policy?
Petraeus knows full well that it is not an issue of religion, but recognition of the potentially deadly consequences of thousands of violent migrants from a volatile region entering the US en masse.
In the end, the Petraeus argument provides little more than the tired clichés of Islamophobia, that Muslim hostility to the West is caused by verbal slights or other affronts to Islam.
No one is advocating gratuitous insults, but unwarranted appeasement or other emotionally satisfying liberal gestures are, in reality, construed by Muslim leaders as a weakness to be exploited.
In the world of realpolitik, it is preferable to be liked. It is advantageous to be respected. In the absence of those, fear will do. (For more from the author of “Petraeus’ Profoundly Silly Islamophobia Article” please click HERE)
Every notion we in the West have adopted in terms of dealing with Muslims, both individually and collectively, is wrong.
It is a policy based more on political correctness than on rational analysis, more on a misunderstanding of culture than religion.
The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought, a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them, similar to the tactics used by the political left, when they hurl the accusations of “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe” and “hate-speech.”
It became the role of Islamist lobby organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to depict themselves as civil-rights groups speaking out on behalf of a Muslim American population that was allegedly besieged by outsiders who harbored an illogical, unfounded fear of them and regularly accusing the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. Of course, FBI data on hate crimes show that such allegations are nonsense.
Contrary to the propaganda, Islamophobia is not what Muslims feel, but what radical Muslims hope to instill politically and culturally in non-Muslims cultures, that is, intimidation and fear. Thereby, they can, not only further their goal of a global Caliphate, but gain a type of “respect” to which they would otherwise not be entitled based on an absence of convincing arguments or constructive contributions to society.
Danish psychologist, Nicolai Sennels, who treated 150 criminal Muslim inmates found fundamental and largely irreconcilable psychological differences between Muslim and Western culture, which makes effective assimilation at best serendipity and at worst urban myth.
For example, Muslim culture has a very different view of anger. In Western culture, expressions of anger and threats are probably the quickest way to lose face leading to a feeling of shame and a loss of social status. In Muslim culture, aggressive behaviors, especially threats, are generally seen to be accepted, and even expected as a way of handling conflicts.
In the context of foreign policy, peaceful approaches such as demonstrations of compassion, compromise and common sense are seen by Muslim leaders as cowardice and a weakness to be exploited. In that respect, anger and violence are not reasons to begin negotiations, but are integral components of the negotiation process itself.
According to Sennels, there is another important psychological difference between Muslim and Western cultures called the “locus of control,” whether people experience life influenced by either internal or external factors.
Westerners feel that their lives are mainly influenced by inner forces, our ways of handling our emotions, our ways of thinking, our ways of relating to people around us, our motivations, and our way of communicating; factors that determine if we feel good and self-confident or not.
In Muslim culture, however, inner factors are replaced by external rules, traditions and laws for human behavior. They have powerful Muslim clerics who set the directions for their community, dictate political views, and provide rules for virtually all aspects of life.
The locus of control is central to the individual’s understanding of freedom and responsibility. When Westerners have problems, we most often look inward and ask “What did I do wrong?” and “What can I do to change the situation?” Muslims look outward for sources to blame asking: “Who did this to me?” Sennels noted that a standard answer from violent Muslims is often: “It is his own fault that I beat him up (or raped her). He (or she) provoked me.”
As a result, Muslim culture offers a formula for perpetual victimhood.
With a decrease in feelings of personal responsibility, there is a greater tendency to demand that the surroundings adapt to Muslim wishes and desires, infiltrating rather than to assimilating into a Western culture.
All of this does not bode well for the logic of any proposal to increase Muslim immigration into non-Muslim cultures or the success of any foreign policy involving Muslim nations by applying current Islamophobia-based misconceptions.
Sennels offers a harsh, but realistic prescription:
“We should not permit the destruction of our cities by lawless parallel societies, with groups of roaming criminal Muslims overloading of our welfare system and the growing justified fear that non-Muslims have of violence. The consequences should be so strict that it would be preferable for any anti-social Muslim to go back to a Muslim country, where they can understand, and can be understood by their own culture.
It is not Islamophobia from which the West suffers, but Islamonausea, a natural reaction to something culturally abnormal. (For more from the author of “Muslims Don’t Assimilate, They Infiltrate” please click HERE)
It hurts. To run for President of the United States, to get to the final round of primaries, and lose both a key primary and the hope of winning period? To be out there and have your family out there and lose? Yes, it stings.
But a word about Senator Ted Cruz.
Yes, yes, I know he is a conservative’s conservative. That is precisely why I have repeatedly suggested him for the second half of a Trump ticket, something that seems highly unlikely at this point. (Although Trump himself told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly the other night on the subject of Cruz for Vice President: “He really competed hard and tough, so I respect Ted. He’s certainly a capable guy, so it’s something we can think about.”) Here here!
But let’s be candid. Here is a Breitbart headline and part of a story that reflects the problem.
Poll: 70 Percent of Ted Cruz Supporters Now Dislike Donald Trump
Almost 7-out-of-10 of Sen. Ted Cruz’s supporters have an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump, and fewer than 30 percent have a favorable view of the New Yorker, according to survey data from Morning Consult.
As the Breitbart story also points out, this wasn’t always the case.
This wasn’t always the case. At the end of 2015, of all his challengers, Trump’s favorable numbers were highest among Cruz supporters. More than half of Cruz’s backers, 53 percent, had a favorable view of the real estate developer. Just 39 percent of Cruz supporters had an unfavorable view of Trump.
By comparison, 60 percent of Sen. Marco Rubio’s supporters had an unfavorable view of Trump and just 38 percent had a positive opinion.
The positive feelings between Trump and Cruz supporters were even more reciprocal in the other direction. Among Trump’s backers, 61 percent had a positive view of Cruz, while only 21 percent had a negative view.
Among Trump’s supporters, in fact, Ted Cruz had a higher favorable rating than any other rival for the nomination.
Each were the top second choice of the other’s supporters.
One minute Trump and Cruz supporters were buds. Then not. Houston, we have a problem.
So let me start discussing this problem here, from the Trump side.
Certainly I am not in agreement with most of the Wall Street Journal’s “Cruz Postmortem” editorial. The WSJ says that Cruz had a “ruin-to-rule campaign strategy” and that it “crashed”. Said the WSJ:
The reasons for this crash go back to Mr. Cruz’s strategy to run for President that began from his earliest days in the Senate in 2013. He calculated he couldn’t stand out in the presidential pack if he merely attacked President Obama and Hillary Clinton. So he and his allies at the Heritage Foundation and the Mark Levin talk-radio right put together a strategy to inflame populist resentment against the GOP Congress and catapult Mr. Cruz to the White House.
In the narrative they contrived, true conservatives are forever betrayed by the corrupt leaders of what Mr. Cruz called “the Washington cartel.”
Thus they set up impossible feats of strength like the ObamaCare government shutdown, or phony tests of political purity on drones and gun control. Mr. Cruz also saw immigration as a wedge for the base and made it his signature.
What is incredulous here is the assignment of Cruz’s actions in the Senate as a cynical strategy to get elected president. Long before Ted Cruz appeared in the Senate there were plenty of people like me who agreed with, to quote the WSJ, “the Heritage Foundation and the Mark Levin talk-radio right” on the subject of a Washington Establishment gone off the rails. It took absolutely zero calculation for Ted Cruz to understand what was — and remains — a serious problem in American government. In the last few weeks I have had many, many conversations with Trump supporters. To a person they agree with some variation of what the WSJ scorns as the Heritage and Mark Levin talk-radio right.
I have repeatedly reiterated my support for Cruz as Trump’s VP. Why? Precisely because I believe as a conservative’s conservative he would add immeasurably to a Trump ticket and, critically, be the “conservative in the room” when it came time to decide about Supreme Court appointments and for that matter the entire appointments to the entire federal judiciary.
But this begs the obvious question. Why wasn’t I there for Ted Cruz for the top job?
Well aside from my support of Donald Trump – I was pro-Trump, decidedly not anti-Cruz — it appeared to me that — at least at this point — Senator Cruz was unable to reignite the fabled “Reagan coalition” in its modern incarnation. Which is to say a massive coming together of Americans from all walks of life — ages, income, gender, geography, race, and religion, not to mention Democrats and Independents as well as Republicans — around the core tenets of conservatism. And in doing so, move that coalition into the American future as the dominant force in American political life.
As the campaign launched, I confess I was uncertain of just how Cruz would play in my neck of the woods — the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic states that range roughly from Maryland to Maine. And to confirm my suspicions, there were eventually the actual primary results. Yes, Cruz did carry Maine through its Republican State Convention. But alas, that was it. In fact, everywhere else in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states Senator Cruz got absolutely trounced in Republican primaries, some of them “open” and some of them not. Here in my home state of Pennsylvania, Trump carried all 67 counties, something that has never been done before by any presidential, senatorial or gubernatorial candidate in an open primary — in either party. There was no question in my mind that Donald Trump could carry Ted Cruz’s home state of Texas. There was considerable question whether Ted Cruz could carry Donald Trump’s home state of New York.
This cannot — must not — be ignored. In fact, this is an opportunity for Cruz moving forward.
Senator Cruz is frequently described in awed tones as a great Princeton debater, the star of Harvard Law and so forth. All to the good. But every single person who runs for the Presidency of the United States is humbled somewhere along the line by their political and human shortcomings as candidate or chief executive. Their success in either category comes because they reach inside themselves to acknowledge their problem, confront it — and move on.
If I may, again respectfully? I winced when I heard the Cruz presser early on in the day of the Indiana primary. Where he suddenly let loose in an emotional tirade with a vituperative frustration about Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. In truth, it reminded me of this moment — which, I acknowledge one has to be old enough to recall. As preserved here in its original grainy black and white, this was known as “Nixon’s last press conference.” After losing a tight presidential race to JFK, Richard Nixon ran for governor of California two years later in 1962. He lost. Humiliated, exhausted and bitter, against the advice of his aides, he descended into the ballroom of a Los Angeles hotel the morning after the election and proceeded to launch an emotional tirade against the press. Among his lines, he said this was his “last press conference” and sarcastically said the press should think about how much they will miss him because “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Suffice to say, it was mistake. A Grade-A political disaster that was used to haunt him for years to come. His enemies had an absolute field day. Within days ABC News was airing a show called “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon” in which they gloated at his presumed political demise. In the White House, a dictaphone captured his old rival JFK talking with California Governor Pat Brown who had just defeated Nixon. Nixon was called “psychotic” a “nut” and “paranoid”. Not good.
The “last press conference” may have made Nixon feel better, but he finally came to his political senses. After quietly retreating awhile, moving to New York to start anew, by 1966 he was re-emerging as a much refreshed, solid, very polished and professional candidate. He had made his mistakes – and he had learned from them. Among other things he hired a young media savvy guy named Roger Ailes to do his media work in 1968. If nothing else, the success of Nixon in 1968 was a classic case of the candidate who confronted his problems directly, corrected them (never in 1968 was he not facing the spotlight without being rested and on his smiling professional game) and as a result finally winning the prize.
There is nothing wrong with losing a race for president. When Ted Cruz stood at that podium the other day surrounded by his family, notably his mother and wife Heidi — the latter whom I know and who is one of the world’s classiest human beings — he and they had every right in the world to be proud of his accomplishments as a candidate. In this corner, there is the distinct belief not just that he will be back. I believe he should be back.
But to come back implies the hope that after a time of well deserved rest, Senator Cruz will in his methodical, data-driven fashion sit down and try and figure out not just where he went wrong but what he did right and what he needs to do to make sure that the next time – or the next (it took Reagan three tries) – he can finally hit the political bullseye and be elected president.
The thought here is that the WSJ did in fact get one thing right in that editorial. This:
The Texan’s lost opportunity was to expand his appeal beyond his most conservative base of support and coalesce mainstream Republicans. He never tried to break out of his factional ghetto, as if excoriating the establishment and transgender bathroom laws could motivate a majority to defeat Mr. Trump’s plurality.
Inelegantly put, perhaps, but from here it would seem to be all too true. The other week I attended my first Trump rally. It was here in Central Pennsylvania. The Farm Show Complex, the largest venue in the capital city of Harrisburg, was almost filled literally to the rafters. An informal survey showed these folks numbering almost 10,000 in number to be a virtual conservative dream. Middle class, blue collar, lots of well-to-do and well-educated folk all rubbing shoulders with the less so. All passionate about The Donald. And yes, there were lots of talk radio fans in the crowd. Fans of Rush, Sean, Mark, Glenn and Laura.
There is no reason in a future American politics that all those Donald fans can’t be passionate about Ted Cruz. But they are not to be scorned, much less condescended to. In point of fact it is a huge mistake for Ted Cruz or his supporters to suddenly adapt the GOP Establishment elitist attitude and look down their noses at these Trumpians when in fact they have so much in common.
The Trump supporters I met at that rally are good, solid, decent Americans. They have responded to Donald Trump for a whole host of reasons. One Trump supporter stopped me in the local grocery store to relate that he had had a stroke and although recovered his dealings with Obamacare were a nightmare. He was decidedly unhappy. What he saw in Donald Trump was someone with a record of getting things done — a man of action. Ted Cruz was, notably, never mentioned. That’s not a diss, either. It is simply revealing of exactly why this one Trump supporter was supporting Trump.
Again, it is important as we move along here to face the hard reality that Donald Trump is where he is today because millions of people affirmatively set out to quite deliberately vote for him. Deriding his supporters, berating and condescending them is a guarantee that they will be permanently turned off — to Ted Cruz or any other conservative who thinks that at a later date they can approach these people and win their votes in a future campaign.
And Trump supporters? This is no time to gloat. Winning brings with it the responsibility of leadership. The obligation to listen, to respectfully consider honest dissent, to sit down and discuss. The fact of the matter here is that lots of very good, very honest and very conservative Americans voted for someone other than Donald Trump. A lot of them voted for Ted Cruz, and it is likewise critical to understand why. There is much, much common ground here in the Trump-Cruz dynamic, as that Breitbart story above noted when it said:
At the end of 2015, of all his challengers, Trump’s favorable numbers were highest among Cruz supporters. More than half of Cruz’s backers, 53 percent, had a favorable view of the real estate developer. Just 39 percent of Cruz supporters had an unfavorable view of Trump.
The only thing that has changed since the end of 2015 was the inevitable. To wit, a hard campaign that produced a Trump victory rather than a Cruz victory. And most assuredly, if Ted Cruz had won, I certainly would have been supporting him and it would correctly have been expected that other Trump supporters get on board as well.
This is an ongoing discussion. But for now?
No, it is not a good idea to elect Hillary Clinton by default. It is time to keep building the conservative movement. To understand just why it’s that a lot of genuine conservatives went out of their way to vote for Donald Trump, without the slightest animus towards Ted Cruz. And it is decidedly a moment for Ted Cruz and his supporters, past, present and future – to take an unblinking look at just what went wrong in this initial Cruz presidential campaign and how to correct it.
The future beckons for Ted Cruz. As with a defeated FDR in 1920 or Nixon in 1960 or Reagan in 1968 and 1976 or George H.W. Bush in 1980, the first defeat most assuredly does not mean eternal defeat. Far from it.
Here’s to wishing Ted Cruz well. That he may pull up his socks and get on with it. Because there is much getting on to do. (For more from the author of “What the Wall Street Journal Got Wrong About Cruz’s Postmortem” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Ted_Cruz_by_Gage_Skidmore_4-1.jpg31684752Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-14 23:08:322016-05-14 23:39:53What the Wall Street Journal Got Wrong About Cruz’s Postmortem
Well, President Obama has just returned from an overseas visit, trying to convince Britain and Germany to sign his trade deal and generally butting into European politics in a way many had not expected when President Peace Prize descended from heaven to give the world the new, improved, “Smart Diplomacy.”
The latest international disaster occurred in Great Britain, when the President gave a speech urging the UK to remain in the European Union. Despite warnings from many quarters that such intrusion in the idea of the Brexit – the British Exit – would be less than appreciated, President Stupid went and did it anyway, prompting this reporter to ask the following:
BBC Reporter: Is this any of your business?
That’s from the left, left, left wing BBC, of all people.
London Mayor Boris Johnson called the President’s remarks “ridiculous” and “weird.” Queen Elizabeth apparently asked him not to make the pro-EU speech that he then went on to make, with President Golf Cart telling Britain that if it left the EU it would move “to the back of the Queue” as far as America was concerned.
Well, the important things got done, anyway.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all President Smart Diplomacy had done during his administration was destroy the special relationship between the United States and our best friend in the world, a catastrophe that began during his first days in office when he shipped the British gift of a bust of Winston Churchill back before he had unpacked his bags?
Yes, but that would be simply as Disaster. But President Catastrophe has damaged relations with ALL of our European partners who have said quietly, then not so quietly, that they were astounded at his arrogance and naiveté.
What’s This?
Russia gets more aggressive with us every day: they flew attack jets within 25 feet of a US Navy vessel and awaited the STRONGLY WORDED LETTER in reply.
As a matter of fact, when we were first introduced to the miracle of smart diplomacy, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented the Russian Foreign Minister with a gag red button for him to push… a button marked “RESET” but which was mistranslated. When President Failure’s US State Department, on worldwide television, debuted the new Smart Diplomacy, they had one Russian word to translate correctly and they got that one word wrong.
Meanwhile, China is building man-made islands in the South China Sea and warning US and Allied Warships away from their new “territory.”
In Libya, Mummar Khaddafi — who turned over his nuclear and chemical weapons program the day after US Forces pulled Saddam Hussein from his hiding place — was overthrown and Libya became such a chaotic bloodbath that US forces found themselves aiding Al Qaeda on the battlefield. After months of begging for additional security, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died as Obama and Hillary Clinton watched on TV, ordering the rescue attempt to stand down and then both of them lied to the American people, telling them the Benghazi attack on 9/11 was all the result of a YouTube video.
President Failure backed the overthrow of Pro-American Hosni Mubarak in Eqypt, handing the country to the Muslim Brotherhood. He then stumbled backing over his own Red Line in Syria, allowing the Russians to come to his rescue and, incidentally, achieving major player status in the Middle East overnight, after decades of effective, Non-Smart Diplomacy sidelining.
President Failure could not – or would not – conclude a simple Status of Forces agreement in Iraq, so American troops walked away – they were actually ordered to walk away – from a hard-won victory and allowed the last vestiges of the ravaged and defeated AQI – Al Qaeda in Iraq – to recover enough in the absence of American strength to rename itself ISIS. And now that we have created the Iraq War defeat that President Failure and his Treason Party had promised the American people, we are quietly sending more troops BACK to Iraq. And Syria. And Libya. And Afghanistan… all to try to make up the ground President Failure has not just lost but thrown away.
And of all the things Barack Obama did to damage this country, it’s the one thing he didn’t do that is most heartbreaking: In 2009, the people of Iran rose up against the murderers and fanatics, demanding freedom and democracy. The mullahs teetered on the brink for months. A mere word from the President of the United States would have encouraged them the way President Reagan encouraged Eastern Europe to throw off their communist tyrants. It was the only time during eight catastrophic years that President Obama didn’t have a single thing to say.
So now the sanctions on Iran are lifted. Billions of dollars of funds have been freed for more massacres, and the Iranians have cheated on President Gullible’s treaty before the ink was dry. President Catastrophe has called the Israeli Prime Minister “Chickenshit,” while his and his former secretary of state – currently his likely successor – closest advisors are Iranian. So there’s nothing to deter these Iranian fanatics nuclear ambitions now other than the speed of their centrifuges.
And barking-mad North Korea is reported to have developed a hydrogen bomb and has just launched a ballistic missile from a submarine.
This is Obama and his “Smart Diplomacy,” the Top Secret details of which have been leaked to whomever is curious as the result of the criminal arrogance of Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the Treason Party’s Presidential nominee, who cut and pasted Top Secret and above info onto a server in a bathroom in New York in order to escape Freedom of Information Act requests.
We are going to pay for this. And so are our kids. And so will their kids. (For more from the author of “President Death” please click HERE)
By now you’ve likely read or heard of the knock-down, drag-out fight that we had at the Missouri legislature on Senate Joint Resolution (SJR) 39. If passed by simple legislative majorities, SJR 39 would have placed a ballot question on either the August or November ballot pertaining to religious liberty.
Missouri voters would then decide if government should be prevented from punishing (through adverse tax treatment, revocation of licensing, court fines and other means) clergy and small business owners connected to the wedding industry (wedding planners, bakers, etc.) who refused to take part in gay weddings as a result of their “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
After a 40-hour filibuster by Democrats in the Missouri Senate, the measure moved to the relevant House committee, where it continued to be a source of tremendous attention and controversy.
I was among the most frequent and vociferous supporters of SJR39 on social networks and learned several lessons that might prove useful to fellow conservatives who take up such a fight in the future.
1) Yes, the culture wars have moved this far, this fast. Get over it.
I’m old enough to have worked on George W. Bush’s campaign in Missouri in 2004 when we also had on the ballot a pro-traditional marriage initiative. It passed 71-29. I was as incredulous as most people in Missouri when I realized our House might balk at SJR 39. This fight is coming to a state legislature near you, if it hasn’t already. Get your incredulity out of the way now.
2) Both sides are 100 percent committed to the idea of their own righteousness.
I’ve never worked on a public policy issue where both sides were so entrenched about the righteousness of their position. I’ve always found that liberals take politics far more personally than conservative—they take this issue especially personally. If you engage on this issue and have liberal friends, be prepared to lose some of them.
3) Your friends in business aren’t committed.
Remember those generous business people who fund the Republican campaigns you’ve spent so much time around? Well, they think you’re a troglodyte on this issue and they’d prefer you just go back to the phone bank room now, thank you.
4) The other side’s public officials want this fight more than ours.
Missouri’s elected Democrats were in absolute lockstep in opposing SJR39. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we’ve beat them so badly over the years in House and Senate races that there’s only a handful of them left and they’re confined to the city centers.
Their people not only were in total agreement on the matter but desperately wanted to take this fight on. We had some committed Republicans on our side, particularly in the Senate. But among House Republicans some were for it, some were against it. But the most common refrain among House Republicans was that they’d vote for if they had to but they really didn’t want to have to go against the donor and business communities.
5) We can’t allow our surrogates and supporters to become the story.
I remember well the exact moment that I realized we were going to lose the battle over SJR39. I had been texting with a House Republican who matter-of-factly referred to the head of a statewide conservative organization by a nasty nickname. It was immediately apparent to me that, after attacking him incessantly on social networks for days, our opposition had succeeded in making this leader the issue. They had turned him into the face of our effort, and a caricature at that. Remember that every post you do to social networks could become fodder for the other side; choose your words carefully.
6) Social networks matter. A lot. And the other side is using them much better than we are.
Many of our House and Senate Republicans were glued to #SJR39 on Twitter during the debate and it was a critical platform to changing hearts and minds. I can’t tell you how many people mentioned tweets of mine to me after the fact. So engaging in this way is critical. But generally speaking, pro-SJR39 voices were swamped by the opposition on social networks. Particularly when hearings were being conducted. The population as a whole agrees, but they’re not making it known where and when it matters most.
7) Don’t wait for the cavalry, it isn’t coming.
On the day that SJR was to be decided I spent most of the day driving to and from appointments, listening to Rush Limbaugh on KMOX in St. Louis. If he mentioned a word about this critical cultural vote going on in his home state that very day, I managed to miss it. That was my experience with national conservative and religious leadership as a whole—they just didn’t show up. So when this battle comes to your state, don’t incorporate outside support into your plans – plan for them to be absent.
8) You have to try to find a way to be winsome if you’re going to win hearts and minds.
In the days following this battle I found myself exhausted by it all and not a little bit glad the fight was over for the time being, even if we did lose. As a committed, emotionally involved activist, you must constantly try to keep your cool in this battle when all others around you are losing theirs.
You can’t win hearts and minds with vinegar—only with honey. In the month-long battle I failed myself on this a couple of times and it’s among my greatest regrets about the whole episode. (For more from the author of “What We Should Learn After Religious Liberty Fight in Missouri” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Missouri_Capitol_1979.jpg18152760Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-05-13 20:38:072016-05-13 20:38:07What We Should Learn After Religious Liberty Fight in Missouri
