BuckeyeBlog

Reason TV has a new video out on the folly of President Obama’s proposed higher education entitlement:

Dr. Richard Vedder and I sounded many of the same themes in our critique of the Ohio Board of Regents’ higher education plan.

The stimulus bill has failed on almost all counts so far when it comes to transparency tests. Still, the President is promising we’ll be able to see exactly how and where the money is spent. The administration has set up a website to track the “recovery”, which I suggest watching carefully over the next few months. Every cent deserves to be scrutinized.

Republican Senator Judd Gregg has been a notable critic of the politicization of the United States census in the past, and more recently he has disagreed with some of the key tenets of the stimulus bill. Fearing that the Obama administration (of which he was about to become a part) was about to make the government less accountable, especially in regards to the census, Senator Gregg withdrew his name as Commerce Secretary nominee. Via FOX News:

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination to become President Obama’s commerce secretary on Thursday, citing “irresolvable conflicts” over issues like the economic stimulus package and the Census.

In doing so, the New Hampshire senator became the first Cabinet-level nominee to withdraw his name in protest.

Senator Gregg’s decision is not only the right one in regards to the current stimulus debate, but it’s the right one in preserving the principle of accountable government.

At a time he could surely use it, Governor Strickland garnered some good press coverage for his decision to forgo a hotel room in Washington, D.C., while attending President Obama’s inauguration. Instead, he and his entourage slept in Ohio’s Washington, D.C., office. Left out of this story, however, is the fact that Ohio taxpayers are shelling out a pretty penny to maintain that office and engage in other federal lobbying efforts. Around $800,000 a year is being spent on these efforts, part of which goes to pay for Ohio’s DC office. Another chunk of that goes to pay for Ohio’s membership in the National Governors Association (the Buckeye Institute has a few words on this expenditure here).

Now, some will surely claim that this money isn’t wasteful. After all, Ohio needs a presence in Washington, D.C., right? True, and the Constitution provides for this — that is why we send Senators and Representatives to the nation’s capital. Ohio’s DC office is a lobbying shop which seems mainly focused on securing more federal money for the state. So your tax dollars are being used to try and get the feds to spend more of your tax dollars. Using tax money for this type of advocacy seems pretty fishy to me. But, what the heck, some good came of it, right? Ohio taxpayers didn’t have to spend any money for a hotel room for the governor. Personally, I’d have preferred that the governor shell out $500 to stay the night at a Howard Johnson’s in DC than have the state’s taxpayers shell out $800,000 a year to pay for this office and its activities. But that’s just me, I guess.

Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute has a short, informative video on the problems with Senator Barack Obama’s health care plan:

Although it goes by the name of “campaign finance reform,” efforts to regulate campaign contributions and spending are little more than attempts by politicians to abridge the freedom of people to engage in politics. Often liberals have supported these schemes, but in this election Senator Barack Obama’s fundraising activities should shatter this liberal support of these efforts. At least that’s what Buckeye Institute Board member Bradley Smith says in an excellent piece in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Obama’s epic fundraising should put to rest all the shibboleths about campaign finance reform — that it is needed to prevent corruption, that it equalizes the playing field, or that tax subsidies are needed to prevent corruption.  …

When one side is being outspent, its partisans naturally want to limit the fundraising of the other side. But if we really are concerned about “fairness,” the best approach is probably to remove restrictions on fundraising altogether, rather than limit the speech of those who are raising money successfully. …

We should consider it a healthy thing when Americans support their political beliefs with their dollars. What we see in this election is that contributions don’t really cause “corruption” and that we don’t really want the government deciding who has spoken too much and who has not spoken enough. If Obama’s fundraising shows us the emptiness of the arguments for campaign finance “reform,” he will have done us a great service, in spite of himself.

Yesterday, the Columbus Dispatch ran interesting pro and con columns on the likely impact the presidential election will have on the United States Supreme Court. Bradley Smith, a Capital University law professor and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, as well as a long-time Buckeye Institute advisor and board member, wrote an excellent op-ed explaining the dangers of Obama’s philosophy on judges. He described Obama’s approach as giving judges a license to “substitute their political preferences” in place of applying the law in a neutral fashion. Under this approach, the Constitution means whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it means.

In contrast, Smith pointed out that McCain favors justices like Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led the court toward:

a moderate course marked by an appropriate reluctance to wade into questions best left to elected representatives, careful adherence to the written Constitution and opinions that focus on the immediate case rather than relying on the judges’ hearts to make grand social change from the bench.”

The opposing point of view was presented in a column written by Dan Kobil, who is also a law professor at Capital University. Kobil claimed that Obama would favor justices like John Paul Stevens who is the court’s “staunchest advocate for individual liberties.” However, what Kobil really means is that Obama favors justices who will pick and choose which individual liberties deserve protection based, not on the text of the Constitution, but on the justices’ personal philosophies and political preferences. For example, Kobil’s model justice – Stevens – wrote a dissenting opinion in Heller vs. the District of Columbia, in which he argued in favor of upholding Washington D.C.’s ban on possessing handguns. Stevens’ dissenting opinion, however, does not adequately address the language of the Second Amendment which provides “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” So much for the court’s “staunchest advocate for individual rights.” While gun rights – which are clearly protected by the text of the Second Amendment – are not protected from infringement under Stevens’ interpretation of the Constitution, Kobil praises Stevens for his support for abortion rights, even though abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.

Bradley Smith appropriately described this “living Constitution” approach espoused by Kobil, Stevens and Obama as “a recipe for inconsistency, politics, and favoritism that undermine justice.”