I have been re-reading quite a few of the Federalist Papers for the constitutingamerica.org project and for a summer class I am teaching on the Foundations of the Constitution. A recurrent theme therein is the importance in a federal republic of assuring the connection between constituents and their representatives. NPR has commissioned a poll that demonstrates the electoral difficulties in which Democrats find themselves this year. But, rather than blame the ideological excesses of the Obama administration and the Congressional leadership, NPR takes aim at the influence that voters’ preferences have over the members of Congress and, strangely, bemoans that connection as the “tyranny of the constituency.” NPR goes on to attack gerrymandering as the evil behind the voting patterns in Congress. But, without that gerrymandering, many more Democrats likely would be in trouble (as NPR acknowledges), and the tyranny of the constituency would be magnified. In elections in past generations, partisan swings of 100 seats in the House were not unknown. That order of magnitude is unlikely in today’s finely-crafted districts. NPR is not specifically arguing, as far as I can tell, that gerrymandering produces increased polarization and increases the influence of more ideologically committed primary voters (though that is certainly a justified supposition). The fault here is in the gerrymandering, not for the benefit of unions or the oil industry or any other interest group, as such, but for the benefit of parties and incumbents. The problem certainly is not in the fact that districts do exactly what they are supposed to do, that is, represent the interests of the local constituencies. Those interests would, the Framers hoped, vary across the nation and shift in an ever-changing mosaic of political influence that would prevent the formation of dominant and stable factions that would benefit themselves to the detriment of the whole. Via Instapundit.

First Alvin Greene in South Carolina; now this. A Congressional candidate in Texas wants to impeach President Obama and, during the campaign, carried an oversized picture of the President with a Hitler-style moustache. Obviously, this is the type of person tha Keith Olbermann and Jeanine Garofalo mean when they accuse the “teabaggers” of being racist Obama-haters. Oh…hold on a sec. The candidate is Black? And a woman? And a Democrat? From the Lyndon LaRouche wing of the party, the same folks that were so accepted by the Left when, during the previous administration, they wanted to impeach President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Apparently, the LaRouchies no longer have the same legitimacy among Democrats and the media now that the worm has turned, and they have turned on their former patrons. 

Nanny-statism running riot among the pedagogical set. Teachers keep a watchful eye on children who have “best friends.” Such relationships, supposedly, lead to cliques, exclusion, and bullying. One would think that they would lead to trust and practice at (platonic) intimacy. Children may seek close bonds naturally, “[b]ut the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.” Lori Ziganto rightly takes these commissars of conformity and collectivism to task.

Gallup poll shows that conservatives still outnumber liberals by at least 2-1 in the U.S. This continues a trend from last year and is primarily the result of independents becoming increasingly conservative. The shift to the right may be partly cultural.  But there is also a considerable likelihood that some of the shift is a reaction against the excesses of the Obama administration’s left-liberalism.

Iowahawk’s occasional guest columnist T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII returns, somewhat chastened over his earlier gushing and fawning over Barack Obama. “Each day seems to introduce some new crisis on the world scene with hints of more to come, and one is left to wonder if even our elegant young President’s oratorical and tonsorial gifts are equal to the challenges ahead.” A sad time indeed for the conservative intellectual Doppelgaenger of Christopher Buckley, after several years of proving his bona fides as a committed Obamaphile. But read the whole thing.

Not a thigh-slapper, but a mostly clever parody of the Left in the transnational elites, the academy, and the Obama administration who eagerly swallow every piece of Islamist propaganda against Israel. It also skewers self-important musical “artists”:

Michael Ramirez is taking the measure of Presidents by the inspirational quality of their remarks. Use of the pronoun “I” is the mark of failure. 

Why are certain basic economic proposition known to everyone but Democratic (and unacceptably many Republican) politicians? Here is Alexander Hamilton, writing more than two hundred years ago about the usefulness and limitations of consumption taxes. His warnings about the deleterious economic effects of such taxes apply to other taxes, as well.

“It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption, that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue. When applied to this object, the saying is as just as it is witty, that, ‘in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four.’ If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them.”

The Supreme Court has unanimously decided three federal “honest services” fraud cases by (rightly) limiting such cases to bribery and kickbacks, as intended by Congress when the law was drafted, rather than the more exotic and attenuated theories prosecutors divised. Example, the case of Conrad Black who was basically prosecuted for failing to disclose to shareholders that part of his compensation for selling control of his Canadian company was a straw-man (for tax reasons) non-compete agreement that was legal under Canadian law but also affected American holdings. Black’s friend Mark Steyn, who assiduously reported about the abuse of justice in Lord Black’s case, has more.

More evidence that economic common sense actually is a good predictor of how humans generally react. As Medicare reimbursements decline, doctors take fewer Medicare patients. Shortages develop as government continues to distort the market further and more seniors enter the system. Oh, and as Obama/Reid/PelosiCare gain traction, more people will be thrown into similar government-administered programs.

Let’s see if the media give coverage to a Democrat contrasting “minorities and defectives” with “good, average Americans” with the same intensity and breadth as when a Republican says far less outrageous things.

There used to be a time when piracy was treated as an offense against the law of nations and pirates were summarily tried in Admiralty Courts and executed, often in a particularly gruesome fashion to serve as a deterrent for others. It wasn’t all Captain Jack Sparrow and Pirates of the Caribbean. That pirates were a menace and something to be dealt with is shown, in one example, in discussions in The Federalist Papers of the threat of pirate raids to the several states along the coast. Eventually, the rise of powerful 18th and 19th century navies in England and, to a lesser extent, the United States, put an end to the menace in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Caribbean.

Today, with a new epidemic of piracy taking hold, a different regime prevails. Navies, particularly the American, are still powerful, though one might argue convincingly that there is less order provided today because there is no comparably dominant naval force and similarly concerted anti-piracy effort as two hundred years ago. Worse, there appears to be a rather perverse reversal of incentives. In a manner that reflects broader civilizational dysfunction and paralysis in the West, governments now give pirates all the benefits and protections of Western law that they can muster. If caught and convicted, they can look forward to five years in a comfortable Dutch prison, after which they are eligible to remain in the country. ”When I first spoke to my client, he said being here was like heaven,” Willem-Jan Ausma, a lawyer who represents Farah Ahmed Yusuf, 27, said. ”For the first time in his life he didn’t feel he was in danger, and he was in a modern prison with the first modern lavatory and shower that he’d ever had.” Yes, that’ll show ‘em.

The pirates understand the bizarre Western “rule of law” and try “to remain in the Netherlands, and to bring their families to join them upon release from jail….[The] Netherlands, like Britain, deems Somalia too dangerous to repatriate people to.” Moreover, the pirates had the effrontery (but also the savviness) to declare that the trial was evidence of Dutch Islamophobia. Nothing tickles the West’s elites’ fancy for wearing the hair shirt and apologizing for, well, being from the West, like a claim of Western bigotry against “The Other.”

The judge had the imagination to declare that piracy must be powerfully resisted before imposing this sentence that shows anything but powerful resistance. Needless to say, experts doubt the punitive and deterrent effects. Thus does the West’s civilizational weakness show itself, yet again. But while those elites can bask in their certitude that they are morally pure actors in such matters, others, now and in the future, have to pay the real human cost of piracy that filters money to local warlords in an area increasingly under control of Islamic radicals connected to international terror networks.

Second Iranian ship to go to Gaza and run the blockade. Sent along with all the toys and construction equipment are “no more than 10 volunteers who have already undergone training, ’in light of the possibility that the Zionist regime may do something evil.’” Yes, this is all humanitarian, an approach for which the Tehran regime is world-renowned.

In a similarly Orwellian vein, is the campaign by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (can one imagine the uproar if there were an “Organization of the Christian Conference) at the UN is trying to get the UN’s appalling “Human Rights Council” to investigate the imagined odious anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry in the West. That lamp of religious tolerance, Egypt, wants “the council’s special investigator into religious freedom to look into such racism, ‘especially in western societies’ to ‘work closely with mass media organizations to ensure that they create and promote an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for religious and cultural diversity.’” Meanwhile, the rest of the article explains where the real religious intolerance in often deadly form lies and it isn’t the weak-willed and accommodationist West.

Continuing broadly with a theme, the “Nunsense” series reemerges to delight Off-Broadway musical aficionados yet again. I have no problem with spoofs of religion, done well. But, one wonders, would a bad critical review in the New York Times (and this did not get a bad review) be the only consequence were the musical a spoof of a different religion, say, one complete with even a representation of one of its key figures, a certain prophet? Or might there be a much more “explosive” critique? Just ask Danish cartoonists or South Park creators who draw spoofs of that prophet. For that matter, if anyone even shows a representation of this prophet, spoof or not.

“I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic — it is also a truth, that if industry and labour are left to take their own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out.”

James Madison (1751-1836, Speech to Congress, April 9, 1789)

This is the post I wrote about Federalist Paper No. 25 for the educational blog project at constitutingamerica.org to read the Constitution and Federalist Papers, one a day:

Alexander Hamilton began his Revolutionary War service as a member of a New York militia unit. He then joined the Continental Army as an artillery officer and became General Washington’s adjutant in 1777. After resigning that post, he persuaded Washington to give him a position as a field commander at the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781. From his experience as line officer and staff member, Hamilton was well aware of the capabilities of a trained army and those of the militia. More, in 1783, the Confederation Congress appointed Hamilton to head a committee to investigate the creation of a standing army.

That background stands out in Federalist No. 25. Supporting Congress’s power to create a standing army, Hamilton rejects the argument that, if there is to be such an institution, it should be under the control of the states. Hamilton also rejects a more moderate position supported by Brutus and other Antifederalists that the national government be permitted to raise and keep troops for frontier duty and to counter threatened attacks, but not to keep armies generally during peacetime. He uses a rather trite “where-do-we-draw-the-line” argument to defend drawing no line at all. Brutus has a ready response: Just specify the purposes for which peacetime troops may be raised and kept, and require a two-thirds vote for Congress to act.

But, rejoins Hamilton, “how easy would it be to fabricate pretences [sic] of approaching danger?” A peacetime army might be kept up, through collaboration between Congress and the President, on the flimsiest of excuses and for however long they judge the danger to exist for their own political ends.” Hence, there should be no restriction on Congress’s power to raise and keep a peacetime army. Because a limited power might be abused, there must be an unlimited power? It is this logical leap that the Antifederalists reject.

Hamilton raises an important broader point here, namely, the use of contrived crises not only to justify military action, but any government action. As Publius notes in several other essays, government thrives on crisis, while individual liberty shrivels. Power flows from the individual to government, from local governments to the central government, and from the legislative and judicial branches to the executive. Such crises fuel an explosion of political energy that produce dangerously excessive unity over individuality, and conformity over liberty, at least temporarily. Government officials gain from such crises, be they real or contrived. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” is a brilliantly apt aphorism of this phenomenon. Wars and natural disasters are real crises, but one frequently hears crisis terminology used to describe more run-of-the-mill political issues, from “wars” on poverty and drugs to health care and obesity “crises,” to justify government intrusion into individual autonomy. Not long ago, there was even a “hidden” child care crisis, with government efforts made all the more critical because the crisis was so insidious no one recognized it.

Hamilton also anticipates the assertion that the militia suffices for the national defense, an argument he roundly rejects. This was a particularly sensitive issue for Americans of the time. The myth of the citizen-soldier was a powerful republican tale. The ideal soldier was Cincinnatus, the Roman consul-turned-farmer who was subsequently called to be dictator and general during a war, which offices he resigned upon successful completion of the military campaign. He then returned to his farm. Making this republican myth concrete for Americans was that they had their own Cincinnatus in the person of George Washington. Revolutionary War officers formed the Society of the Cincinnati to promote this republican ideal.

The militia embodies the ethos of the citizen-soldier. Hamilton pays due homage, but recognizes the inferiority of the militia to a regular army in sustained military operations. “The American militia, in the course of the late war, have, by their valour on numerous occasions, erected eternal monuments to their fame; but the bravest of them feel and know, that the liberty of their country could not have been established by their efforts alone, however great and valuable they were.” As he noted in Federalist 24, even in peacetime the militia would be unsuited to perform regular soldiering duties such as guarding the frontier. “The militia, in times of profound peace, would not long, if at all, submit to be dragged from their occupations and families, to perform that most disagreeable duty.” Worse, he declares, is the economic inefficiency of compelling the militia to such service, produced by a loss of labor and industrious pursuits and by the expense to the society of frequent rotation of the militia. Since militia service was universal for adult males of a wide age range, such burdens would be even more objectionable than if they fell on a body of citizen volunteers, such as today’s National Guard.

Our current military system depends on a combination of a professional standing army in active service and volunteers in the National Guard and in various reserve units. The system has advantages in training and professionalism, which become more important as the technology in fighting becomes ever more complex. The war-fighting skills of the massed citizen soldiers of the ancient Athenian hoplite formation or of the Roman Republic’s legions were relatively simple to master. Today’s warfare is infinitely more complex, and continuous campaigns are measured in years, not weeks. Relying on citizen-soldiers, even volunteers in the National Guard, for long commitments produces hardships and economic dislocation, as news reports often point out. This is well worth remembering when politicians blithely call for a state’s national guard to be deployed to guard the frontier against trespassing aliens, or when cuts in the defense budget are proposed while the scope of military commitments abroad continues at a high level.

Finally, consider the essay’s two concluding sentences: “[Nations] pay little regard to rules and maxims, calculated to run counter to the necessities of society. Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions, that cannot be observed; because they know, that every breach of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence, which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country, and forms a precedent for other breaches, where the same plea of necessity does not exist at all, or is less urgent and palpable.” This observation is freighted with significance: The display, again, of the Framers’ political realism; the recognition that necessity knows no law; the ill-considered attempts to over-regulate by law the government’s ability to respond to domestic and foreign emergencies; the broader disrespect for law that comes when such law is on the books but is ignored; and the need to contain the dangers from such realism, including the inevitable attempt to expand constitutionally legitimate flexibility in governing to inappropriate and unjustified occasions.

By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court has reversed the Ninth Circuit (no surprise there) and upheld a federal statute that criminalizes giving “material support” to terrorist groups. The challengers argued that the law violated their free speech rights by preventing them from engaging in advocacy on behalf of the non-terrorism activities of such groups. They also argued that the law was unconstitutionally vague in the use of some terms. The case focuses on very basic free speech issues, but is not easy reading as it is very complex factually and procedurally.

Sarah Palin was right. Again. Canadian health care, soon to be emulated by the Obama administration: I have stage four colon cancer, and all I got was this lousy apology. From what some might call a “death panel.” Apology, but no treatment. Part (but not all) of the problem is a shortage of specialists. A government program produces shortages? You don’t say!

Bill Roggio’s excellent “Long War Journal” has an analysis of Predator drone attacks on Taliban and al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. Beginning in 2008, the frequency and lethality of the strikes increased significantly.

Conservative student organizations are vilified and investigated for much less than the Muslim Students Union at UC Irvine has been able to do many years without repercussions. But their actions in interfering with a speech by the Israeli ambassador appears finally to have prodded the timid and lethargic UCI administration into some form of discplinary reaction.

Yet another reason why self-reliance, and the right to own firearms, are so important. One cannot rely on the police to be there when needed.