Daily Archives: 6 November 2011

Justice’s View of the Law

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“When the [Attorney General] does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

In the aftermath of the 11th Circuit issuing an injunction, pending fuller appeal, against Alabama’s enforcement of the (major) portions of its new immigration law that a lower court had let stand, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department is demonstrating a breathtaking—even for this administration—arrogance.

Among other things, the injunction blocks Alabama school districts from collecting immigration information from its enrolled students.  Holder’s DoJ, bypassing the districts’ legal representation, the State’s Attorney General (Luther Strange), has gone straight to the districts to demand they surrender to Justice copies of all such immigration information (information which they now are enjoined from collecting).

Yet, despite explicit and repeated requests from Strange that Holder cite the authority by which he conducts his “investigation” of an internal State matter, Holder has steadfastly refused to identify that authority.  Instead, he simply keeps repeating his bald assertion that he has it.  In a letter which his Assistant US Attorney General, Thomas Perez, wrote to Strange, this is all he had to say:

The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is tasked with investigating potential violations of civil rights laws that protect educational opportunities for schoolchildren.  We know that the longstanding legal tradition in this country of ensuring the right to attend school without being subject to discrimination on any impermissible ground is as critically important to you, as the Attorney General of the State of Alabama, as it is to the Civil Rights Division.

This is just a cynical obfuscation of the matter.  Asserting that an arm of Justice “is tasked” wholly evades Strange’s question of “by what authority.”

It would seem more appropriate, since Holder seems unable to identify the source of his asserted authority (else surely he would do so), that he look more to doing his job.  As Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) suggested in a related context,

…I would suggest that the Attorney General take a little timeout from his lawsuit against Arizona or Alabama or other states, and focus a little bit of his attention on…jurisdiction[s] that [are] willfully and deliberately acting to undermine federal law enforcement.

Sessions said this in response to Senator Dick Durbin’s (D, IL) beef that Alabama actually was trying to enforce immigration law, but the remark applies just as well to Holder in the context of his invasion of AL over its schools.

Are the Republicans Panicking?

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It’s beginning to look like the Republicans are losing their nerve and starting to duck away from the fight that must be fought for our nation’s soul.

House Speaker John Boehner looks like he’s beginning to bend on the matter of tax increases; he’s conceding that a final deal, from the super committee or in Congress, could include revenue increases; although he maintains that “there clearly is a limit.”  Additionally, 100 Representatives, including 40 Republicans, have signed a letter to the super committee that insists that “all options for mandatory and discretionary spending and revenues” be considered.  Unfortunately, we know what the limit invariably is, once the camel’s nose is in the tent.

Senator Jim DeMint (R, SC), while professing general optimism, notes that one of the reasons he’s not endorsing any of the present Republican candidates for President is that he wants to focus on getting a greater number of conservative Republicans elected to the Senate in 2012.  He’s already seen in the past week, for instance, 32 of his colleagues side with Senate Democrats to block an amendment offered by Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK) that would have cut spending by $1 billion through reducing funding for the Rural Development Agency.  In the same week, 11 Republican Senators, together with the Democratic Party, couldn’t even figure out how to cut $6 million from the Small Community Air Service Development Program.  Senator DeMint has been forced to take a different route than he did in 2008 when he endorsed then-candidate Mitt Romney:

I want to do better for our next president than we did for George Bush. [He] had a Congress that wanted to spend money, and if he wanted anything done, he had to agree to that spending….”

Apparently too many Republicans, in the Senate, at least, have lost their stomach for this fight to reduce government and cut spending.

We cut our deficit and our debt by cutting spending.  Period.  This isn’t rocket science.  The government has too much money, already; there’s no need to raise taxes.  Eliminate loopholes—starting with the energy subsidies, both oil and gas and “green” energy subsidies—absolutely, and this will raise revenue sufficient to Boehner’s “revenue increases,” but it does so without raising taxes, without raising tax rates.  The surest way to increase government revenue, and the most economically sound way, the most moral way, is to get government out of the way of our economy, out of the way of our businesses, and let our economy recover and our citizens get back to work.  This demands, as a first step, spending reductions.  This requires cutting wherever the opportunities arise.  This requires forcing the Democrats—alone—onto the record as voting for spending increases.

If we need to alter our taxes, and we do, we need to do so by reforming our present system by replacing it in its entirety with a flat tax that has no subsidies, no credits, no loopholes, and that has everyone paying something.  Ten percent of Americans paying 70% of the nation’s income tax, while 50% of us pay 3%-4%, is a system that cries out for wholesale replacement.

The Republicans need to find their…sticking-place…and rescrew their courage to it.  One sitting Senator understands this need.