Washington Goes to War
GREVE, MICHAEL S.
Washington Goes To War The case for an energetic—and limited—national government. BY MICHAEL S. GREVE WHEN FLIGHT 11 crashed into the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush was sitting in on...
...The FBI cannot track down international terrorists if it must devote manpower and resources to the pursuit of such federal "interstate" crimes as carjacking, gender-based domestic violence, and the failure to pay child support...
...As we put aside the trivial pursuits of the focus-grouped presidency to meet exigent national concerns, conservatives and liberals both need to reacquaint themselves with the core constitutional principle that the federal government—in order to be energetic and effective in its proper sphere—must be limited...
...The threat is national in scale—unlike such recent national "crises" as suburban sprawl and trace levels of arsenic in a few rural water systems...
...Both the gloating and the lamenting over "big government" are grossly exaggerated...
...The terrorist threat to the nation, and indeed the world, is real, serious, and immediate—unlike, say, computer models showing one half-degree Celsius of global warming over the next century...
...yet the clean-up effort in Manhattan goes forward...
...It is the old politics, fought over a slightly larger pot of money...
...In the wake of September 11, voters easily comprehend those distinctions, and they will be receptive to political initiatives that translate them into practice...
...This distinction— between a real national interest and special-interest causes dressed up as crises—is lost on the liberal establishment, because those trumped-up crises are their national agenda...
...Later that day, he found himself preparing the nation for war...
...Environmental Protection Agency monitors at ground zero in New York have found violations of federal trace-level standards for asbestos, PCBs, and dioxin...
...Two major new federal initiatives that conservatives would otherwise have been unable to stop are now indefinitely on hold: an education "reform" of, by, and for the teachers' unions...
...Vigilance against liberal attempts to use September 11 for the greater growth and glory of the nanny state is altogether commendable...
...and a patients' bill of rights that was mostly about the trial lawyers' inalienable right to sue health care providers in a forum of their choosing...
...September 11 has not expanded the national government's presumed authority, which was already boundless...
...More precisely, the energetic national government that we now desperately need presupposes and requires limits...
...Similar ironies and contradictions abound...
...Those enactments would have brought vastly more centralized government—and vastly greater gains for unions and plaintiffs' attorneys—than the most ambitious anti-terrorism and relief programs contemplated since September 11...
...After decades of self-loathing," Jacob Weisberg enthuses in the New York Times Magazine, "Washington is proud once again to be the place with the answers...
...Conservative resistance to those schemes, however, rarely gained traction...
...It is the country that is at stake...
...A serious war against terrorism demands a credible campaign against the nanny state...
...declare any of its old domestic initiatives officially dead...
...Comparable violations have in the past prompted EPA-ordered evacuations, including the closure of an entire town (Times Beach, Missouri...
...Our national government must be limited not because it should be enfeebled, but rather and precisely because it must not be distracted from the life-and-death work it has to do...
...Think what Washington would promise a mobilized electorate...
...BY MICHAEL S. GREVE WHEN FLIGHT 11 crashed into the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush was sitting in on a second-grade class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida...
...In a matter of hours, Bush had traversed a divide, from the photo-op distractions that had come to preoccupy our chief executives to the serious business for which we have a national government, and a president...
...We cannot ensure an adequate supply of smallpox vaccine, let alone administer it in an emergency, unless we also immunize producers against punitive product-liability suits...
...Liberal pundits, meanwhile, have had a hard time containing their enthusiasm for what they take to be the restoration of the era of big government...
...carbon dioxide budget...
...Tom Daschle's anthrax-polluted offices are being fumigated with chlorine, a chemical that the environmental movement has for years sought to ban...
...Complaints have ranged from a general, dire prediction that September 11 will produce another "ratchet" of war-induced government growth to very specific objections to the airline bailout, federal reinsurance guarantees, and provisions of the just-enacted anti-terrorism legislation...
...Beyond such crowding-out effects, the perceived, constituency-driven "priorities" of the nanny state will tend to give way when they conflict, as they often do, with the real priority of fighting—and winning—the war against terrorism...
...Rather, September 11 has reintro-duced us to the difference between national interests and the self-absorbed issue-mongering that Washington defaults to in times of peace and prosperity...
...While the war against terrorism will bring some new programs and a higher level of spending, an incremental enlargement of the federal pork barrel is not a quantum leap...
...The threat, rather, arises from a government that cannot tell the difference between a national crisis and a constituency demand, between a war and an interest-group favor...
...So long as the nanny state's "priorities" lacked a contrast, let alone a conflict, with an actual national priority, the voters were too bored to pay attention, too nice to say "no" to the next group of miserable claimants, and at any rate persuaded that a resilient economy could surely afford another public program...
...We cannot ensure a robust, resilient energy market if we continue to obsess over the hurt feelings of polar bears and calving caribou on Alaska's North Slope...
...That, too, is why the congressional Democrats promptly mistook an airline security bill for a union jobs measure...
...As the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger observed in a trenchant column, the trial lawyers' vow to abstain from lawsuits over the fallen World Trade Center was an ironic concession that September 11 compels a break with the normal operation of our legal system (in this case, legalized bounty-hunting...
...To do so would require drawing a distinction between the war on terrorism and the poll-tested baubles that comprised its pre-9/11 agenda—targeted tax cuts, charitable "incentives," and federally funded and supervised school "accountability...
...Still, to construe our new politics as nothing more than a struggle between partisans of big government and small is to miss the real reason for pursuing a limited-government agenda—namely, that there is a war to be won...
...We would be constrained in flying B-2 bombers from Missouri to Central Asia under the Kyoto global warming accords, which threaten to count war-related air emissions (except for UN-approved missions) towards a U.S...
...Even before September 11, the obsessions and distractions that now compete and conflict with a serious war effort were, for the most part, just that—irksome, inane, and occasionally expensive distractions...
...Conservatives should therefore resist the tendency to characterize serious wartime measures as just another big-government charade...
...And terrorism and the war against it are truly national in the sense that neither can be reduced to constituency politics and interest-group demands...
...There has been on the right a rather indiscriminate bellyaching over an impending expansion of big government...
...Small-government conservatives and libertarians have likewise failed to draw crucial political distinctions and to forsake their reflexive anti-government rhetoric for a sober consideration of the ways in which government must grow more powerful to defeat our enemies...
...The administration has not so far been willing to recognize those limits...
...There is no point in decrying the voters' apathy—which, in times of peace and prosperity, is rational and in fact a protection against even greater political mischief...
...Indeed, the wartime president is again visiting grade school classrooms, now pitching penpalships with Kuwaiti kids, and the White House has yet to Michael S. Greve is the John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and director of AEI's Federalism Project...
...The lesson, rather, is that the principal threat to limited government does not arise from a national government that pursues the nation's interests with energy and resolve...
...That is why Washington-is-back pundits believe the public's renewed trust in Washington and its support for the war against terrorism will translate into support for Hillary Clinton's wish list—from improved mental health care to more efficient internal combustion engines, child care benefits, and Amtrak service from Bismarck to Biloxi...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 9
