Redstate

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Internet member since 1987
Member of the Surreality-Based Community

So long as the federal government is spending at a deficit, it’s simply pushing the taxes onto future taxpayers which will be me and my children. Now if Bush had done what he started out doing by holding spending at about the rate of inflation, I’d agree with you that he deserves our support. But the fact that he not only caved on spending (much like Reagan did BTW) but actually championed it (e.g. Medicare Part D, the energy bill, etc.) was a slap in the face for the fiscal conservatives that no “temporary” targeted tax cuts can fix.

Regarding immigration, putting troops on the border was a stunt and I’ll bet anyone my complete collection of Babylon 5 DVD’s that the next term of Congress, Bush will (barring a filibuster in the Senate, how pathetic is it to put one’s hopes for sanity on the Senate) will be signing an immigration “reform” bill that creates a guest worker program as or more generous than the vilified McCain-Kennedy bill.

As far as judicial nominees go, frankly I don’t have the same made on for the courts that a lot of conservatives do. It’s more important to have good legislators who write good laws (and fix or repeal bad laws) than it is to worry about who is sitting on the bench. The percentage of cases that outrage people are relatively small and frankly most of the time that judges “legislate from the bench” it’s because the laws were poorly drafted and gave them the opportunity or expected them to fill in the gaps.

quite safe. I agree with you.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

On the courts, it's the most important issue of the day. Good legislators writing good laws will never happen. They write mush and let the regulators and lawyers sort it out.

Don't expect laws to be less poorly drafted. If it takes more than a dozen pages, it's mush.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"...

Who'd'a thunk it?

Oh, right, anyone but someone who thought that there was anyone in Congress who cared about social issues. Or fiscal issues. Or both.

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Even those who learn from history are surrounded by those doomed to repeat it.

About the only thing that fiscal conservatives got were some “targeted” temporary tax cuts (which even then were driven in part by the social agenda of the White House) while spending on nonsense like the farm bill, Medicare Part D, the energy bill, the transportation bill went through the roof and Social Security reform never even came up for a vote.

Bush did however fight for Faith Based Initiatives (which were additional spending rather than redirecting already existing spending), a partial birth abortion ban, judicial nominees, attempted to amend the constitution (but not for a line-item veto or a balanced budget amendment), and the only time he found his veto pen was over increasing federal-funding for embryonic stem cell research.

The problem is that the GOP needs both social and fiscal conservatives to be a viable majority party, it’s that by ignoring the bread and butter issues, Republicans allowed Democrats to dominate on the issues that motivate most likely voters. And the fact of the matter is that most of what the federal government does domestically focuses around economic and not social issues but the priorities of the Republican Congress and the Bush administration were exactly the opposite.

Across the board marginal rate cuts are not "targeted" by any stretch of the imagination. They were also not a minor footnote by any stretch of the imagination. The SCOTUS appointments also appear to be big wins (time will tell) for conservatives of any stripe. Those things are huge and not overcome by any talk of an FMA that didn't get anywhere and never had a chance of going anywhere.

I'd like to see a lot less carping about social conservatives in the Republican party, myself. I haven't seen the social conservatives ripping on the fiscal conservatives and blaming them for electoral losses. As you mention, we wouldn't be a viable party without them.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

I’m speaking of course of things like the increased deduction for charitable giving, the child tax credit, the focus on the phony “marriage penalty,” increasing the alphabet soup of retirement vehicles, and dropping a few million more people off the federal income tax rolls entirely. I don’t disagree that there were across-the-board rate reductions (which were countered in part by the AMS) but the cumulative effect of the tax cuts was to make the code more not less complicated and more not less politicized.

The code wasn't simplified in the process. Big deal. Realistically... that's not going to happen so long as we have an income tax. An income tax is easy and powerful to meddle with and we have a group of people in DC that exist to meddle in things and be powerful. I'll take a lower rate any day over promises of "simplification" that might just end up costing me money. That's why the flat tax doesn't at all interest me (that and the fact that it doesn't actually "simplify" nearly as much as people like to think).

His accomplishments put him ahead of any of the presidents during the past several decades, excluding Reagan, so I'm not really sure what your standard is here. If I had to choose between Bush 41 and Bush 43, it wouldn't take me 5 seconds to make up my mind.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

we might find that the Democrats will have a lot of pressure on them to renew the tax cuts, especially if the economy is not as robust as it is now.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

Figure out which tax cuts are most politically popular and renew those while dubbing the ones they let expire as “tax cuts for the wealthy.”

In which case Bush gets to either (a) veto a tax cut for “middle class” or (b) give his tacit agreement to the new tax cuts by signing them into law. Either way a win-win for the Democrats.

The notion that Roberts and Alito were some gift to social conservatives is misinformed. Most of what the SCOTUS deals with has nothing to do with abortion or other so-caled "social issues". They spend a great deal of time dealing with contract law and other busness related matters, including cases of corporations being sued.

Here is a link to the cases it decided in a typical year.

"Lincoln Property Co. v Roche", "Buckeye Check Cashing Inc v Cardegna", and "Dominoes Pizza Inc v McDonalds" are just some of the cases decided. And by a strange coincedence, the sort of judges who take a reasonable stance on these cases tend to be the same ones who take a restrained stance on the "social issues". Alito and Roberts are not gifts to the social cons, but to all Americans, very much including the fiscal cons.

I agree that most of what the courts look at has little to do with contentious social issues and that what effects the courts have is largely more important on economic than social issues. I’d even grant (and I said much the same thing during the Roberts and Alito hearings) that judicial nominees is one thing that unites or ought to unite the entire base to an extent.

That being said, I disagree with the suggestion that judicial nominees are as important to every part of the base equally. IMO the people who are most concerned about the makeup of the courts tend to largely be people who want to overturn Roe v Wade or stop civil marriage from being redefined by the courts than people who are concerned about the Erie doctrine or the finer intricacies of antitrust statutes. Also I’m not sure that there is that much of a difference among judicial nominees on the latter types of issues (I haven’t looked through all of the cases of the last term but I suspect there are more 9-0 and 8-1 opinions than 6-3 or 5-4). At the risk of challenging my con law professor, what’s considered a “liberal” or “conservative” justice on these issues depends often on what the issue is rather than who the judge is.

Finally, I tend to think that too many in our movement place too much emphasis on who gets to sit on the bench to hear a case and does not pay enough attention to what kind of laws are being written. IMO it is more important to prevent bad laws from being written (e.g. McCain-Feingold, ADA, antitrust statutes, ESA, CWA, CAA) than it is to worry about a judge “legislating from the bench.” Usually if a judge “legislates from the bench” it’s because the legislature left a statute ambiguous and relied on the courts to fill in the gaps. That’s not to say that there aren’t high-profile examples of courts simply writing their own policy preferences from the bench (the recent NJ Supreme Court decision on civil marriage is one example IMO) but I think it usually happens because of a fault in how the statute was written. Better to put competent legislators in Congress that can prevent these problems from occurring than to try to focus on who will be hearing the case down the road.

On things like Kelo, the rampant ICC abuse, and the abuse of the 14th. Behind all of that is the attack on our system of government represented by an out of control judiciary that makes stuff up as they go along and usurps power from the other branches. Those aren't SoCon issues. There's plenty of reason for everybody to be concerned about the makeup of the courts.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

In the case of Kelo and the Interstate Commerce Clause cases, the Court isn’t legislating its own policy preferences from the bench, they are deferring to the legislative branch in deciding what the policies ought to be (e.g. what constitutes a “public use”). Ironically enough, this is the very thing that conservatives say they want the courts to do when it comes to issues like abortion, the definition of civil marriage, etc.

If you want to prevent eminent domain from being used for economic development, the place to do it is in your State legislature. If you don’t want the Interstate Commerce Clause to become the constitutional equivalent of the Enterprise-D deflector array, then you need to focus on who you elect to Congress and who you elect as President. Railing against the courts for not “fixing” bad laws is focusing on the wrong target.

From all accounts the question of judges and the courts is one that gets a large part of the Republican coalition engaged. And the fact that the GOP basically let this issue die probably contributed to the losses in November.

There are a lot of people who are "judicial-cons" and not all of them are Christians. The Federalist Society was one of the more important backers of Roberts and Alito, and of so-called "right-wing" judges in general. And they are hardly a branch of Focus On The Family. Many of them are Jews. I don't think you need to be some Christian fundamentalist to be concerned about the courts changing marriage law, or any law. You simply need to be someone concerned with keeping our republican form of government, which is slipping away before our eyes.

I agree that a better legislature would ease the neccessity for great judges, but that seems to be hard to accomplish.

When we begin to accept this:

I agree that a better legislature would ease the neccessity for great judges, but that seems to be hard to accomplish.

The ironic thing is, we have far more influence over who we elect to the legislative branch and what kind of laws get enacted than we will ever have on who gets appointed to the courts or how the courts rule on a case.

There is something to what you say. But its still true that the slippery slope we're sliding down was greased by the very activist courts in the sixties and seventies, who overrode the legislatures with abandon. It does us no good to elect good people to Congress and have them pass good laws only for those laws to be tossed out by the courts.

The solution perhaps is for the Congress to muster the courage to slap down the courts from time to time. But they are cowardly critters at heart. And I suspect they secretly endorse the positions taken by the courts.

is indeed the root of most of our modern evils.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

Memo to Bush: the whole point of Social Security reform was to reduce the program’s cost on the tax payers and to give workers better options. Raising the payroll cap (which is a tax hike no matter how you spin it) and adding on a mandatory contribution on top of FICA defeats this.

We get a $395, excuse me, $749 Billion increase in Medicare spending but we’re supposed to be dancing in the streets that someone included Health Savings Accounts.

Betcha a dollar that the new Congress tries to strip away the HSA's as a “tax cut for the wealthy” when they “fix” Medicare Part D.

We were getting Part D either way. Much like we will probably get a tax hike on SS either way, much like we were getting a massive increase in ed spending anyways. Gotta start somewhere.

Two thirds of the world is covered by water, the other third is covered by Champ Bailey

So long as the other guy is feeding at the trough, I’m justified in doing the same.

The only guy who loses in the one stuck with paying the bill.

Silly me, I thought that the whole point of the existence of the Republican Party was to stand up for the guy who gets stuck with the check.

There is no way we can go cold turkey in this country.

Two thirds of the world is covered by water, the other third is covered by Champ Bailey

He’ll fight for his faith based initiatives and then tout them as some great “victory” on the domestic front.