Patrick at Popehat has the goods on why even pro-gun control liberals ought to be rooting for Alan Gura in the latest 2nd Amendment case that he is bringing before the Supreme Court.  I especially liked this sentence of Patrick’s: “It’s fair to say that most of the Constitutional law of the 20th century has been a dishonest attempt by the Court to rectify its dishonesty in 1873.”  Yup.

Time for some blawging.

Rod Dreher makes the case, once again, that same-sex marriage presents a unique and unavoidable conflict that will drastically undermine religious liberty in this nation, concluding that the ”conflict between gay rights and religious liberty is deep, serious and irresolvable to the satisfaction of both.”  Dreher further argues that:

“It’s one thing if the boundaries of gay rights are set by statute, as in the DC case. It’s another if they are set by a court in a constitutional case. In the former, exemptions for religious organizations can be carved out — but if the Supreme Court decides that gay marriage is a constitutional right, then religious organizations will be given much less room to move, and there’s nothing they will be able to do about it.”

On both counts, Rod misunderstands the nature of the conflict and the role of the legislature and courts in creating (or potentially alleviating) that conflict.

First, the conflict here is definitively not between gay marriage and religious liberty.  It is instead between laws regarding private discrimination and freedom of association, or perhaps between licensing laws and freedom of religion.  As they affect the private sphere and specifically religious organizations, gay rights, and specifically same-sex marriage, represent at most an expansion of existing conflicts rather than any new type of conflict.  Even here, the conflict arises not from whether or not same-sex marriage is permitted, but instead from whether or not statutory laws recognize sexual orientation as an impermissible basis for private discrimination (whether in an employment context, public accommodations context, or otherwise), which is independent of whether same-sex marriage is permitted.

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Round 2 of the debate on the future of the American Right between John Hawkins of Right Wing News and Conor Friedersdorf is up.  It is again quite civilized even as both participants remain unapologetic and honest about their positions. 

Hawkins opens with a couple of haymakers, but also throws some straw men into the debate when he treats “moderates” as indistinguishable from “reformers.”  He notes, correctly, that few of the Bush Administration’s worst abuses were “conservative” in any meaningful sense, but also makes the unsupportable statement that these policies were ”a case where conservative politicians were convinced by people of Conor’s ideological temperament to abandon conservative governance, and it led to disaster.”   The reality of course is that the advocates of many of these policies came from both the movement and what is now the reformist camp.   They were in large part the result of political strategists (who, again, fall into both camps) filling the policy void left in a party without any kind of unifying positive agenda, as I’ve argued before.  Indeed, many of the reformist criticisms of the Bush Administration are precisely the same as the criticisms by the movement – specifically, that the Bush Administration pursued an un-conservative agenda. 

After missing this right hook, Hawkins then lands a doozy in discussing why movement conservatives don’t trust the reformers, noting that the reformers often seem more interested in throwing personal jabs at the Right, disowning conservatism, and supporting the Left than in actually working with the Right.  This is followed with a right-left combination, as Hawkins asks “Why do the people who get accused of being racists, xenophobes, and too dumb to understand politics always have to be the ones who forgive while the same blockheads who never learn from their mistakes insist on getting their way again?”  The first punch in the combination on racism and xenophobia hits home hard – it’s tough to earn someone’s trust if you’re making claims like that about them.  The second punch – “learn from their mistakes…” – misses because it again ignores that the mistakes of recent years came from strategists from both camps running the show rather than wonks or the base itself.

Notably, Hawkins sprinkles in a few successful blocks by conceding that the base exhibited too much partisan loyalty to Bush throughout the first term and that there needs to be more open discussion of ideas in the conservative media (though he tries to throw a gratuitous cheap shot that the Left is less willing to openly discuss ideas than the Right – obviously Hawkins doesn’t read many liberal blogs). 

Conor, however, comes back swinging, wearing Hawkins down with some strong blocks and dodges.  He opens his part of the round by narrowing the issues beautifully, conceding a number of Hawkins’ best points from Hawkins’ first post.  Then he goes on the attack with a magnificent roundhouse, writing “As a conservative, I presume you believe, as the Founders did, that political power tends to corrupt. Indeed, long experience teaches that all political and ideological movements sooner or later tend to become corrupted, intellectually lazy, blind to internal weaknesses, captive to orthodoxies of thought, and forgetful of their ostensible ends.

How can the right mitigate these ills so that when Republicans return to power, they’ll govern effectively? You’d think answering that question would be an urgent priority, especially for movement conservatives who regard today’s Republican Party as out of touch at best, and corrupt at worst, even as they pine for its return to power. But I can’t recall ever seeing the matter addressed, except by folks who are dismissively derided as “conservative dissidents.” This analysis applies whether the Republican Party moves to the right or to the center, whether or not it more successfully wins minority voters, etc.”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  This is in many ways exactly the point that I’ve been trying to make for weeks now.  This little flurry brings the crowd to its feet, shouting “Conor! Conor! Conor!”

And Conor isn’t even done.  He follows this punishing sequence with some very hard truths about the policy issues facing this country: welfare isn’t the problem, middle class entitlements are; the looming pension crisis; defense cuts; and the fiscal limits on our foreign policy. 

This sequence puts Hawkins on the ropes, and Conor looks poised for the knockout.  But just before the bell rings, Conor runs out of steam and throws a few weak punches denigrating the quality of the conservative media as compared to the quality of the explicitly liberal media.  This series of punches misses because it’s not clearly tied with the theme of the rest of Conor’s argument and Conor lacked the time at the end of the post to set this line of argument up properly.  The truncated resulting argument thus comes off as unconvincing and quite likely as a gratuitous shot at conservatives that Hawkins will no doubt use heavily to his advantage in the final round. 

Still, the first 3/4 of Conor’s round were near-flawless and landed some clear haymakers, where Hawkins’ round was inconsistent despite landing some solid blows.  Friedersdorf wins the second round of a tough fight.  After two rounds, I have it scored 19-all.  However, had Conor left out the last paragraph, Hawkins may well have suffered a knock-down that would have left the round 10-8.

This report pretty clearly demonstrates why “not as bad as Corzine” will, in practice, amount to “no different than Corzine.”  New Jersey needed a governor with an actual plan to attack its fiscal problems beyond just standard boilerplate platitudes.   We no longer have the luxury of just slowing the speed in which those fiscal problems mount – we needed to actually address them.  Simply being “not a Democrat” isn’t going to do the trick.

Nate Silver breaks down international soccer (ratings here).  In related news, Mark Thompson and Ordinary Will have achieved nirvana.

So, the Heritage Foundation puts together a database and a project intended to create public awareness about the overcriminalization of federal law, highlighting just some of the many problems with our criminal justice system.  This, of course, is a project that liberals have been working on, passionately and righteously, for years.  [Read more →]

…which, for football purposes, includes South Florida. 

In 2005, the Big East – long a basketball-heavy conference – lost three of its five traditionally strong football programs to the ACC, while one of the remaining two, Syracuse, had fallen on desperate times.  To remain a viable football conference (and retain its BCS status) the league was forced to raid Conference USA and managed to land three basketball-heavy schools with football programs.  In the case of Louisville, the football program was even pretty strong, coming off an 11-1 season in 2004.  Still, the conventional wisdom at the time was that South Florida, Louisville, and Cincinnati were far-from-adequate replacements for Virginia Tech, BC, and Miami and that the Big East’s days as a BCS conference were numbered.  Meanwhile, the ACC was expected to be entering a period of dominance with its new additions that would make it every bit as strong a football conference as the SEC.

This is now the fifth season since that realignment occured.  The first season, 2005, went pretty much as everyone expected, with 2 ACC teams in the final top 10 of the BCS rankings, and West Virginia the highest ranked Big East team at 11, and only Louisville joining it in the final top 25.  But in all but one of the four years since then, the Big East has not only consistently demonstrated that it is a strong football conference, it has even arguably been better than ACC, especially considering its substantially smaller number of teams. 

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I don’t have time to comment on it fully, but Sonny Bunch’s Friday column for the Washington Times is faaan-tastic!  Will conservatives get – and celebrate – the subtleties of [Untitled]’s broadside on post-modern art, or will they ignore it because it doesn’t consist of overt cheap-shots on the Left’s low-hanging fruit and is not overtly a celebration of conservative values?

I have no idea whether this is Conor Friedersdorf taking our recent criticisms to heart or if this is something he’s been working on for awhile, but his debate with John Hawkins at Right Wing News – on Right Wing News’ turf, I might add – is precisely the sort of thing reform-minded conservatives should be doing more of.  I still think Conor’s diagnosis of the problem is a bit off, but the tone and posture of his argument are right on the money.  More importantly perhaps, simply by engaging in this debate with Hawkins, he goads Hawkins into a pretty solid response in which Hawkins makes some key admissions of the sort I’ve never seen from Hawkins in the past (admittedly, I’m not a regular reader).  I strongly recommend both posts.

I’m not going to address Conor’s points, which are similar to points I’ve addressed in the past, but Hawkins’ points are both interesting and revealing.

Hawkins’ first point – that “moderates” seem to run the GOP – is his most obvious disagreement with Conor, who notes that the GOP leadership in recent years has had the full support of the conservative movement’s icons.  I think Conor is closer to the truth here, especially since he acknowledges that those leaders have also had the support of GOP moderates, although Conor doesn’t do much to explain why these leaders have had the support of both moderates and movement conservatives.  Hawkins, perhaps inadvertently, hits on this explanation in his third point - more on that in a second, though.

Hawkins’ second point is something of a straw man that comes about due to his faulty first point that moderates have been running the GOP trhe last 9 years.  Specifically, he argues that the GOP has failed because of its willingness to expand the welfare state to obtain electoral advantage, which he implicitly blames on the “moderates.”  Of course, the reality is that most so-called moderates, if you want to consider reformist conservatives “moderates,”  want to see a reform of the welfare state to make it more efficient rather than an expansion thereof.  But dialogues like this help to flesh this out rather than simply allowing the two camps to continue to make such flawed assumptions about each other.

Hawkins’ third point is his most important, though, because he gets the diagnosis of the problem right.  It was, to say the least, a pleasant surprise to see that Hawkins’ diagnosis is almost exactly the same as my diagnosis.  Specifically, Hawkins writes:

Conservatives WILL NOT win by following the “Reagan agenda” because Reagan’s agenda was designed, using conservative principles, to deal with the political situation of his day. Some of those battles have been won. Others have been irrevocably lost. Some have grown in importance. Others have lessened.

****

It’s too bad, for example, that Republicans weren’t really pushing health care reform during the Bush years. How about environmentalism? Instead of making it all about whether we buy into global warming alarmism, how about we emphasize a positive, reasonable clean air, clean water, clean environment agenda as opposed to the extremism offered by the Democrats? On trade, instead of just repeating the words “free trade” over and over, why aren’t conservatives demanding that our government reduce barriers to American manufacturing overseas? We can go on and on with examples like this one — and it’s important that we do so instead of relying on a static agenda.

Amen.

Finally, Hawkins switches to the issue of facing the GOP’s demographic challenges.  His thoughts on that issue are interesting, and amount to an implicit acknowledgement that the GOP’s continued problems with minority outreach stem in part from an overemphasis on tokenism rather than any kind of real outreach. 

Anyhow, the back and forth is interesting and well worth a read. Both Conor and Hawkins deserve credit for their participation in this debate, Conor for having the gumption to directly address the base, and Hawkins for having the courage to acknowledge deep-seated problems with the conservative agenda.  More reformers need to engage in these kinds of debates and more movement types need to be willing to accept the challenges presented by them.  At some point, this will result in a base and, for lack of a better word, a wonk class that can work together again on an affirmative policy agenda rather than continuing to work against each other.

While I took much issue with the Obama Administration’s initial response to the Honduran crisis in July, and especially the severe sanctions imposed, which achieve little more than hurting an already desperately poor population, I must admit that I’ve been quite happy with their actions in recent weeks.  To be sure, the deal they helped negotiate was far from perfect from my admittedly distant perspective, but it appeared to be a fairly good faith attempt to recognize that even if the Michelletti regime has not covered itself in glory and acted illegally in forcing Zelaya into exile, the Constitutional concerns that gave rise to Zelaya’s ouster were very real and legitimate rather than manufactured power grab. 

But today, that deal appears to have fallen apart in a deluge of finger-pointing.  This fact leaves a whole host of thorny questions for the diplomatic community with massive implications for millions of Hondurans.  First, who is to blame for the deal’s apparent collapse?  Is this just kabuki theater on Zelaya’s part? On Michelletti’s?  On both?  Can the deal be salvaged?  And most importantly, should any of this matter, especially if the elections at the end of the month turn out to be in accordance with international standards, or at least more in accordance with international standards than the “re-election” of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan?

From my distant perspective, this looks like it’s all just a chess match between Zelaya and Michelletti, in which neither side was particularly happy with the deal nor had much interest in complying with its spirit, even if they were willing to comply with its letter.  Certainly, it looks like Michelletti’s attempts to seek Zelaya’s input on a short-term unity government were half-hearted at best, undertaken solely out of the desire to appease the international community.  While I have no idea whether the deal required a vote on Zelaya’s reinstatement by yesterday, the delay in holding such a vote can only be described as spiteful and contrary to the spirit of the deal.  At most, a vote restoring Zelaya to the Presidency by yesterday would enable Zelaya to be a lame duck President for a few months at a time when all the branches of government, including the military, have made clear that their loyalties lay with Michelletti’s faction.  Zelaya will simply not have the time required to re-establish a power base within the government, and if he attempts to do so by dismissing the leadership of those other branches of government and replacing it with those loyal to him, he will quickly see the non-Chavez international community turn on him.

Meanwhile, Zelaya has to be largely aware of all of the above.   Indeed, Zelaya probably never had much interest in seeing the deal fulfilled, which is why he refused to respond to Michelletti’s half-hearted attempts to form a unity government.  What interest could Zelaya have in returning to the Presidency for perhaps a few months as a complete and utter lame duck?  Better to ensure that the deal falls through, make a plausible case for blaming the international pariah Michelletti for that fact, and watch as the international community refuses to recognize the results of the elections.  Once the elections have passed, Zelaya’s negotiating strength will likely increase dramatically as the new regime deals with widespread sanctions and intensifying international pressure and isolation. 

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We are in the process of upgrading our server.  The site may be a bit, uhh, temperamental over the next 24-48 hours, although hopefully blogging will be able to continue relatively unabated.

P.S. (Erik here) – While we’ve been having difficulties today, we may have much more site-crushing issues beginning this evening and continuing on for another (likely) 48 hours.  After that all should be well and good, but please:

DON”T PANIC!

Hopefully, I’ll have more on the New Jersey election results later, but I must say that I’m incredibly amused by the varied commentary on the “meaning” of the New Jersey elections by pundits who have zero understanding of politics in this state.  The fact of the matter is that Christie should have had this election wrapped up in June; that he failed to do so is testimony to his weaknesses as a candidate and, I would argue, to the weaknesses of the GOP establishment, which is why I must respectfully dissent from even Mr. Larison’s analysis that Christie’s victory “show[s] that competent center-right candidates interested in governance and all those “parochial” local issues can tap into voter discontent and win electoral victories.”  That New Jersey is considered a “blue” state is largely irrelevant – I don’t care how “blue” or “red” a state is, when it’s managed this incompetently for this long, the opposition party is going to make some headway.  The Star-Ledger’s Paul Mulshine (proving that dead-tree columnists can still have value) beautifully illustrates how the, well, nihilism of the Christie campaign will result in no meaningful change or solution to the state’s deep-seated problems:

The winner last night, Republican Chris Christie, managed to get through the entire campaign without taking a single principled stand on a single issue. He was against waste, fraud and abuse. He was against corruption. He was in favor of tax cuts. And that was about it.

As a result, Christie can’t claim a mandate. That’s not just because he won by such a small margin in what should have been a runaway. It’s also because you can’t win a mandate to do nothing — which is what he promised to do.

As they say, read the whole thing.  You’d think I wrote it, and it explains beautifully why at best Christie’s governorship will be able to slow the state’s downward spiral rather than do anything to put it in reverse, or at least neutralize it.