I was listening to Jeff Katz on my way home and he said he had a confirmed source (don’t recall the guy’s name) that Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is voting for cloture regarding the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty Bill. So, we now know where he stands.
Republicans
Fred Thompson, 25 percent
Mitt Romney, 20 percent
Rudy Giuliani, 17 percent
John McCain, 8 percent
“Law & Order” actor Thompson has not declared his candidacy, yet the former Tennessee senator’s ranking in the poll indicates a lack of enthusiasm for other GOP candidates. McCain, an Arizona senator, is at odds with GOP conservatives over his support for immigration legislation, and saw his support fall to single digits.
If the state Legislature finally acts on a proposal to raise taxes in Michigan, it could be the most pressure-packed vote ever faced by some of the lawmakers now at the Capitol.
A few Republicans and Democrats in vulnerable seats could face recall efforts if they vote in favor of a tax increase. And lawmakers from both parties worry about the consequences in their districts no matter which way they vote on the yet-to-be-specified but widely anticipated tax proposal. It’s expected to originate in the Democrat-controlled House.
The behind-the-scenes pressures have surfaced off and on over the last few weeks, with sharp accusations from both political parties raising the stakes for the votes that could start as early as this week.
Lawmakers most likely will have to decide whether to raise the state’s personal income tax as part of the plan to eliminate a potential $1.6 billion deficit in the fiscal year that starts in October.
The Republicans control the Michigan State Senate, so really this tax increase should not go through. That’s of course assuming we have true fiscal conservatives in Michigan and not a bunch of RINOs. I’m not putting up any money on this one.
It’s interesting to read about this because it reminds me of my old State of Pennsylvania, a Democrat governor and a Republican State Legislature that capitulated to just about everything he wanted, including an income tax increase in 2003. Of course, Michigan has a tool that we in PA did not. They can recall their politicians at any time and there is a movement afoot to do exactly that.
Two things to note here. One, if the tax increase goes through that’s just too bad and I don’t want to hear any crying from the people that live there. That is exactly what they deserve for re-electing a governor with a failed first term and changing their State House from R to D.
Secondly, if this tax passes, damned be the Republicans in the State Senate because it will be their fault. A simple majority vote in the State Senate can kill this, so if this passes there will be some Republicans who will need to be swiftly removed, either by recall or next year’s primary election.
The Republican charge that he flip-flopped too much may have helped derail the candidacy of John Kerry. But now Massachusetts Democrats have embraced the metaphor to wage war on one of their favorite political nemeses: Mitt Romney.
About two-dozen Democratic activists passed out yellow-, blue-, and green-dotted variants of the summer shoes yesterday evening outside Fenway Park, where Romney supporters were holding a barbecue.
The Supreme Court loosened restrictions Monday on corporate- and union-funded television ads that air close to elections, weakening a key provision of a landmark campaign finance law.
The court, split 5-4, upheld an appeals court ruling that an anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 elections. The law unreasonably limits speech and violates the group’s First Amendment rights, the court said.
This is a good decision and strengthening of the First Amendment and hopefully a stepping stone to begin taking apart the unconstitutional Campaign Finance Reform law.
Not surprisingly, the four most Left wing justices were in dissent of the decision. Funny how they falsely call themselves liberals yet have no respect for free speech.
Wow, I would have never thought a post urging folks to read Reflections on the Revolution in France would turn into a total flame fest. Anyway, I want to address a couple of good points brought up.
1) Rob Lee has spent some time hammering me as being a blowhard for refusing to debate folks who haven’t read the Reflections. I am surprised by this line of argumentation more or less because I was more using hyperbole to make my point and didn’t mean it 100% literally. But I do think that such a proposition would not be far fetched. I mean it would be like having an argument about Marxism without having read Marx or Capitalism without reading Adam Smith. I know this gives Burke a very big place in conservatism, but one that I think is both deserved and nearly universally recognized by the movement intellectuals.
2) Rob Lee also brought up that we live in a new, faster, different world than we used to so Burke is less important and philosophical reading in general is less important. I would argue against both of these thoughts. We still live in a fallen world of competing interests with limited resources where we stand on the shoulders of our forefathers to understand the world we live in today. So while we now have more technology the basic governmental principles behind Burke stand strong. We can’t create grand utopian visiosn for our future, and I would argue this applies to the almighty Free Market Utopia too.
Too often I’ve spent hours hearing my friends in the movement talk about efficiency, the invisible hand, market forces and all sorts of other great theories. [Of which I do agree with them] Yet, their mistake is turning the market into some type of utopian tool that can be used to solve all of our problems. It just isn’t and as conservatives we should have skepticism for anything that claims to heal all our ills, even conservatism itself.
In this sense then, Burke is still very important to understanding the world we live in today. But its not just domestic policy, in foreign policy too Burke’s principles give us some guideposts. As he points out Western Society evolved over hundreds of years of a unique combination of Judeo-Christian values with Greco-Roman government and philosophy. Our efforts to build governments in other parts of the world should understand that you can’t do it out of whole cloth.
To address the second sub-point about a changed world is that life is more hectic today so people don’t have time for esoteric philosophy. This I think is the problem with the modern young Republican (CRs, YRs, etc) movement that builds itself into cults of personality around Coulter, Hannity, Bush, etc. Others touched on this deeper in the comments thread, but I will say it took me one evening to read Reflections on the Revolution in France. I think if you are going to make a big part of your life conservative politics you can spare one night to read. Moreover, maybe if we spent more time developing strong foundations, then we would have to spend less time in fighting ourselves.
3) Rob Lee made a point that my support of Burke is hypocritical in regards to the standards I hold politicians too. First of all I think all of us here realize we will never agree with a politician 100% of the time. I still love Sen. Kyl even if I disagree with him on immigration, or I love Sen. Sunnunu even if he has voted for pork. The point is that you do a cost-benefit analysis of whether on the whole that politician is beneficial to our goals.
Burke did this in his own life when he fought vigorously the modernist wing of his Whig party who was pro-French revolution. If Burke was some lover of practical party politics, it certainly didn’t come through in this seminal event of his life.
It is hard to read a lot of inside the beltway chatter without coming across the “new” conventional wisdom. The Republican Party’s domination of religious Americans is waning, evangelicals are now growing concerned with “social justice” and “environmental” issues as much as the life issue. The nascent premise being promulgated by many left of center Catholic, Protestant, and secular thinkers is that the social issues are in some way illegitimate “divider” issues but that issues of social justice and helping the poor are a moral imperative for Christians.
They are right on both counts, but in ways they probably don’t expect. Of course hot button issues like abortion divide people, but just because they divide people doesn’t mean they aren’t a moral imperative. Opposition to abortion has been a tenant of Christianity literally since the beginning. The Didache, basically the earliest Christian writing we have specifically condemns abortion. In fact, all of Christendom until the 1920s condemned all forms of birth control too (not that I am advocating for that as a government policy). So this premise that the Republicans invented this issues to win elections is farcical. There can be no doubt that it has been viewed as a moral wrong by Christians of every stripe since Christ walked the earth.
There second point is that Christians should care about poverty. They are 101% right and it is certainly true that conservatives don’t talk enough about helping the poor. The liberals then make the logical leap that caring for the poor equals big government programs, and thats where I and many other Christians jump off the bandwagon. We don’t oppose these programs out of some want to keep wealth to ourselves and keep the poor down. In fact, we as a group give much more in private charity than similarly wealthy liberal atheists. We just believe that big government programs do tremendous harm to society and have systematically made the poor worse off and destoryed the traditional institutions that used to aid them.
Sojurners and other of the progressive evangelical movement want us to move beyond abortion to social justice. I say that we should not move beyond abortion, as it is still the key human rights issue of our generation, but should talk about how our programs help the poor. As Fred Thompson recently pointed out, increased prosperity due to decreased government involvement in the economy has resulted in healthier, happier children. Prosperity is not a cure all for sure, but certainly time and time again it has proven a benefit.
Then there are stories like one back in Pittsburgh of an evangelical megachurch that has almost singlehandedly revived and entire neighborhood. Not through taxpayer dollars, but through building a true community and using that community to help their neighbors. No bureaucracy, no red tape, and yet an effect bigger than any of the proposals the “social justice” people are putting out their today.
If we want to help the poor it starts at home. Donating to charities, volunteering time, and building institutions that will help them without Big Brothers wasteful arm involved. From a government level if we want to help poverty lets start with lwoering taxes so people have more money to donate and then lets remove the red tape that 501(c)3 non-profits have to jump through. How much money do non-profits spend every year just to comply with Uncle Sam that could actually be spent feeding the hungry, or building camps for disadvantaged kids, or any number of other worthy causes that instead go to legal fees just to keep Uncle Sam from shutting the operation down.
Then lets deal with the big poverty issue of today: marriage. I am not talking about gay marriage, lets forget about that for now, but talk about regular marriage and how the public policy solutions of the 60s combined with cultural changes have destroyed the #1 anti-poverty organization there is: the nuclear family.
Now unlike the other side, I don’t think that the good brothers and sisters in Christ over at Sojurners are evil or have some grand scheme to hurt the poor. I think they genuinely want to show Christ’s love for the poor, but unfortunately have chosen methods that actually hurt the people they are trying to help. But I would love to discuss the issue rationally, instead of the current situation where opposition to big government programs gets one lableled heartless and anti-poor. We should be able to dialogue not demagogue on this issue.