The Coming GOP Overreach

Republicans like to say that Barack Obama overinterpreted the mandate of the 2008 election. It's easy to see that Republicans are about to start doing stuff the voters didn't really intend:

"Liberal groups in Wisconsin are bracing for a fight over contraception coverage under Medicaid. Battle lines are being drawn over sex education in North Carolina. And conservatives in several states intend to try to limit the ability of private insurers to cover abortions.

Social issues barely rated in this year's economy-centric midterm elections. More than six in 10 voters who cast ballots on Election Day cited the economic downturn as their top concern, according to exit polls. And this year was the first in more than a decade in which same-sex marriage did not appear on a statewide ballot.

But major GOP gains in state legislatures across the country - where policy on social issues is often set - left cultural conservatives newly empowered"

The voters were thinking economy. The GOP is thinking about gay marriage and abortion. Let us know how that works out for you, Republicans.

The Party of 'Real America'

Slatest: "November's elections showed that the country is getting increasingly politically divided. Unlike the big GOP win in 1994, Republicans this time around won back the House without any real help from metropolitan areas, which remained largely Democratic. The GOP gains came mostly in districts 'that were older, less diverse and less educated than the nation as a whole,' notes the Washington Post. The good news for Democrats is that they continue to win among minorities and whites with more education, but they are increasingly losing working-class voters. While that's good news for Republicans it's also a shrinking percentage of the electorate."

Facebook Makes You Have Threesomes Before Facebook Was Invented

The Guardian:

"A pastor who said Facebook was a 'portal to infidelity' – and told married church leaders to delete their accounts or resign – once testified that he took part in group sex with his wife and a male church assistant.

Rev Cedric Miller confirmed the information reported yesterday by the Asbury Park Press of Neptune, New Jersey, which cited testimony he gave in court in 2003. The activities had ended by that time."

Difficult not to be mildly amused by a man who creates rules for other's behavior when he's played by rather more expansive rules. But seeing this in the best light: Rev. Miller might be very sincere in wanting to put up barriers to future infidelity for himself and the people around him. He's like the reformed alcoholic who becomes an anti-drinking zealot. (I've known a couple.) Hey buddy: Just because you can't handle the stuff doesn't mean the rest of us can't.

Is Sarah Palin A Liberal Plot?

That seems to be David Boaz's belief:

"Talk about Sarah Palin running for president continues to mount — in the liberal media. Conservatives smile and look away when the topic is raised. They want to watch her on TV, they want to turn out for her lively speeches, but they don’t see her as a president.

Liberals, on the other hand, are jumping up and down at the prospect of a Palin candidacy. She could win! they urgently insist to skeptical Republicans; you should get behind her. Don’t throw us Democrats in that Palin briar patch! The latest example is the star columnist of the New York Times, Frank Rich. His Sunday column is titled “Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha.” Palin’s got a huge television presence, Rich says — 5 million viewers for her new TLC series. Which is slightly less than the 65 million it would take to win a presidential election. She’s running, he says; her upcoming book tour “disproportionately dotes on the primary states of Iowa and South Carolina.” Well, yes, she’s going to both those states, along with 14 others."

Oh, poppycock. Liberals didn't put her on the 2008 ticket. We didn't put her on Fox News. And we're not the ones making her books into bestsellers. We're not in the party that's giving her an 80 percent approval rating. And we're not the ones scouting office space in Iowa for her. There's something going on there, and it's not the left's fault.

Undoubtedly there's a few liberals who would like to see Palin win the GOP nomination because they think she'd be easy for Obama to beat in 2012. I'm not one of those people: I'd like to see the Republican Party put forth a credible, non-demagogic leader who is capable of leading the entire country. But the reason many, probably most, liberals talk about Sarah Palin is because she's clearly connected to the id of the GOP, and would seem to thus have a realistic chance of contending for her party's nomination. A conservative friend says: " I'd wager she raises more money for Democrats than she does for Republicans." And that may be true. But one could say the same thing about Hillary Clinton's profile among Republicans for most of the last 20 years; she nearly became president, and it's not because conservatives were secretly trying to push her into being the Democratic Party's mistake. Sarah Palin is a real phenomenon, but she's not a liberal one.

Afghanistan Quagmire Watch

The Washington Post reports from a refugee camp outside Kabul:

"Helmand refugees living in this squalid camp, known as Charahi Qambar, offer a bleaker assessment. They blame insecurity on the presence of U.S. and British troops, and despite official claims of emerging stability, these Afghans believe their villages are still too dangerous to risk returning.

'Where is security? The Americans are just making life worse and worse, and they're destroying our country,' said Barigul, a 22-year-old opium farmer from the Musa Qala district of Helmand who, like many Afghans, has only one name. 'If they were building our country, why would I leave my home town and come here?'"

Republicans Won't Repeal Health Care

New York Times:

"More than a few Republicans know that while the politics of trying to nitpick provisions and curb funding are appealing, any wholesale repeal of major provisions of the health care overhaul is likely to generate a backlash.

Even the Republican-leaning electorate on Nov. 2 was evenly split on repealing Obamacare, the exit polls showed. And many of the major provisions of the bill command broad support or could expose critics and repeal advocates to embarrassing contradictions."

Federalist 40: A Strict Reading of the Rules

In the tradition of James Madison?

The men who created the Constitution didn't gather at Philadelphia with the purpose of creating a constitution, actually. They were there to try to fix the old constitution, the Articles of Confederation, that bound the United States together loosely but imperfectly. This was their commission:

"Resolved -- That in the opinion of Congress it is expedient, that on the second Monday of May next a convention of delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States, be held at Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein, as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed by the States, render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union."

But the men who gathered at Philadelphia didn't actually do the specific job they were given. Rather than fiddle around trying to fix the (apparently) unfixable Articles of Confederation, they more or less ripped up the document and started over with a blank piece of paper. And it's important to consider that act, very carefully, because what it means is this:

The Constitution was created because the Founders decided not to be "strict constructionists" about the rules they were given. Instead, they decided to act in the spirit of their commission, for the good of their country. The Constitution -- and the country -- we have is the result of their expansive reading of a plainspoken document.

Seems to me that this fact should have some bearing on how we decide to read the rules the Founders gave to us. Do we rely on a strict or originalist reading of the Constitution and bind ourselves very tightly to the vision of men who died more than two centuries ago? Or do we act in what we perceive to be the spirit of that document, allowing the government some leeway in acting for the collective good? And if we do that, where can we say the line is drawn, where the government has gone beyond the bounds a free people should allow it? Tough questions, often treated simply. But the experience of the Founders suggests, really, that there isn't a simple answer.