Capitol Ideas / Breaking Away
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEA Breaking Away by Tom Bethell T he Committee for Waco Justice turned out to be a rather pitiful group of no more than fifty people holding candles in Lafayette Square. Some carried...
...In fact, the liberal establishment increasingly resembles nothing so much as a bitter remnant of the Socialist International...
...The criticism of "judicial activism" so often heard in the 1980s seems to have produced in them nothing more inspiring than a philosophy of congressional supremacy...
...Carol Moore was the organizer, and she was selling her 134-page report, The Massacre of the Branch Davidians, for $7...
...The younger generation is more "conservative" in that it will embrace more fundamental changes in our government...
...As a result, I can reveal, Gingrich has been under consideration for the Strange New Respect Award (given to conservatives who see the progressive light), but no decision has yet been made...
...He pretended in his campaign to be a "new" Democrat, but his great hero turns out to have been FDR...
...He seemed not to realize that this leads to government jobs programs and full-employment for social workers...
...Term limits for politicians is something else I like...
...The great problem is that the Supreme Court has for some time acted as the judicial-enforcement arm of Congress, making sure that the states comply with federal law, but rarely venturing to find federal law itself unconstitutional...
...W ashington's attention, as I write, has been totally focused on Whitewater, Vincent Foster, Webster Hubbell, the shredded documents, and so on...
...The Von Mises Institute in Alabama is soliciting papers for a conference on secession...
...I found myself thinking of today's federal government as analogous to the British in the 1770s...
...My own feeling was that bringing murder charges against the survivors of a military assault was just one more example, although an outrageous one, of the unlimited power that the federal establishment now wields...
...and many others Topics Include: Cities, Courts, and the Due Process Revolution Due Process and Public Education The Bill of Rights, Community Policing, and Community Decorum Due Process and Public Housing For Information Contact: The Manhattan Institute The Federalist Society 1745 N Street, N.W...
...What attracts most politicians to Washington is the prospect of spending other people's money, and of being called "compassionate" for doing so...
...This has been conspicuous all over Europe, in Canada, and in the demise of the Soviet Union...
...otherwise the party might be well on the way to joining Canada's Progressive Conservatives in oblivion...
...Finally, there's the counter-revolutionary word that I have begun to hear from some of my conservative friends: secession...
...In Washington terms, we didn't exist...
...He has toned down tax and other proposals to suit those in the liberal wing of the GOP...
...Reporters keep reminding us how "aggressive" and "partisan" is Michel's probable successor, Newt Gingrich of Georgia...
...This is so blatant a repudiation of the Fifth Amendment that even the ACLU has emerged as a latter-day defender of property rights...
...May 16, 1994 Featuring: Hon...
...Jon Utley had told me about the gathering, and we stood with the group for a while...
...One couple, wearing "Gun Owner" buttons, said they had read about it on the Internet...
...20006 (202) 466-7300 (202) 822-8138 Registration fee for the conference, which includes admission to the luncheon, is $60.00...
...Hardly anyone would see it, let alone read it...
...So perhaps Senator Biden didn't have cause for concern after all when he waved a copy of Richard Epstein's Takings before the cameras at Thomas's confirmation hearings, and worried that he might be so bold as to defend our economic liberties against congressional inroads...
...Attorney General Judge Robert Bork Professor Vivian Berger American Enterprise Institute General Counsel, ACLU Judge H. Lee Sarokin Hon...
...The Texas jury's verdict in the case, acquitting the survivors of murder and conspiracy, had been handed down a few days earlier, prompting Attorney General Janet Reno to say that justice had been "had...
...What I would like to know is how we cut it down to size...
...Faith in a centrally controlled future is mostly confined to those aged 65 or older...
...Another has been the Supreme Court...
...71 20 The American Spectator April/May 1994...
...Supreme Court Dr...
...They have not been joined by Rehnquist & Co., whose view seems to be that if a law is bad, it's up to Congress to change it...
...They were huddled directly in front of the floodlit, silent White House...
...House minority leader Bob Michel revealed to a Washington Post reporter the other day how much he had changed since coming to Washington...
...A lot of people—I will not call them conservatives, let us just say normal people (still the majority)—feel frustrated as a result...
...Vincent Lane U.S...
...Oh...
...Luckily for the GOP, I would guess, Clinton beat Bush in 1992...
...It is simply assumed on all sides that their jurisdiction is unlimited, which in practice it is...
...1700 K Street, N.W., Ste...
...Walter Williams wrote a column about it in December, and he told me it elicited more mail than anything he wrote all year...
...A familiar campaign of envy-arousal by the press, stressing his great wealth, backfired in favor of Perot...
...Strangely, conservatives on the court believe that a law is constitutional if a sufficient number of their predecessors thought so, too...
...There are also demographic grounds for optimism...
...In promising to raise taxes to balance the budget, he fell straight into the very first trap set for him...
...She's from South Carolina...
...The Washington Post called this verdict "a professional setback for government prosecutors," which should "spur on the review of military assault-type activities that federal law enforcement agencies launched...
...meanwhile, those under 35 know that they are at the wrong end of a Ponzi scheme and will be lucky to get back what they are now required to contribute to the federal coffers under the guise of Social Security...
...This is almost the reverse of what the framers had in mind...
...A re the Feds unstoppable, then...
...901 Washington, D.C...
...Before the final assault on the compound, the Waco standoff engaged the attention of hunTom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...The unstated deal in Congress was that conservatives would get their expanded military in return for ever-increasing domestic programs...
...Clinton, incidentally, made the tactical error of choosing as his vice president a man whom Beltway regulars would dearly love to see in the Oval Office...
...n recent years, Congress has enacted asset-forfeiture statutes that permit suspects (notably in drug cases) to be deprived of their property without due process of law...
...Then came the NAFTA fiasco (there are valid arguments against it but Perot didn't understand them) and he ended up on cable TV making Al Gore look like a fount of wisdom...
...Meanwhile, what about the federal beast...
...Charles Murray Professor Nadine Strossen Author, Losing Ground President, ACLU Judge Patricia Wald Hon...
...Unfazed by socialist failure everywhere else, they are pursuing the further centralization of power in Washington, with the Clintons as their willing agents...
...That is their agenda, most obvious of late in the realm of health care...
...But Perot was a disappointment...
...that is, without trial or conviction...
...Bill Clinton's Arkansas background deserves all the attention it gets, of course...
...The Industrial Revolution tookworkers out of their homes and put them in factories...
...No, good things are happening out there...
...He's an astute enough politician to know that the expansion of federal power is the last thing people want, so deception was integral to his strategy...
...Initially, Ross Perot appealed to the electorate because he seemed to understand this problem and perhaps could bring change...
...The court acts not as a check upon Congress, but as its legal arm...
...At a time when our cities are becoming more and more hazardous as a result of the obdurate, unceasing, and quite fanatical social engineering of the underclass by the American ruling class, there are fewer and fewer reasons to live in these cities in the first place...
...Clarence Thomas U.S...
...Above all, politicians are unable to stop the ongoing technological revolution, a powerful force for decentralization...
...William Barr U.S...
...The lesson of the past is that it's no good looking to the GOP to diminish federal power...
...Even in the (net tax-recipient) Washington area voters are said to be "angry and impatient," according to the Washington Post...
...Recent Supreme Court rulings have chipped away at these...
...Party leaders have stood for "less of the same" when out of power and "more of the same" once safely ensconced...
...Since the 1930s, the Court has been a major force for the centralization of power, and Republican appointees haveeither made no difference, or have been worse than the Democrats...
...Some carried signs, one reading "Is Your Church ATF-Approved...
...For this deceit alone, he deserves to be run out of town...
...Establishment ringleader Pete Peterson, Republican Moderate, must have been 18 The American Spectator April /May 1994 THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTE and THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY present THE RIGHTS REVOLUTION AND THE POOR: VICTIMS OR BENEFICIARIES...
...Underlying all this weird business is the implicit question: Who gets to steer the federal beast...
...In a case decided in December, Clarence Thomas "disagree[d] with the outcome reached by the Court" (a bare majority of Kennedy, Blackmun, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg) but was wistfully "sympathetic to its focus on the protection of property rights—rights that are central to our heritage...
...And Howard Segermark tells me that a friend of his has on her car a bumper sticker reading: "If at first you don't secede, try, try and try again...
...More federal power would have to be dressed up as something else...
...His money was seen as liberating him from the usual media suspects and party power-brokers...
...For decades, many Americans were willing to tolerate a bloated federal establishment as the price for resisting Soviet expansionism...
...District Court Chicago Housing Authority...
...I was glad to give her the money...
...20036 Washington, D.C...
...Well, he's leaving, and the Washington Post has been saddened by that, not to say concerned that a two-party system might one day re-emerge...
...He just didn't get it...
...Here, however, it has been held in check, thanks to the continued liberal stranglehold over policy (unchecked by twelve years of Republican "rule...
...Man, in those early days I'd just flat out vote against foreign aid," Michel said, as though looking back in wonderment at his own youthful naïvet...
...dreds of reporters and I must have seen dozens of stories on TV, without seeing one that bothered to explain just how the federals had claimed jurisdiction in the first place...
...Hey Bill Clinton, find the scoundrels, / Appoint an independent counsel (for Waco, not Whitewater)—could hardly be heard above the Pennsylvania Avenue traffic, and there were no supportive horns or headlights flashing...
...But let's not wait for the Supreme Court to tell us whether or not it's constitutional...
...the Computer Revolution is putting them back into their homes...
...The other day I heard Gingrich say that Republican welfare reform would force recipients to work for their benefits...
...The real trend in the world today is toward the decentralization of power...
...For those who would like to see a reduction of the federal burden, Perot has not been the only false hope in recent years...
...Centralize, centralize...
...So let's get rid of the bums by voting against incumbents, irrespective of party label...
...forfeiture laws—but with the court's liberals emerging as the (admittedly faint-hearted) defenders of property...
...His self-confidence exceeded his grasp of the underlying issue...
...Another healthy development is the removal of children from government schools and the continuing growth of home-schooling...
...But as the columnist Robert Novak pointed out recently, Gingrich himself has been showing signs of "growing...
...I suspect a lot of people may feel this way, perhaps without so formulating it...
...Now that the Cold War is over, the military is (rightly) being cut back, but domestic spending keeps on growing...
...With the exception of Ginsburg, the entire sitting court today was appointed by Republican presidents...
...What can ordinary citizens do...
...Clinton's troubles will no doubt revive the GOP, but to what end, other than boosting the careers of senior Republicans...
...I think at bottom the impatient mood in the country stems from the government's failure to respond to the end of the Cold War...
...Students may take a special rate of $30.00 gleeful...
...And here I am not referring to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the possibility of further Democratic appointments...
...Court of Appeals 77th U.S...
...Their muffled chants—Hey hey, ho ho, / ATF has got to go...
...Robert Nelson wrote an article for Liberty entitled "Secession as a First Amendment Right," and there's a fellow in Salt Lake City called Joseph Stumph who is agitating for something called the Ultimatum Resolution (too complicated to explain, but he hopes thirty-eight states will pass it...
...I realized how much my whole outlook on such matters had changed when I was reading recently about the American Revolution...
...The Capital Hilton Washington, D.C...
...Within the Beltway, political opposition to Democratic proposals is called "gridlock...
...Which brings us to another doleful institution, the Republican Party...
...LikeWise the property-rights movement (a by-product of environmentalism, which won tyrannical power for some federal agencies...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
