First of all, the remarks demonstrate why I do not care for talking about abortion unless I must: it is incredibly easy to shoot myself in the foot with poorly chosen words. Furthermore, as a man, I must be even more careful because there is a sizable portion of women, particularly those who call themselves “feminists”, who are all too willing to portray my words (or any man’s words), especially when I choose them poorly, as another evil misogynist who wants to enforce his “evil” ideas on women. It’s not right, but it is something that exists. It’s not just the gravity of the issue at hand, but the appearance that I can create while discussing it, that can determine how the message is received.

Second, I’d like to make a quick comment on the “legitimate rape” thing. I originally had a long, drawn out discussion written, but the more I wrote, the more I found it harder to explain. Therefore, I’ll keep this short. Suffice to say, we do know that there are false rape accusations, as the Duke lacrosse case demonstrated. This article at the Forensic Examiner by Bruce Goss explains the issue of false versus real allegations of rape and the care that must be taken in any rape case better than I ever could.

Third, there is a lot of discussion over just how often a pregnancy does occur after a rape. James Hamblin, a doctor and the health editor for The Atlantic, addresses this in a post at the magazine’s website. It is the most useful and succinct explanation I have found. The 5% pregnancy rate that people have cited comes from a 1996 study published by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. However, it is important to note that this is note the only study published on the issue, and as Hamblin notes, the study includes rapes where condoms were used. Other studiesdealing with other countries have reported numbers greater than that, in the 12-17% range. As Hamblin also notes, this is what the normal pregnancy rate for a woman is:

• 3 days prior to ovulation: 15% chance of pregnancy
• 1-2 days prior to ovulation: 30% chance of pregnancy
• Within 24 hours of ovulation: 12% chance of pregnancy
• 1-2 days after ovulation: Around 0% chance of pregnancy

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You?are?with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

But it’s not just the governor’s race that deserves our attention. There’s a race for a state Supreme Court seat that we need to look at as well, where right-leaning Richard Sanders is trying to regain his seat on the court. Columnist Rachel Alexander has an excellent column up on Townhall.com explaining the race and the stakes:

One of only two right-leaning justices who has served on the Washington Supreme Court in recent years is in the battle of his life to regain his seat. As a result of his freedom of religion, sanctity of marriage, gun rights, and the unborn, former Justice Richard Sanders has been a lightening rod for attacks from the left and the biased media. Those attacks finally cost him reelection in 2010, after serving on the high court for three terms since 1995.

After he was sworn into office at the Washington Supreme Court in 1996, Sanders walked over to a pro-life rally at the State Capitol and briefly thanked the pro-lifers for their support. His enemies on the left complained and made him the subject of a long, drawn out expensive ethics investigation by the state judicial conduct commission, which reprimanded him. The Supreme Court refused to allow the Attorney General to represent him, forcing him to pay for his own defense. $92,479 in attorneys fees later, the reprimand was overturned by the Washington State Court of Appeals as a violation of free speech. Sanders was forced to sue the state to obtain reimbursement of his fees. The highly publicized ethics investigation went on for so long that ultimately his name and reputation were significantly damaged.

The Liberal media, predictably, has put him through the grinder. One of the most outrageous examples is the outrage ginned up over some comments on race he made. Alexander explains:

The offending comment by Sanders? Blacks may be disproportionately incarcerated because they commit more crimes, rather than because the criminal-judicial system is biased. Later he clarified what he meant, but it was too late, “I would never say, nor do I believe, that people commit crimes because of their race.”

He is a principled constitutionalist, and his willingness to stand up for religious freedom is even more important in today’s times. This willingness is exemplified by his ruling in the case Maylon v. Pierce County, where he, writing for the majority, found that volunteer chaplains for the Pierce County sheriff’s department did not violate the religious establishment clause of the state’s constitution (Article I, section 11), and his distaste for political correctness can be found throughout his court opinions and his writings for the University of Washington’s student newspaper The Daily from back when he was a law student.

Lastly, we get to why this case is so important. Alexander explains in her column:

The Supreme Court has shifted to the left since Sanders lost reelection, with only one conservative left, Jim Johnson. Without Sanders, the court voted 5-4 to strike down an initiative against red light cameras. Sanders said, “Had I been on the court it would have been 5-4 the other way.”

[...]

Sanders will likely face off in the general election against Sheryl Gordon McCloud, who is described by the Tacoma News Tribune as “a fiery liberal.” McCloud, a criminal defense attorney, has been endorsed by the National Abortion Rights Action League, unions, Democrat clubs, an executive director from the radical Latino organization El Centro De La Raza and numerous criminal defense attorneys.

There’s far more to Mrs. Alexander’s column, but I think this suffices as evidence for why we should support him. It’s not enough to focus merely on the United States Supreme Court–though it is doubtlessly extremely important to insure we get the right kinds of judges serving there. We need more constitutionalists sitting on the benches of our state supreme courts.  Justice Sanders fits that bill. You can visit his website here and contribute or, if you live in Washington, find out ways to get involved with his campaign.

I’ll close with some remarks by the justice himself from his website:

Let’s make sure he makes it back to the Washington state Supreme Court.

P.S. Rob McKenna‘s a pretty good guy to support, too!

The best embeddable version of Romney taking it to this heckler that I can find is this:

Breitbart has a full video feed of the incident here.

Romney’s exactly right about Obama, too. He needs to take his campaign out of the gutter and focus on the real issues that concern Americans. Of course, I don’t actually expect Mr. Obama to heed that advice, since he has no real record of dealing successfully with those issues to run on. Nevertheless, it’s still good to remind people of this fact.

Also, this isn’t the first time Mitt Romney has done this sort of thing. He gave a nice response to a contraception heckler back in March.

Mitt Romney: He eats hecklers for breakfast.

Consider this an open thread.

First of all, it’s been reported that Darrell Issa is going to sue Eric Holder for civil contempt in the federal circuit court for the District of Columbia, according to Rollcall. However, the Daily Caller gives a fuller explanation, including the following:

Holder’s Department of Justice directed Ronald Machen, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, to not enforce the criminal contempt resolution after the House of Representatives approved it….

Because of the fear Machen wouldn’t be able to separate politics from the law, a bipartisan group in the House also approved a civil contempt resolution against Holder. That resolution allowed for Issa’s team to hire attorneys, and provided for resources to sue the administration over the release of documents Congress has not yet seen.

It should come as little surprise, of course, that Eric Holder would order a U.S. Attorney to not enforce a criminal contempt resolution against himself, so we can only hope that the D.C. Circuit will order the release of those documents Obama has protected under executive privilege.

The second story comes to us from a new book that will be released on August 14th (tomorrow).

In Martin A. Lee’s new book Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana — Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, he notes that Eric Holder has gone on a “reefer madness” like campaign to distract from the fallout of the Fast and Furious scandal. The Daily Caller has posted some excerpts from the book. The essential gist is that the “shiny object” Holder was trying to direct our attention to in this case was California’s medical marijuana dispensers. From the book (and courtesy of the DC):

“On October 7, the same day Holder wrote a detailed letter to Rep. Issa, defending his handling of the Fast and Furious affair, four federal prosecutors in California held a hastily organized press conference in which they threw down the gauntlet and announced the start of a far-ranging crackdown that would nearly decimate the Golden State’s medical marijuana industry.”

“Within ten months, close to half of California’s 1400 dispensaries would shut down as the DEA waged an all-out vendetta against what Proposition 215 had unloosed,” Lee continued.

Then, Lee notes:

“Team Obama’s decision to crack down on the medical marijuana industry wasn’t motivated by public health concerns,” Lee writes, answering his own question. “The Justice Department green-lit a scorched earth campaign against medicinal cannabis in order to placate law enforcement and control the damage from the Fast and Furious scandal by deflecting attention to other matters.”

We can agree or disagree whether marijuana (medicinal or otherwise) should be legal or not, but the fact of the matter is that Eric Holder was trying to distract our attention from a failed government gunrunning operation–one that has led to the deaths of 300 Mexican citizens and two Border Patrol agents. It’s not just that, though, over 1000 of the guns from this failed operation are still unaccounted for, and they all might never be found.

If we backtrack a little in the DC’s article, though, there’s one other thing about Martin A. Lee’s book that needs to be commented on. Per the article, Lee says:

“The fact that Fast and Furious had its roots in a similar Bush-era ATF operation mattered little to GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, the grandstanding chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who went so far as to accuse the Obama administration of purposely allowing the guns to escape as part of a liberal plot to impose new gun control laws,” Lee writes. “Issa was not credible; nor was Holder.”

He gets this wrong. The operations that the Bush administration did were done in concert with the Mexican government. There are other differences, too, and this article from The Blaze does a great job of breaking down the five biggest ones (including the one I’ve already mentioned). Perhaps Mr. Lee should have done his research a little better.

The details surrounding failed gunwalking operation Fast and Furious just keep getting worse and worse. We’re already aware that the guns involved were involved in the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens and in the deaths of Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata, but now it has been reported that they might also have been involved in a plot to assassinate the police chief of Tijuana. The El Paso Times reports:

A weapon tied to “Operation Fast and Furious” was seized in Tijuana in connection with a drug cartel’s conspiracy to kill the police chief of Tijuana, Baja California, who later became the Juárez police chief, according to a U.S. government report.

The firearm was found Feb. 25, 2010, during an arrest of a criminal cell associated with Teodoro “El Teo” García Simental and Raydel “El Muletas” López Uriarte, allies of the Sinaloa cartel.

This echoes what Breitbart’s Mary Chastain wrote a couple days before the Times‘ article, and she has posted a translated version of the original source here (admittedly, it’s translated via Google Translate, so prepare for the typical clumsiness).

This is a great time to remind everyone, including those in Washington, that as bad as Fast and Furious has been for us, it’s so much worse for Mexico. Deroy Murdock, whom Chastain links to, gives an excellent breakdown of just how badly our neighbors to the south have been affected. In addition to being found at 200 different crime scenes, Murdock gives us this somber note in his conclusion:

“Fast and Furious has poisoned the wellspring of public opinion inMexico as it relates to the cooperation and engagement with the United States,” Mexico’s envoy to America, Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, declared on May 31.

Mr. Issa and Mr. Grassley concluded that 1,048 of these weapons “remain unaccounted for.” Unlike carrier pigeons, these Fast and Furious guns will not fly safely home. Instead, for years to come, they will keep drawing blood in Mexico - and points north.

It’s past time for heads to roll in this scandal, but the Department of Justice, aided by the White House’s claim of executive privilege, has done little but stonewall on the issue. It’s time for some accountability.

Politifact has finally weighed in on the subject, and it’s not good for Reid:

Reid has said Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. It was no slip of the tongue. He repeated the claim on at least two more occasions, at one point saying that “the word is out” when in fact it was only Reid who put that “word” out.

Reid has produced no evidence to back up his claim other than attribution to a shadowy anonymous source. Romney has denied the claim, and tax experts back him up, saying that the nature of Romney’s investments in Bain make it highly unlikely he would have been able to avoid paying taxes altogether — especially for 10 years.

Reid has made an extreme claim with nothing solid to back it up. Pants on Fire!

I suppose this is one of those occasions where a lie is so absurd that they have to come out against it. Even the White House, which has been trying to ply the tax returns issue for the past few weeks, has decided Reid’s forgotten the first rule of holes.*

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped Reid from quadrupling down.

*=Stop digging!

P.S. Word has it that Harry Reid is a pederast.

At the end of the 2011 RedState Gathering, I told myself that, by the time the 2012 Gathering rolled around, I’d be on the front page. It’s taken a lot of hard work on my part and help from my friends (especially people like Aaron, Neil, Brian Simpson, and Erick), but I managed to make that little promise come true.

Again, it is a blessing to be here.

Just to give you a little background on who I am, I am currently a 23 year old graduate student and assistant at Georgia Southern University’s Department of History. My particular field that I am specializing in, since I have to pick one (it’s hard!), is American Indian history, particularly their service in the military. It’s that interest in history that has fueled my interest in politics, because the decisions we make today will become a part of our history, and it can be so instructive to learn from the mistakes and successes of the past. I think there’s no better way to sum my reasons for being involved here and elsewhere than to quote Ronald Reagan:

I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose. We have come together here because the American people deserve better from those to whom they entrust our nation’s highest offices, and we stand united in our resolve to do something about it.

–Acceptance Speech for the 1980 Republican Presidential Nomination

Every now and then, I find myself listening to that speech and thinking about just how relevant it is today. It’s part of what motivates me to stay in the fight when my spirits get down, and it reminds me that there’s always the chance things will get better.

I’ve never been a fast reader–I take too much time trying to read every single word–but I nevertheless enjoy reading. The bookshelf near my bed in my apartment contains works by Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Barry Goldwater, Jean-Francois Revel (I’d add Frederic Bastiat, but I left my copy of The Law at my parents’ house), and others. It would be nice to say that I’ve read all of those books, but school intervenes (along with a nice assist by my own laziness). Of late, I’ve been reading about Canada’s 7th Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, a member of the Liberal party from back when liberals stood for liberty. He is an incredible orator, and his speeches articulate the case for individual liberty and federalism in such an impressive way. This is one of my favorite quotes from him:

I am a friend to liberty, but with me liberty does not mean license. A free people is not one without laws or checks; a free people is one among whom all the attributes, all the rights of the members of the State are clearly defined and determined and among whom there is no encroachment of one power upon another. That is the true liberty.

–Speech on the Abolition of Dual Represenation, 1871

People like him, and in our country people like Reagan and Calvin Coolidge, are proof that you can make a career out of standing for the right things and be successful. Laurier was Prime Minister for 15 consecutive years–the longest unbroken term as PM in Canadian history–and his 45 years in Parliament are a record for longevity that stands to this day.

My own philosophical approach is something I may get into at another time, but I’d like to note that I call myself a conservative. Plain and simple. No modifiers like “social”, “fiscal”, or “Libertarian”. The only thing I’d put first is “Christian”, because my faith in God is the most important thing to me. I also reject attempts by those who want to water down or redefine conservatism in the name of bringing it “up to date” or something similar. To quote Barry Goldwater in his Foreword to The Conscience of a Conservative:

The ancient and tested truths that guided our Republic through its early days will do equally well for us. The challenge to Conservatives today is quite simply to demonstrate the bearing of a proven philosophy on the problems of our own time.

Before I conclude this, I’d like to give a little advice to the people out there who want to be contributors or prominent diarists (or good bloggers in general): I said it before in this post, but it took a lot of hard work . I think there’s a real evolution in my writing abilities and the maturation of my thinking that can be observed just by seeing some of my blog posts from the beginning up until now. For a while, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to post as much as I have lately, but then I was told that it doesn’t have to be a term paper. It just has to get the word out and get the facts right. It’s been a bit of a shift having to go from academic mode to blogger mode and then back when necessary, but it’s something I’m learning to make.

Additionally, it took a commitment to post. I wasn’t always sure if I’d find something to say, so I went looking through places like Drudge, the National Review, my friends on Twitter, various media outlets, and other major conservative blogs. After a while, my “story sense” became more and more honed in on the things that might make a good post. When I found a story, I’d write up a quick post on it explaining, for example, why it got a detail wrong or what the broader implications for it were, and I’d make sure I had it ready to post in a timely manner. Nothing too long usually. Generally, I try to keep my “news” posts around 500 words, and no more than 750 if at all possible.

Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten here without the advice given to me by my friends here. Going to the RedState Gatherings was indispensable in that respect. Through those Gatherings, I met people like Erick, Neil, Aaron, Caleb, Brian Simpson, Jeff Emanuel, Bill S, Moe, and so many others. Twitter has allowed me to keep in touch with them, as well, and it’s because of my experiences at the first Gathering that I returned to Twitter. Along they way, they have helped advise on how to become a better blogger. They have been indispensable to my success here.

I’d like to thank God for the blessings He has given me. I’d like to thank the Contributors who run this site for allowing me the chance to post on the front page. I hope you enjoy my posts as much as I enjoy having the opportunity to post here.

Thank you for your time, and may God bless all of you.

P.S. On a lighter note, it looks like Neil and I will be the resident anime fans here. Fortunately, it looks like I won’t be so alone when it comes to talking about football–my other big nonserious pastime.

View Enlarged Image

They explain it this way:

GM Financial auto loans to customers with FICO scores below 660 rose from 87% of total loans in Q4 2010 to 93% in Q1 2012.

The worse the FICO score, the bigger the increase. From Q4 2010 to Q1 2012, GM Financial loans to customers with the worst FICO scores — below 540 — shot up 79% to more than $2.3 billion. The second worst category, 540-599, rose 28% from about $3.4 billion to $4.3 billion.

Prime loans, those above 660, dropped 42% to $676 million.

And, as the article notes at the end, the industry average for these kinds of sales is around 6%. In Q4 of 2010, GM’s percentage of subprime sales was at 4.8%–below the average. In Q1, of 2012, that number stood at 8.2%–a sizable increase, and a number that’s much above 6% average.

In other words, GM is propping itself up through the same kinds of risky loans that propped up the housing market, but the Obama administration doesn’t care. There’s a double standard at work here. As the article notes:

“The Obama administration has seen to it that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is important in the subprime mortgage arena,” said Niedermeyer. “But it has exempted auto-finance from that. I definitely think it is a double standard.”

One other point comes just a little before that, though. The Treasury Department still owns 500 million shares of GM–or 26.5% of the company’s stock–and GM still owes the federal government $26.4 billion in direct aid. In order to pay off this money, GM’s stock price would need to be 53, but last Friday, they closed at 19.67. Monday, they closed at 19.36.

How much more money will the taxpayer lose off of this? How long before the subprime chickens come home to roost at GM, too?

With Mitt Romney, there is some trouble, though. Admittedly, it’s pretty easy to understand how they could spin him into the “evil” narrative. After all, he is a millionaire and former CEO (of a “vulture capital” firm, no less!)–two things that are verboten to the class warfare Left, unless you donate to them, of course (see: John Kerry, George Soros, etc.). However, beyond that–and they really aren’t doing too good a job at dissuading the voters from supporting him with that narrative–their attempts break down. Since it’s difficult to call someone with dual graduate degrees from Harvard “dumb”, they have to try their hand at the “wimp” narrative. Newsweek writer Michael Tomasky serves up his latest attempt at making now-digital fish wrapping by pushing this narrative–or trying, at least. Behold:

Romney was raised in that same [upper class] code [as George H. W. Bush]—his father was the epitome of the civic-minded millionaire (except, of course, the Romneys were not WASPs). But as Mitt was making his fortune, those old values were being ground to dust by new Gordon Gekko values. The clash between those competing value systems exists inside him. There’s some of the old—he gives away plenty of money and so on. But the new values surface often enough—his fondness for firing people, the way he made fun of NASCAR fans’ ponchos, his reminders to us that his friends are the people who own the teams, and now his putdown of an entire nation, which happens to be our closest ally—to suggest that they won the argument.

A good-looking guy doesn’t have to walk around saying, “Hey, look at me!” He knows everyone’s looking. And a rich guy doesn’t have to remind us he’s rich. When he does, something’s off. It looks insecure.

Romney is the genuine article: a true wimp. Oh, there are some ways in which he’s not—a wimp lets himself get kicked around, and Romney doesn’t exactly do that. He sure didn’t during the primaries, when he strafed Rick Perry and carpet-bombed Rick Santorum (but note that they were both weaker than he).

There could be a big potential scandal bubbling just under the surface in Afghanistan. According to The Blaze, General William Caldwell is accused of covering up horrifying conditions at a certain hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan–a hospital that is funded by YOUR taxpayer dollars. The Blaze quotes an AFP article which says:

The problems date back to 2010, when US officers expressed concerns about the possible embezzlement of funds from the Afghan-run Dawood National Military Hospital and the lack of treatment provided to wounded Afghan soldiers.

Some Afghan soldiers died of malnutrition at the hospital, in conditions that one retired Army colonel described as “Auschwitz-like.”

The reason for the cover up? It would make the 2010 elections more difficult for Democrats.  The AFP article then quotes retired judge advocate general Col. Gerald Carozza, who says:

“The general did not want bad news to leave his command before the election – or AFTER the election,” Colonel Gerald Carozza, Jr., a now-retired US Army judge advocate, said in written testimony to the House Committee on Oversight.

“The general, like too many generals, was too concerned about the message, creating a stifling climate for those who had to deal with the reality,” Carozza said, comparing Dawood to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

It’s all about controlling the message, and in an election year, particularly one where the deck was already stacked against the Democrats, doing so becomes all the more important. The article also mentions one Col. Mark Fassl, inspector general for the NATO-led training mission in the country, saying he heard Gen. Caldwell tell him, “How could we do this or make this request with elections coming?”

Right, because who cares if a few Afghans suffer if it could make a political party look bad? The Blaze gives a little more insight into conditions at the hospital:

In September 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported from Kabul that U.S. officers found that patients at the hospital were routinely dying of simple infections and starving to death, while corrupt doctors and nurses demanded bribes for food and basic care.

And as the same article reports, when Gen. Caldwell finally did decided to support a probe into the conditions at the hospital, he allowed it only on the conditions that it did not mention the horrifying conditions there. The AFP article mentions that an unnamed source said that Caldwell supported a probe of the hospital, but he wanted Afghan officials to take the lead. These two references might be to the same probe.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is looking into this, but even they might not be looking at all they should. Col. Carozza told them in a hearing that they shouldn’t just be focusing on the conditions there. They need to look at the cover up:

Carozza said he spoke to three officers who were called to a meeting with Caldwell, and all of them offered the same description of the general’s comments.

“Lt. Gen. Caldwell screamed at these three officers, waving his finger at them for trying to bring in the DOD IG,” Carozza said. The general was quoted as saying, “There is nothing wrong in this command that we can’t fix ourselves.”

Carozza said he was in a meeting with Caldwell’s deputy, Patton, when Patton “informed the group that Lt. Gen. Caldwell was upset about making the request to DOD IG so close to the election and we were to consider postponing it until afterwards.”

If all of this is true, heads need to roll. The conditions reported at this hospital and the shameless, self-serving cover up that apparently happened are a disgrace to the United States Military and an affront to human decency. The situation for us in Afghanistan is hard enough already, and this can only be another black eye for us. We need answers.

UPDATE: After a little research, I’ve discovered that General William Caldwell has posted a couple of times on the Huffington Post (not exactly a conservative or Republican outfit) and once at Think Progress. I don’t have any voter registration records on him, but combine the fact that he has posted on both of these sites with his reasons for the cover up and you get a little idea about what side of the political spectrum he is on.

On July 31, 2012, Georgians will vote on a one-cent sales tax to invest in a specifically identified list of transportation improvements in each of our State’s twelve economic development regions. Each region’s election will be separate from the other eleven regions, and each region’s citizens will determine the fate of a new 10-year Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (T-SPLOST) on all sales in the counties within that particular region.

The T-SPLOST referendum was authorized by the Transportation Investment Act of 2010 (Georgia House Bill 277) which sought a means for Georgia to make the necessary investments into our transportation and highway systems.

Now, before you explore any more of the website, you should consider the obvious pro-T-SPLOST bias the website has that colors its analysis. It’s not just on the internet, though. A drive through the major roads of metro Atlanta would reveal many “Untie [County/City Name]“.

To help counter the propaganda, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation has published a 39 page report (PDF file) analyzing it. Erick has already posted on the subject. He focuses on the graph on page 19 but there’s a section of the report that I think deserves attention as well. In it’s analysis of how the tax will affect Atlanta, the report identifies some notable shortcomings (if you’re not a fan of large blockquotes, scroll down some, there are videos!. Also, the bolding is mine):

Political realities make it impossible to create a perfect project list. However, the metro Atlanta region’s project list in particular has several shortcomings. First, there is no regional framework. Instead of creating a highway grid or a regional transit system, the list contains numerous localcentric projects frequently chosen for political reasons. Despite the requirements, only 44 of the 126 highway projects and 19 of the 32 transit projects are truly regional, affecting multiple cities or counties. Only 87 of the 126 highway projects and 23 of the 32 the transit projects are necessarily related to congestion mitigation.

Many of the highway projects are labeled “operational.” Operational is a vague definition. These projects might improve transportation or offer recreation or economic development opportunities. Without more detail it is impossible to determine the goals of these projects. Several of the road projects and 18 of the 32 transit projects also fail any cost-effectiveness test. Six of the transit projects have other factors such as high cost or utility relocations that are not considered.

Projects also are not geographically distributed in an equitable manner. The city of Atlanta has 10 percent of the region’s population yet receives 27 percent of the funds. Fayette County has only 2.5 percent of the region’s population and 80 percent of county residents work outside the county. Yet Fayette still receives 2.2 percent of the funds. Gwinnett, with almost 20 percent of the population, receives less than 14 percent of the funds, while Cobb has 17 percent of the population and receives 11 percent of the funds. Additionally, projects are not well distributed within city limits. All of Atlanta’s transit projects and 19 of the 28 highway projects are located in the northern half of the city. While the northern half is growing more quickly, the large discrepancy between north and south is troubling.

The project list also dedicates a significant share of the region’s transit funds to rail. As a result of its low density and its large percentage of single-family homes, most of metro Atlanta is a poor market for rail transit. To create successful rail transit, the metro area would have to intensively increase population density. Building rail transit first and hoping that local officials will change density requirements later does not create successful rail systems. That said, even with Atlanta’s low density there are some rail lines that could move significant numbers of people somewhat more cost effectively. Unfortunately, these are not the lines the tax will fund. The transit project that receives the most funding is the Atlanta BeltLine. The BeltLine receives more than 10 percent of the total regional funding. From a transportation perspective, the BeltLine is one of the worst Atlanta projects.

Quite frankly, I like light rail, and I like subways. However, as the T-SPLOST report notes, rail based solutions in general will not work effectively in a city and metro area as sprawled out as Atlanta is.

However, the report does more than just point out the flaws with the T-SPLOST. It does offer a suggestion as to what a responsible and effective plan for fixing Atlanta’s mobility and congestion problems:

An Atlanta project list focused on mobility and congestion mitigation would include a network of upgraded expressways, managed arterials and enhanced Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service. Modifying the Downtown Connector or creating a parallel expressway west of downtown could substantially reduce congestion. The region could benefit from a second east-west expressway. Managed lanes could be added to each expressway, offering free rides to three-person carpools and tolled, reliable travel times to single-occupant vehicles. More importantly, buses and vanpools could use these lanes at no charge, providing reliable travel times. Studies, as well as Atlanta’s experience, show that creating reliable travel times with short headways – greater frequency of service – does more to increase transit ridership than other transit improvements. These managed lanes could also offer guaranteed free-flow conditions to emergency vehicles. Finally, better traffic synchronization, lengthened left-turn lanes and queue jumpers can dramatically decrease congestion on arterial roads.

State Representative for the 35th District Ed Setzler, who has been leading the anti-TSPLOST charge under the Gold Dome, recently sent me an e-mail highlighting three videos that take all the basic criticisms from the GPPF’s report and reduce it to bite-sized tidbits. The first one covers the basics of just why all these advertisements have popped up in metro Atlanta:

The second one compares Atlanta’s particular situation with those of other major cities (going after an issue the T-SPLOST advocates seem to love to hit upon):

The third one explains why bus service is a better idea for most of the metro area:

The folks at TrafficTruth have more information the issue. The site is definitely worth a visit if you live in Georgia.

A T-SPLOST is not a bad idea, in my opinion, but the proposal before Georgia voters would be too costly, too inefficient, and too ineffective at solving the problems the metro Atlanta area faces. It comes across as more of a series of pet projects and short-sighted rail ventures cobbled together by eager-to-please lawmakers lacking the backbone, and probably the clarity of vision, to address the real problems Atlantans face.

Georgia, we can do better than this. Vote “No” on the T-SPLOST referendum this July 31st.

It has often been observed that the difference between the beliefs of the elites and the “rank and file” in a given group are different from one another. The Republican rank and file, for example, are more conservative that the elites. The same could be said for many union members when compared to the leadership.

It has also been remarked by many people, among them Juan Williams*, that the Black community has been dominated by a select number of leaders whose public statements often find themselves at odds with the beliefs of many African Americans. Most these leaders are running on the last fumes of the legacies they built during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, now only caring about their own enrichment and promoting their narrative rather than what’s good for the community they claim to represent (indeed, when I see Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, I am reminded of Oliver Cromwell’s exhortation to the Rump Parliament). The younger ones, meanwhile, have been elevated to their positions generally because they march in lockstep with the old guard without questioning the narrative they are given.

We see evidence of this again in the wake of Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP. Contrast the reaction of NAACP Chairman Roslyn M. Brock:

“Unfortunately, much of his agenda is at odds with what the NAACP stands for — whether the issue is equal access to affordable health care, reforming our education system or the path forward on marriage equality,” NAACP Chairman Roslyn M. Brock said in a statement Wednesday.

With that of the activists who gathered to hear him:

But in his speech in Houston to the organization, Romney was applauded by the NAACP activists when he said: “As president, I will promote strong families — and I will defend traditional marriage.”

[...]

The applause from the activists at Romney’s declaration that he’d defend traditional marriage is notable because the leaders of the organization voted to officially support gay marriage earlier this year.

And it’s not just the activists at the NAACP. The black community’s opposition to same sex marriage is something that has been commented on at length. Proposition 8 in California is a classic example, as black voters managed both to help Obama pad his margin in the state and gave the ballot measure the necessary margin it needed to pass. North Carolina, earlier this year, reconfirmed it.

In fairness, it isn’t a total disconnect. The activists booed Romney when he slammed Obama on healthcare, but nevertheless, we are left to ask ourselves, particularly on social issues: just who does the NAACP represent? Does its leadership really listen to its members, or the rest of the black community? Do they really care, or are they in actuality a Liberal advocacy organization using race to further its own (read: the Left’s) agenda?

These are questions we all need to ponder, though I suspect many of us already know the answers.

*=Read that book. It’s good, seriously, regardless of what your opinion of Juan Williams is otherwise.

P.S. The issue of same sex marriage is something I am quite on the fence about, but hypocrisy like this is something I cannot stand.

Among the other stories that surfaced in the news yesterday, I found out that former 14 year-old conservative wunderkind Jonathan Krohn, he of the book Define Conservatism and the CPAC 2009 speech, has now defected. Though he asserts, according to Politico, “I want to be Jonathan Krohn…and I’m tired of being an ideology, and it’s not fun and it gets boring and it’s not who we are as individuals,” it’s easy to tell from his positions that he’s essentially a Liberal now. He favors same-sex marriage, he likes Obamacare, and he says he’d vote for Obama this year, if he was old enough to vote. Per the same Politico article:

“One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative,” said Krohn. “It just didn’t seem right to me anymore. From there, it branched into other issues, everything from health care to economic issues.… I think I’ve changed a lot, and it’s not because I’ve become a liberal from being a conservative — it’s just that I thought about it more. The issues are so complex, you can’t just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue.”

It’s saddening, to be sure, but I can’t say it’s all that surprising. As kids grow up, they tend to question the views their parents handed to them. Some arrive at the same conclusions, some don’t, and some flirt with the other side before seeing the wisdom of what they taught. It remains to be seen which of the latter two categories Krohn will fall into, though I certainly hope it is the last one (and I’m sure I’m not alone).

The blog Caffeinated Thoughts has a post up that should be required reading for people exploring this story. Per them:

Politico’s ability to state that Krohn’s moving in his late teens while reading German philosophy is “bucking trends” is beyond absurd. Moving left as you enter your college year particularly if you read German philosophy. It’s so cliched that the Independent 1980s Christian film Geronimo included this as a major reason for the main character’s drift. The point about being growing more conservative is that you grow more conservative as you live life: get married, have kids, and start paying taxes, not that you become more conservative between puberty and learning to drive.

It’s true, but even more important is this cautionary point: “Of course, the only reason Krohn’s ‘ideological evolution’ is news now is the gusto with which conservatives embraced him.” We place these prodigies up on a pedestal, and when they end up crumpling under the pressure as they work their own thoughts out for themselves, it becomes news. We find ourselves with egg on our faces.

Caffeinated Thoughts links to another post by the same author back when Krohn made his debut at CPAC where he discusses the fates of similar teen conservative pundits. It, too, is worth reading:

Kyle Williams is perhaps the most obvious example. He began writing for WorldNetDaily.com in 2001 at age 12 and also had a book published. He got in a speech at the National Press Club and a few TV interviews before he mostly disappeared, except for his weekly article for WND every Saturday.

I read Williams’ column with interest, but it began to take a turn towards the end. My wife remarked, “Someone that young shouldn’t be this cynical.” Williams went from conservative cheerleading to dishing on conservatives and their causes. Williams was struggling with who he was, what he believed, and what he wanted to do with his life in front of an audience of thousands. Williams ended his column in 2005 at the age of sixteen.

Another teenager, Hans Zieger, began a column at age seventeen and ended up writing for WorldNetDaily.com as well. He had a unique focus on issues relating to the liberal assault on the Boy Scouts and wrote a book on the topic, as well as another one called Reagan’s Children. He “retired” at twenty-one at the end of 2006, declaring, “I don’t know enough to be weekly offering my opinions as though possessed of some eminence.” Zieger is now a senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative alternative to the ACLU.

To my knowledge neither has defected from conservatism–indeed, the post notes that Zieger is now with a conservative organization–but the point still stands. People like Krohn, Williams, and Zieger, at the time, were still working out their beliefs. As I have said earlier, and I’m sure it’s fairly obvious, as a child progresses through his teen years, it’s not unusual to question the things you are taught. We ought to avoid feting them as the next great hope and placing such a spotlight on them. Instead, we should quietly and gently encourage them along in their search for the truth. We should show them the great conservative thinkers–people such as Burke, Bastiat, de Tocqueville, Hayek, T.S. Eliot, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk–and how they dealt with the great philosophical questions. When they question their beliefs, we ought to engage them to find out why they question.

This is not to say that they shouldn’t be recognized as intelligent kids, but elevating them into the spotlight to such a degree is harmful to them and runs the great risk of embarrassing us. I can only imagine the kind of embarrassment it would be had we given a young Goldwater Girl named Hillary Rodham such attention back in the day.

Before I close, I’d like to speak a bit about myself. Growing up, I was a young conservative (and at almost 23, I still am a young conservative). I grew up in a household that was engaged in politics, though my parents certainly weren’t activists. I first really became interested in politics at the age of 11 with the 2000 election and the fiasco it produced, and 9/11 only steeled my resolve to follow politics. It wasn’t until I began researching the details of President Bush’s NSA wiretaps, though, that I truly became involved.

Of course, like many teens, I began trying to establish just what it was I believed, but I never really flirted with Liberalism. I think the credit for keeping me away from that goes mainly to my discovery of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative followed by my reading of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Since then, I’ve read books by Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Frederic Bastiat, and so many others (my main regret is that I haven’t finished all of them!). Currently, I am perusing a volume of Canadian Prime Minister Wilfird Laurier’s early speeches. He was a classical liberal, and he articulates his beliefs better than all but a few others.

As for philosophy, I’ve read parts of Kant (something I will try to avoid doing again–he is a poor writer), Montesquieu, Baron d’Holbach, Rousseau, and Locke, among others. Though I find great value and enrichment in many of them, whether I agree with much of what they say or not, I nevertheless find myself agreeing with the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, Thomas Reid (pdf):

The man who first discovered that cold freezes water and that heat turns it into vapour was using the same general principles and the same method as Newton did in his discovery of the law of gravitation and the properties of light. His regulae philosophandi [= ‘rules for scientiic and philosophical thinking’] are maxims of common sense, and are practised every day in common life; and anyone who philosophizes by other rules, whether concerning the material system or the mind, will get nowhere.

Conjectures and theories are created by men, and will always be found to be very unlike the things created by God. If we want to know the works of God, we must consult them with attention and humility, not daring to add anything of our own to what they declare. An accurate interpretation of nature is the only sound and orthodox philosophy; anything we add to that is spurious and carries no authority.

All our ingenious theories about the formation of the earth, the generation of animals, the origin of natural and moral evil, when they go further than what can be soundly derived from facts, are empty folly, as much so as the ‘vortices’ of Descartes and the ‘Archæus’ of Paracelsus. The philosophy of the mind may have been as much adulterated by theories as has the philosophy of the material world. The theory of ideas is indeed very ancient, and has been very widely accepted; but neither age nor acceptance can give it authenticity, so they oughtn’t to shelter it from being examined freely and frankly—especially at the present time, when the theory of ideas has produced a system of scepticism that seems to triumph over all science and even over the dictates of common sense.

This is not to say philosophy doesn’t have its value (and Reid wouldn’t argue that it does), but the problem with many philosophers is, quite simply, they overthink things. Once you lose touch with reality, dangerous things can happen

When I first joined RedState back in October of 2006 (after lurking for months), I had ambitions of being a great blogger. Though, to some extent, I still wish to be one today, I am grateful than I labored and learned in obscurity. It gave me time to figure out my thoughts and articulate my views in a better and more authentic way than I would have at the age of 17. Indeed, reading over my early posts, especially those from before we jumped to the current site, reflects a real evolution and maturation in my thought process, in my opinion. It’s gone from “Hey, look at this cool video/article I found” to being able to articulate a coherent and (hopefully) well-written statement as to why it’s important, in addition to putting down my own point of view. The time I spent in the shadows allowed me to work out what I believed with out the burning bright light of the spotlight shining down on me, and I think, overall, it benefited me.

I’ll close with one final piece from the Caffeinated Thoughts post I linked to earlier:

But for me the story of Jonathan Krohn proves to me that years of frustration and obscurity may be good for the young political wanna be pundit. Perhaps, it’d be well if before a young person earns a platform to express themselves nationally that they actually have grown enough to know who they are. My political life was spent doing a lot of listening and a lot of working for unborn children outside of abortion clinics not going on Hannity, and I can’t help but think that’ s healthier.

[...]

I don’t think that young interested people should be discouraged from being involved in politics. They should be involved, but they should do so in a quiet way, right on a blog, right for an ezine. Don’t parade them around in front of three thousand activists and millions on television because they happen to be under 18.  It’s not the duty of sincere attention-seeking kids to  make these boundaries, but it falls  to activists, conservative media,  and especially parents.

It’s food for thought for the next time we encounter a situation like this.

However, there have since arisen some issues with this. Per CNN:

New unofficial numbers released Saturday night by the New York City Board of Elections show Rangel ahead of his main challenger, state Sen. Adriano Espaillat, by only two percentage points – 44% to 42% – with just 802 votes separating them and more than 3,000 votes unaccounted for.

Espillat has filed a lawsuit challenging the results of the election, and with a margin of victory that thin for Rangel and the kinds of questions that have arisen, it’s understandable he would. Espillat will never be even close to “one of us”, but the possibility of Rangel, one of the biggest liars and all around arrogant hypocrites in a party full of them, losing his seat, even if it’s only to another Democrat, is still awesome.

Also, possible voter fraud in a Democratic primary? The irony is delicious. I hope they know that’s why Voter ID laws are becoming increasingly popular.

And now for the background: You see, the United States wasn’t the only nation having an important election that year. Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister for the most of the last 16 years and the man whose shadow loomed large in every corner of Canadian federal politics for the same time, has finally decided to retire for good. In his stead, John Turner had been elected by the Liberal Party as its leader and, consequently, Canada’s Prime Minister, despite not holding a seat in the House of Commons at the time. It was time for a referendum on Trudeaumania and the Trudeau years. and it was up to Mr. Turner to lead the Liberal party to it’s fifth victory in six consecutive elections (there had been, for a few months from 1979 to 1980 a government led by the Tory Joe Clark after Trudeau retired the first time before he came back to defeat Clark).

While the polls had shown a Trudeau-led Liberal Party losing to Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, John Turner fared much better. A series of slip ups and gaffes, however, caused Turner to slip. Still, by the time of the second leaders’ debate, polls showed he had as much as a nine point lead over Mulroney’s Tories.

But, one of the biggest issues of that election was set against Mr. Turner: a controversy over patronage. In his final days in office, Trudeau had recommended to Governor-General Jeanne Sauvé over 200 Liberal appointments to various posts, including judges, senators, and positions on various governmental and crown corporation boards. It was a deeply unpopular move, as it reeked of one that Turner had the power to stop since they were not yet finalized. He could have advised the governor-general to cancel the appointments (which Sauvé would have been obligated to do under Canadian constitutional practice), but he did not because it ran the risk of alienating Trudeau’s wing of the Liberal party.

He didn’t stop there. He even appointed more Liberals to positions in the government. Had Turner waited until 1985, the latest he was constitutionally allowed to call an election, there was a chance the issue could have blown over at least some by then, but instead, four days after he assumed office on June 30, 1984, he called for an election, which would take place on September 4 of that year.

In the meantime, Brian Mulroney didn’t exactly help himself. It surfaced that he was allegedly planning a patronage machine of his own in case of a victory. Apparently, he, too wanted to get his nose in at the public trough–allegedly, of course.

So now, we arrive at the debate, John Turner brought this fact up, even though he was vulnerable on the issue himself. He started what he probably intended to be his own blistering attack on Mulroney for making these plans, arguing  that he “wouldn’t offer Canadians any newness in the style of government” and that Mulroney plans reminded Turner of “patronage at its best”.

Mulroney, though, had a history dealing with these kinds of situations excellently. He was a star debater for St. Francis Xavier University’s debate team and had won numerous public speaking contests there, and he also served as Prime Minister in the campus’ model parliament. In his professional life, he had negotiated the end to several strikes in Montreal. Needless to say, he was quite used to the heat of the debate.

So, in the middle of Turner’s attack, Mulroney fired back with the following: “I have gone so far because I believe what you did was so bad…I’ve gone so far, sir, to apologize… for even kidding about it. I’ve apologized to the Canadian people for kidding about it. The least you should do is to apologize for having made these horrible appointments.”

Clearly shaken by Mulroney’s retort, John Turner could only respond, “I had no option.”

The moderators were content to leave it at that, but before they could get to the next question, Mulroney thundered back:

“You had an option, sir. You could have said, ‘I am not going to do it. This is wrong for Canada, and I am not going to ask Canadians to pay the price.’ You had an option, sir — to say ‘no’ — and you chose to say ‘yes’ to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal Party. That sir, if I may say respectfully, that is not good enough for Canadians.”

Turner could only mumble “I had no option,” again.

At this point, a clearly angry Mulroney blasted:

“That is an avowal of failure. That is a confession of non-leadership. And this country needs leadership. You had an option, sir. You could have done better.”

It was a classic example of a “knockout blow” politically, and it really deserves to be seen:

The results are summed up best by Peter Mansbridge in the book 100 Days that Changed Canada:

Now it was the Conservatives with the nine-point lead in the polls. Allan Gregg, the Conservative pollster at the time, told Mulroney it was the greatest single change in the numbers since polling began in Canada. A few weeks later, Brian Mulroney became Canada’s eighteenth prime minister. He won 211 seats, more than any party ever had before, or since. No one doubted the turning point of the campaign. “You had an option, sir” is now part of our political lexicon.

Parliament after the 1980 election.

Parliament after the 1984 election.

In American politics, the closest we come to this in presidential politics is probably Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again,” or his retort when asked about his age in 1984. Outside of that, the best example (and probably the closest we have) is Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

I look at what Brian Mulroney said and think to myself how applicable that phrase is to our times. There are so many occasions over the past three and a half years where Barack Obama had an option to do the right thing but instead chose the wrong path. The debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is but one example, especially in light of yesterday’s ruling.

Mr. Obama, you had an option to say no to levying the biggest tax increase in American history. You had an option to ensure that this bill passed honestly and transparently, without all the kickbacks and other goodies that are so endemic to the typical way of Washington, DC. You had an option to listen to the American people and know that this bill wasn’t what they wanted. You had an option to pass a healthcare law that harnessed the powerful forces of the free market and a free people.

Even beyond healthcare, we find the phrase applicable. Mr. Obama, you had an option to give us a real budget–not one that couldn’t even get votes from your own party. You had an option, you could have kept us from going almost 1200 days without a budget passed. You had an option to tell Harry Reid to stop sitting on his hands and bring a budget up for a vote.

You had an option, you could have said no to so many different wasted green energy loans to companies like Solyndra. You had an option, you could have avoided giving us the billion dollar boondoggle (another Canadian-coined phrase) stimulus and bailouts. You had an option, you could have pushed your ideas about immigration policy, however wrong they might be, in Congress when your party controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of you Presidency.

Shortly after Bart Stupak sold his soul to Obamacare, I mentioned Mr. Mulroney’s quote in a post endorsing Dan Benishek for Congress from MI-1 (a seat that he won). I edited it so that it would work for America. Here’s what I came up with:

You had an option, sir. You could have said, ‘I am not going to do it. This is wrong for America, and I am not going to ask Americans to pay the price.’ You had an option, sir — to say ‘no’ — and you chose to say ‘yes’ to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Democratic Party. That sir, if I may say respectfully, that is not good enough for Americans.

How true every single bit of that quote is for President Obama. There are so many instances where he could have said “No,” for our country’s sake. No to more spending. No to trillion dollar deficits. No to 1200 days without a budget. No to an unpopular healthcare law. No to adding 800,000 newly legitimized illegal aliens to the workforce. No to apology tours. No to so many other things that have damaged our country at home and abroad. But instead, he said yes, and we’re worse off for it.

Too often, he has blamed his problems on everyone but himself, especially George Bush. It’s an excuse for failure, and too often, he has been absent when our country needed leadership. We can do so much better.

I really hope Mitt Romney can deliver a similar knockout blow in the campaign and the debates. I think it’s important to use the debates, because it might be the only time we can compare Romney and Obama side-by-side. Obama has a glass jaw. He folds like a cheap suit under pressure. Once you get past all the media hype about how wise, intelligent, and all around great he is, he’s quite an easy target, as long as you’re willing to go after him without fear.

Earlier in the day, Rangel said he’s still the man for the job despite being censured at one time by the House for ethics violations.

“The one reason why I think it’s important that I be allowed to extend the service to my country and the Congress and my district is because of the times that we find ourselves in the Congress. Never before have we faced such a fiscal crisis,” Rangel said.

I suspect that, had the race for the Democratic nomination in NY-13 (which is tantamount to an election victory) been a little less crowded, Espillat would have managed to eke out a victory. As the results show, though, had the race not been crowded with 3 other challengers, it is likely he would have lost.

Rangel , Charles (i)	Dem	15,605	45%
Espaillat , Adriano	Dem	13,718	40%
Williams , Clyde	Dem	3,570	10%
Johnson , Joyce	Dem	1,112	3%
Schley , Craig	Dem	503	1%

Call it a hunch, but I’m assuming most of the people who voted for the three lesser primary challengers to Rangel would probably not have voted for him in a 2 person race with Espillat.

Despite sending one of the most corrupt Congressmen in history onto what will, barring a miracle, be his 22nd term, the Democrats did, as I said before, manage to avoid completely embarrassing themselves. In the open NY-08, they managed to avoid giving the nomination, which is, again, tantamount to election here, to Charles Barron a raving racist and anti-semite backed by unions, the retiring Congressman Edolphus Towns, and even David Duke (huh?). The victor Hakeem Jeffries’ crimes seem to be that he was not loony enough for the district and favored charter schools. Mr. Barron, meanwhile, was predictably entertaining in defeat:

Mr. Barron blamed his defeat on the Democratic establishment, “the white media,” “the Wall Street elite,” and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, among other entities.

He attacked his opponent, Assemblyman Hakeem S. Jeffries, for “shaking up and waking up John Lewis in Georgia to make robo-calls,” referring to the famed civil rights figure who recorded phone calls urging voters to support Mr. Jeffries.

And Mr. Barron borrowed a phrase from the Occupy Wall Street movement, portraying Mr. Jeffries, who had been supported by many of the city’s prominent Democratic leaders, as a representative of “the one percent.”

“When we launched the campaign, we knew we were going to be up against powerful opposition,” Mr. Barron said. “Never in the annals of the state has a candidate been up against the entire Democratic leadership.”

A former Black Panther and three-term City Councilman with a reputation for making outrageous remarks, Mr. Barron accused the media of trying to “assassinate us” during the race, and he blamed Mr. Jeffries for not defending him from the attacks, saying “it showed a lack of character.”

Well, you can’t win ‘em all, Mr. Barron, and apparently even heavily Democratic districts have standards. I don’t expect much from Jeffries, but Democrat or not, he is a better man than Barron. It’s a small victory for common sense, though Jeffries will probably never be our ally.

I can’t profess to be an “expert” on American Indian issues–there are so many tribes and cultures, there are so many differing opinions, and there is much I still have to learn–and I can’t claim to speak for American Indians, whether all or in part. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop me from being outraged over what Elizabeth Warren has done. To borrow from the late great Andrew Breitbart, it’s time for a little “righteous indignation.”

As Indian Country Today a major newspaper for American Indians, says:

If U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren was telling the truth back in May when she said that she listed herself as an American Indian minority in order “to find some more people like me” while a professor from 1986 to 1995, she seems to have altogether abandoned that mission. That’s the conclusion of a group of four Cherokee women who are traveling in Massachusetts this week with the intent of meeting with the candidate to talk about her unproven claims of Indian ancestry and her understanding of tribal issues. During their time in Boston, Warren has dodged them – much to the delight of local press pointing out the oddness of the situation – and her campaign has labeled them as out-of-staters cavorting with extremists.

“The out-of-state group in question is being promoted and supported by a right-wing extremist who is on the record supporting and contributing money to Scott Brown,” Warren spokeswoman Alethea Harney told The Boston Herald in an article published on June 20. “It is past time we moved on to the important issues facing middle-class families in Massachusetts — even if Scott Brown won’t.”

No, Mrs. Warren, this isn’t just some political ploy to take you down in the polls. In fact, if anything these people should be your political allies. As the same article notes:

Twila Barnes, a Cherokee genealogist who has found no evidence that Warren is Cherokee as she claims, is outraged by the campaign’s assertions about her group’s travels.

“We don’t need a John Smith,” Barnes told ICTMN on June 20 via telephone. “We are smart Native women who did this on our own, and we are plenty smart enough to figure out that Warren has been less than truthful and now doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to give us Native women that credit, yet she calls herself a Native woman. That’s just wrong.”

The Cherokee group of women, which include Barnes, Ellen Goss, and Ali Sacks from out of state, as well as Sky Davis, an Eastern Band citizen who lives in the state, denied they’ve received financial support from Jacobson, and they say they tend to lean left politically. They deny that the Brown campaign orchestrated their visit, and the women say they have partially paid for this visit through fundraising on Facebook and personal funding.

The blog Legal Insurrection has also done some great coverage. In fact, as they argue, Elizabeth Warren has been using Alinsky tactics against them. Apparently, they are just for usage against the Right any more. William A. Jacobson writes:

Note that the Warren campaign never has tried to delegitimize or contradict the actual evidence the Cherokee women had showing that Warren is not being truthful.  Instead, the Warren campaign attacked the messengers of the evidence.

Never to this date has the Warren campaign disputed the findings by Barnes and other Cherokee genealogists that Warren is not Cherokee.  Not once.

The purpose of the delegitimization was to isolate the Cherokee women, to suggest that if they received assistance of any type, they were illegitimate.

[...]

These were proud Cherokee women who came to Boston in good faith in the hope that Warren would do the right thing, meet with them, look at the evidence, and stop making false claims to be Cherokee.

And they were met with Alinsky Rule No. 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.

This is a classic example of what happens when members of a minority group speak up against the Left, even when said members otherwise agree with Liberal orthodoxy. We’ve seen the same kind of thing happen when Juan Williams made certain comments about Muslims on NPR and was fired for it. The party that claims to stand up for such marginal groups as minorities and the poor only does so when those groups conform to their ideology. Speak up and you are shouted down will be targeted by the same tactics they use against the right. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Juan Williams or an Allen West. Dissent is heresy, and heresy is anathema.

Contrary to Elizabeth Warren’s assertions, these are legitimate questions of character. You have not just been accused, with legitimate evidence to support it, of lying about your past, you have been accused of manufacturing an identity in another culture in order to “fit in” and advance your own interests. It is an outrage both that she has made these assertions and that she will not confront a group of Cherokees who want answers from her. Someone who was truly concerned with Native opinions would drop the “pawns of a right-wing extremist” rhetoric and take some time out of her busy campaign schedule to meet with them, especially since they might normally be her allies. As the Indian Country Today article notes:

Some Natives feel Warren is aggravating an already sensitive situation by having her campaign say that this is a non-issue because many Indians feel her self-identification is a crucial issue that speaks to her character and to how she understands Indian issues, which would be an important part of her job if elected to Congress.

“Elizabeth Warren has avoided taking responsibility for her false ethnic claims by avoiding a group of Cherokee women who traveled hundreds of miles just to spend time with her,” says David Cornsilk, a United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians citizen, who has created a Facebook group drawing attention to the Warren controversy. “Warren claimed she wanted to meet others like herself while claiming to be a Cherokee, yet when presented with the chance to actually talk to four authentic Cherokee women representing membership in all three of the federally recognized Cherokee tribes; she flees like a scared rabbit.”

Indian culture is apparently a plaything for Mrs. Warren. She ought to have more respect than that, but instead she has the audacity to play the victim. As Legal Insurrection notes:

Warren’s behavior has been disreputable and should be disqualifying.  Warren talks a good game about fighting for the downtrodden at the same time that she steps on the backs of generations of Cherokees.

The way Warren has treated these Cherokee women is the way a schoolyard bully treats physically weaker classmates.

Yet miraculously and in a myriad of ways Warren always portrays herself as a victim.  Warren tells stories about being Cherokee, yet somehow is the victim when Cherokees demand she tell the truth.

Mrs. Warren, Indian heritage isn’t something you claim because you want to be like “them”–whatever the Indians in your head may look like. We’ve seen enough of that throughout our nation’s history. Even in recent decades, we have all sorts of New Age “Indian Tribes” constituted of various people of non-Native descent trying to construct a new identity for themselves based upon the images of Indians that existed in their heads.

Furthermore, Indian heritage isn’t something you claim to get special treatment or any similar cynical and self-serving reason. Furthermore, it isn’t something you claim just because your mother told you so. You have to be willing to do the actual research. When you do go looking, you do it respectfully and out of an interest for filling out the gaps in your own heritage.

There are two ways used by tribes to determine if you are eligible for membership. The first is the descent system, which the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma uses. All it requires is that you be able to trace your ancestry to someone on the Dawes Rolls, you are eligible for membership.

The other method is the blood method, which relies on your blood quantum (the degree of Indian blood you have). If your great-grandmother was a full blooded American Indian and married a non-Indian, your grandmother would be half Indian blood. If she married another non-Indian, your mother would be one-quarter Indian blood. If she too married a non-Indian, you would be one-eighth Indian blood, meaning you’d have a one-eighth Indian blood quantum.

There are long established ways of verifying the degree of Indian blood you have. The most common is called the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB), and you cannot be admitted into many tribes without it (other tribes that utilize blood quantum use similar methods). There is an application for it here at the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ website (pdf), and the Choctaw Nation has a nice list of FAQs (pdf) about it at their website (as well as information pertinent to those trying to join the tribe).

Each tribe has its own standards for enrolling new members. For example, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, based in North Carolina, has the following requirements:

• Have an ancestor listed on the Baker Roll of 1924
• 1/16 Eastern Cherokee blood quantum (be at least 1/16 Cherokee by descent)
• Be under 18 years of age

And each tribe also has a website providing the necessary advice and information for applying for enrollment. Of the tribes I’ve mentioned in this post, here are the pages for the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation, and I’ve already provided the link for the Hopi Nation.

Elizabeth Warren could have tried to verify her claims through the acceptable legal means for the relevant tribe, but she has apparently not. It can be time consuming, but it’s not especially difficult for most people, as long as they can identify their biological parents. It’s simple: either you meet the requirements or you do not. It might take a little genealogical research, but Indian tribes are typically very willing to assist people in their search.

Regrettably for those of us in possession of common sense and a well-developed conscience, our Elizabeth Warren story doesn’t end there. Despite the fact that she has yet to win an election for anything, she is already being touted as a frontrunner for 2016. The Atlantic reports:

Confirming the impression I’d gleaned from my conversations with activists and organizers, Warren ran away with the 2016 straw poll conducted at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, winning 32 percent of the vote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 27 percent. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who spoke at the conference and whose brand of gravelly-voiced populism is a perpetual hit with this crowd, was third with 16 percent; the other names on the ballot, all polling in single digits, were New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Vice President Joe Biden, and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner.

As it stands now, an Elizabeth Warren campaign for President, to say nothing of her actually winning the spot (which I doubt she will), would be a humongous slap in the face to American Indians if she cannot verify her claims. It is already bad enough that she is still in the Massachusetts Senate race. As The Atlantic notes, though, it is a sign of desperation over the size of their “farm team” that the Democrats are even considering her for the Presidency to begin with.

Simply put, Elizabeth Warren either needs to prove her ancestry, or admit that she is a phony and a fraud. If she is the latter–and I personally suspect she is–she ought to drop out of the Massachusetts Senate race out of respect for the Senate, the standards to which we ought to hold our elected officials and candidates, and American Indians everywhere. At the very least, she ought to meet with those Cherokee women. She owes it to Cherokees and other Indians everywhere.

Imagine if it had been a Republican making these claims. He or she would be justly banished from the political scene.

The partisan hack in me would like to remind you to donate to Senator Scott Brown. We can keep this seat away from Elizabeth Warren. Whether she’s Indian or not, her ideas for America are dangerous enough. Fortunately, Massachusetts still isn’t fully buying what she’s selling.

Having discussed in Part I of my series the view of Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution‘s “natural born citizen” requirement in the days of the early republic, and provided a digression on the role English common law played in American law, it is now time to look at how the clause was viewed in the latter half of the 19th century. A particular emphasis will be placed upon the 14th amendment, but as the title shows, the timeline of topics discussed makes it clear I swill be discussing more than just that. Since this time period seems to be a favorite of many birthers, I’m going to have to pay special attention to these topics. At the same time, in the interests of not making this a book length post, I will have to balance the need for some brevity as well.

Also, I apologize for such a great delay between Part I (and the digression) and this post. As you can probably tell, assembling a post like this takes a lot of research, and that can take a while. I believe I actually began Part I in April, but only returned to finish it in mid-May. Regardless, this part is finally done after sitting “in the hopper” for almost a month.

What we have learned thus far in our study is that early legal minds, including James Madison himself, all believed that a “natural born citizen” was a person born in this country to parents, regardless of whether they were citizens or not, provided that they owed the country allegiance, which would exclude foreign ministers, ambassadors, similar agents of other nations acting on behalf of their sovereign, American Indians (at the time), and enemies engaged in hostilities on a nation’s soil. This allegiance could be temporary or permanent, but it had to be present. As James Madison said:

It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth however derives its force sometimes from place and sometimes from parentage, but in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States; it will therefore be unnecessary to investigate any other.

This statement meshes nicely with William Blackstone’s definition of a “natural born subject” in his Commentaries:

Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it. Allegiance is the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject. The thing itself, or substantial part of it, is founded in reason and the nature of government; the name and the form are derived to us from our Gothic ancestors.

Insofar as the courts are concerned, they upheld Madison’s view of citizenship. As Vice Chancellor Lewis Sandford stated in Lynch v. Clarke:

The only standard which then existed [when the Constitution was written],of a natural born citizen, was the rule of common law, and no different standard has been adopted since. Suppose a person should be elected president who was native born, but of alien parents; could there be any reasonable doubt that he was eligible under the Constitution? I think not. The position would be decisive in his favor, that by the rule of the common law, in force when the Constitution was adopted, he is a citizen.

All of this is the Cliff’s Notes version of my statements in preceding two posts, so if you want a more detailed exposition of these points of view, I suggest you refer back to them. Now, having recapped what I have previously said, let us dive into the latter half of the 19th century.

We begin by looking at the following passage from Secretary of State William Learned Marcy, who served under President Franklin Pierce for the duration of the latter’s administration. In 1854, he wrote the following in a letter to the United States’ Minister to France John Y. Mason:

In reply to the inquiry which is made by you…whether “the children of foreign parents born in the United States, but brought to the country of which the father is a subject, and continuing to reside within the jurisdiction of their father’s country, are entitled to protection as citizens of the United States,” I have to observe that it is presumed that, according to the common law, any person born in the United States, unless he be born in one of the foreign legations therein, may be considered a citizen thereof until he formally renounces his citizenship. There is not, however any United States statute containing a provision upon this subject, nor, so far as I am aware, has there been any judicial decision in regard to it.

We also find some quotations from President Lincoln’s Attorney General Edward Bates. In a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, he said:

And our constitution, in speaking of natural born citizens, uses no affirmative language to make them such, but only recognizes and reaffirms the universal principle, common to all nations, and as old as political society, that the people born in a country do constitute the nation, and, as individuals, are natural members of the body politic.

If this be a true principle, and I do not doubt it, it follows that every person born in the country is, at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen; and he who would deny it must take upon himself the burden of proving some great disfranchisement strong enough to override the ” natural born’‘ right as recognized by the Constitution in terms the most simple and comprehensive, and without any reference to race or color, or any other accidental circumstance.

This is not all he had to say on the matter either. In an opinion from the same year to Secretary of State Edwin Stanton, he said (bolding mine, italics are in the original):

I am quite clear in the opinion that children born in the United States of alien parents, who have never been naturalized, are native-born citizens of the United States, and, of course, do not require the formality of naturalization to entitle them to the rights and privileges of such citizenship. I might sustain this opinion by a reference to the well-settled principle of the common law of England on this subject; to the writings of many of the earlier and later commentators on our Constitution and laws; to the familiar practice and usage of the country in the exercise of the ordinary rights and duties of citizenship; to the liberal policy of our government in extending and recognizing these rights, and enforcing these duties; and lastly to the dicta and decisions of many of our national and state tribunals. But all this has been well done by Assistant Vice Chancellor Sandford, in the case of Lynch vs. Clarke, and I forbear. I refer to his opinion for a full and clear statement of the principle, and of the reasons and authorities for its support.

Now, you will note that I have bolded “Lynch vs. Clarke”. I have done this to show the case’s influence. It did not exist in a vacuum, emerging out of nowhere from a single state’s court and never to be heard from again. It was influential, and as we shall later see just like we have here, it has been cited on matters of citizenship.

Before we confront the elephant in the room that is the 14th Amendment, let’s take a look at its precursor, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Birthers quote this particular section of the act to bolster their claims:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States…

They are also fond of quoting on of the authors of the act, Representative John Bingham, when he said during the debate over the bill:

Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen; but, sir, I may be allowed to say further that I deny that the Congress of the United States ever had the power, or color of power to say that any man born within the jurisdiction of the United States, not owing a foreign allegiance, is not and shall not be a citizen of the United States. Citizenship is his birthright and neither the Congress nor the States can justly or lawfully take it from him.

But they neglect to point out that he had previously said this, in 1862, on the subject of natural born citizenship that would shed more light on his views (bolding mine, italics in the original):

The Constitution leaves no room for doubt upon this subject. The words ‘natural born citizen of the United states’ appear in it, and the other provision appears in it that, “Congress shall have power to pass a uniform system of naturalization.” To naturalize a person is to admit him to citizenship. Who are natural born citizens but those born within the Republic? Those born within the Republic, whether black or white, are citizens by birth–natural born citizens.

Before moving on in our examination, I’d like to give a quote from President Andrew Johnson’s message vetoing the bill (which Congress overrode):

By the first section of the bill all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are declared to be citizens of the United States. This provision comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color. Negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood. Every individual of these races born in the United States is by the bill made a citizen of the United States. It does not purport to declare or confer any other right of citizenship than Federal citizenship. It does not purport to give these classes of persons any status as citizens of States, except that which may result from their status as citizens of the United States.

So, we can tell from this that President Johnson certainly understood what this bill would do. Birthers, apparently, cannot.

And now we get to the real elephant in the room, the 14th Amendment, which passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified by 1868. Section 1 is the locus of the debate. It reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Birthers contend that this excludes the children born of non-citizens, but does it really? They are fond of quoting Representative Bingham, again, who said:

I find no fault with the introductory clause [of the bill that would become the 14th Amendment], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen…

–Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st session, pg. 1291

In addition to the problems they’d have squaring it with his 1862 remarks, it is important to note that no one in the same Congress, at least among those who spoke up, shared his opinions. The quotes I provided above in the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1866 ought to prove that well enough, but here are some additional ones relating to this Amendment specifically:

Blackstone says:

“The first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the Crown of England; that is with in the ligeance, or, as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens are such as are born out of it.”–Sherwood’s Blackstone, vol. 1, p. 304.

The principle here laid down applies to this country as well as to England. It makes a man a subject in England, and a citizen here, and is, as Blackstone declares, “founded in reason and the nature of government.”

The English law made no distinction on account of race or color in declaring that all persons born within its jurisdiction are natural born subjects…This law bound the colonies before the Revolution, and was not changed afterwards…

–Rep. James Falconer Wilson, House Judiciary Committee Chair, pg. 1116

[T]he question of citizenship has been so fully discussed in this body as to not need any further elucidation, in my opinion. This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtual of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens,* who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.

–Sen. Jacob Howard, author of the amendment’s citizenship clause, pg. 2890

The asterisk is my addition. There are some birthers out there who quote this selection and with the word “or” where the asterisk is. This word does not exist in the original copy in the Congressional Globe. I do not know how they came to think that word was there, but I wouldn’t put them above adding it themselves.

Anyways, Sen. Howard’s remarks were well understood by his fellow Senators, such as this remark by Senator George Williams of Oregon:

In one sense, all persons born within the geographical limits of the United States are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, but they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in every sense. Take the child of the ambassador. In one sense, that child born in the United States is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, because if that child commits the crime of murder, or commits any other crime against the laws of the country, to a certain extent he is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, but not in every respect; and so with these Indians. All persons living within a judicial district may be said, in one sense, to be subject to the jurisdiction of the court in that district, but they are not in every sense subject to the jurisdiction of that court until they are brought, by proper process, within the reach of the power of the court. I understand the words here, “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” to mean fully and completely subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. if there was any doubt to the meaning of those words, I think that doubt is entirely removed and explained by the words in the subsequent section; and believing that, in any court or by any intelligent person, these two sections would be construed not to include Indians not taxed…

–pg. 2897

And Mr. James Conness of California is also of like mind:

The proposition before us…relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision into the fundamental instrument of the nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.

–pg. 2891

They are also like to quote Senator Lyman Trumbull in the debates over the same bill, where he said (in the first column, for those checking):

The provision is, that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That means “subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.”…What do we mean by “complete jurisdiction thereof?” Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.

First of all, this quote was given in the context of whether this amendment applied to Indians not taxed. In fact, Trumbull continues:

Can you sue a Navajoe [sic] Indian in court? Are they in any sense subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? By no means. We make treaties with them, and therefore they are not subject to our jurisdiction. If they were, we wouldn’t make treaties with them…

And shortly thereafter:

If they are there and within the jurisdiction of Colorado, they ought to be citizens; that is all that is proposed…It is only those persons who come completely within our jurisdiction, who are subject to our laws, that we think of making citizens; and there can be no objection to the proposition that such persons should be citizens.

They also ignore his other statements, given during the debate over the bill and elsewhere during his Senate career. Since there are a few, I will give the page with each quote (all are from the 39th Congress in 1866, unless otherwise noted).

If there were any question about it, it would be settled by the passage of a law declaring all persons born in the United States to be citizens thereof. That this bill proposes to do.

–pg. 475

Mr. COWAN. I will ask whether it will not have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?

Mr. TRUMBULL. Undoubetdly.

[...]

Mr. TRUMBULL. I should like to inquire of my friend from Pennsylvania, if the children of Chinese now born in this country are not citizens?

Mr. COWAN. I think not.

Mr. TRUMBULL. I understand that under the naturalization laws the children who are born here of parents who have not been naturalized are citizens. That is the law, as I understand it, at the present time. Is not the child born in this country of German parents a citizen? I am afraid we have got very few citizens in some of the counties of good old Pennsylvania if the children born of German parents are not citizens.

–pg. 498

I have already said that in my opinion birth entitles a person to citizenship, that every free-born person in this land is, by virtue of being born here, a citizen of the United States.

–pg. 600

By the terms of the Constitution he must have been a citizen of the United States for nine years before he could take a seat here, and seven years before he could take a seat in the other House; and, in order to be President of the United States, a person must be a native-born citizen.

It is the common law of this country, and of all countries, and it was unnecessary to incorporate it in the Constitution, that a person is a citizen of the country in which he is born. That had been frequently decided in the United States. It has been acted upon by the executive department of the Government in protecting the rights of native-born persons of this country as citizens of the United States. It has been held in the judicial tribunals of the country that persons born in the United States were citizens of the United States. I read from Paschal’s Annotated Constitution, note 274:

“All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country as well as of England. There are two exceptions, and only two, to the universality of its application. The children of ambassadors are, in theory, born in the allegiance of the powers the ambassadors represent, and slaves, in legal contemplation, are property, and not persons.”*

–(42nd. Congress, 1872) pg. 575

*=Actually, if you look at the quote on the Congressional Globe, this specific note from Paschal’s Annotated Constitution cites Lynch v. Clarke as one of the cases supporting this statement.

James Ho, who would become Ted Cruz’s successor as Texas’ Solicitor General, had this to say about the clause in 2007 a testimony before the Texas legislature on whether birthright citizenship ought to be repealed. He says:

I would submit that the plain meaning of “subject to jurisdiction” is rather straightforward. It simply means that one must have a duty to obey U.S. law. When a person is “subject to the jurisdiction” of a court of law, that person is required to obey the orders of that court. When a company is “subject to the jurisdiction” of a government agency, that company is required to obey the regulations promulgated by that agency. The meaning of the phrase is simple: One is “subject to the jurisdiction” of another whenever one is obliged to obey the laws of another. Simply put, the test is obedience, not allegiance.

It is also worth observing that, if the drafters had intended to require allegiance, rather than obedience, they could have said so. How easy it would have been for them to state explicitly that only children born to citizens are guaranteed birthright citizenship—with a simple proviso to address the descendants of slaves. But instead, they chose the language of jurisdiction, not citizenship. And that decision deserves respect.

Of course, the phrase “subject to jurisdiction” must mean something. Otherwise, it would serve no purpose. Under the interpretation I put forth, it does serve a purpose. The “jurisdiction” requirement excludes only those individuals who are not required to obey U.S. law. This concept—like much of early U.S. law—derives from English common law. Under the common law, neither foreign diplomats nor enemy soldiers are legally required to obey our law. They enjoy diplomatic immunity or combatant immunity from our laws. As a result, their U.S.-born offspring are not entitled to birthright citizenship.

This understanding is also confirmed by the congressional debates surrounding the Fourteenth Amendment. Members of the 39th Congress debated the wisdom of guaranteeing birthright citizenship—but no one disputed the amendment’s meaning. In fact, opponents of the amendment conceded—indeed, they warned—that the language of the Citizenship Clause would guarantee citizenship to the children of those who “owe [the United States] no allegiance.” And supporters of the amendment agreed that only members of Indian tribes, ambassadors, foreign ministers and others who are not “subject to [our laws]” would fall outside the guarantee of birthright citizenship.

The first major case that birthers like to discuss in the context of the “natural born citizen” clause is Minor v. Happernett. Since this post is already getting long, I will deal with this briefly here and expand on it in the comments if necessary. Law professor Joel Hylton gives what should be the definitive debunking of why this is a bad idea, and this is one reason why I am not going to pay much attention to it in this post. He says (in the comments, but the article itself–which was written by him–is worth a read on Chester Arthur’s case for natural born citizenship):

To cite Minor v. Happersett as the definitive statement of the meaning of the phrase “natural born citizen” is to exhibit an unfortunate lack of understanding of the Supreme Court’s 1874 decision in that case.

The Minor case involved Virginia Louisa Minor’s constitutional challenge to the Missouri law that limited voting to adult males. Her unsuccessful argument was that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws prohibited the state of Missouri from denying women the right to vote.

Ms. Minor was born in Caroline County, Virginia on March 27, 1824. Both of her parents were born in Virginia in the 1790?s, and all of her grandparents had been born in the Virginia colony. (One of her grandmothers was a cousin of President James Madison.) Consequently,the issue of whether or not she was a national born citizen had nothing to do with the case.

To latch on the comments made by Chief Justice Waite in passing and to claim that those comments are somehow definitive is simply absurd. Moreover, as Prof. Fallone [sic] pointed out in an earlier comment, Waite specifically stated that it was not necessary to define natural born citizen to resolve the case at hand.

That comment by Edward Fallon, himself a law professor as well, that Hylton references says the following (bolding mine, italics his):

The case of Minor v. Happersett does NOT condition the acquisition of jus soli citizenship on the U.S. citizenship of both parents:

“The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.”

Looking at the full context given there ought to defeat any attempts by birthers to read their own agendas into the case. Remember, this case did not exist in a vacuum. It needs to be placed into the larger context of U.S. legal history as well. To ignore what people before and after have opined on the subject does a disrespect to our legal system, especially since it is so based upon precedent. This case is not, so to speak, a non sequitur in U.S. legal history. At best, this case gives us an inconclusive response on the issue of what the definition of “natural born citizen” is. For birthers, who pride themselves on relying on the original intent of the Constitution and laws, to ignore the fact that this case was never intended to decided the definition of who was and wasn’t a natural born citizen belies both their own agenda and their failure to practice reading comprehension. To borrow some words from Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s majority opinion, resort must be had elsewhere to come to a conclusive definition of what a “natural born citizen”.

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, from 1898, is probably the single most important case in determining the definition of a “natural born citizen”. Because of this, I’m going to quote this opinion at length. The full text of the ruling is here at Justia, and here are the most relevant parts. Since I’m going to quote it at length, I’m bolding the most important parts for those who want the digest version. So, here’s what it says.

The Constitution of the United States, as originally adopted, uses the words “citizen of the United States,” and “natural-born citizen of the United States.” By the original Constitution, every representative in Congress is required to have been “seven years a citizen of the United States,” and every Senator to have been “nine years a citizen of the United States.” and “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President.” The Fourteenth Article of Amendment, besides declaring that

“all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,”

also declares that

“no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

And the Fifteenth Article of Amendment declares that

“the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

[...]

In Minor v. Happersett, Chief Justice Waite, when construing, in behalf of the court, the very provision of the Fourteenth Amendment now in question, said: “The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that.” And he proceeded to resort to the common law as an aid in the construction of this provision. 21 Wall. 88 U. S. 167.

In Smith v. Alabama, Mr. Justice Matthews, delivering the judgment of the court, said:

“There is no common law of the United States, in the sense of a national customary law, distinct from the common law of England as adopted by the several States each for itself, applied as its local law, and subject to such alteration as may be provided by its own statutes. . . . There is, however, one clear exception to the statement that there is no national common law. The interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is necessarily influenced by the fact that its provisions are framed in the language of the English common law, and are to be read in the light of its history.”

124 U.S. 124 U. S. 478.

I would like to pause here and note that Smith v. Alabama is another important case when discussing the qualifications for natural born citizenship. However, I did not devote a section here to it for the sake of brevity. This quote provided here is the “money quote” from the case, though. Anyways, continuing on:

The fundamental principle of the common law with regard to English nationality was birth within the allegiance, also called “ligealty,” “obedience,” “faith,” or “power” of the King. The principle embraced all persons born within the King’s allegiance and subject to his protection. Such allegiance and protection were mutual — as expressed in the maxim protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem – and were not restricted to natural-born subjects and naturalized subjects, or to those who had taken an oath of allegiance, but were predicable of aliens in amity so long as they were within the kingdom. Children, born in England, of such aliens were therefore natural-born subjects. But the children, born within the realm, of foreign ambassadors, or the children of alien enemies, born during and within their hostile occupation of part of the King’s dominions, were not natural-born subjects because not born within the allegiance, the obedience, or the power, or, as would be said at this day, within the jurisdiction, of the King.

[...]

The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions: the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Rep. 6a, ”strong enough to make a natural subject, for if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject;” and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, “if born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen, and by operation of the same principle.” It can hardly be denied that an alien is completely subject to the political jurisdiction of the country in which he resides — seeing that, as said by Mr. Webster, when Secretary of State, in his Report to the President on Thrasher’s Case in 1851, and since repeated by this court,

“independently of a residence with intention to continue such residence; independently of any domiciliation; independently of the taking of any oath of allegiance or of renouncing any former allegiance, it is well known that, by the public law, an alien, or a stranger

[...]

born, for so long a time as he continues within the dominions of a foreign government, owes obedience to the laws of that government, and may be punished for treason, or other crimes, as a native-born subject might be, unless his case is varied by some treaty stipulations.”

And here is an important part of the case taking the Vattel adherents head on:

It was contended by one of the learned counsel for the United States that the rule of the Roman law, by which the citizenship of the child followed that of the parent, was the true rule of international law, as now recognized in most civilized countries, and had superseded the rule of the common law, depending on birth within the realm, originally founded on feudal considerations.

But at the time of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States in 1789, and long before, it would seem to have been the rule in Europe generally, as it certainly was in France, that, as said by Pothier, “citizens, true and native-born citizens, are those who are born within the extent of the dominion of France,” and

“mere birth within the realm gives the rights of a native-born citizen, independently of the origin of the father or mother, and of their domicil;”

and children born in a foreign country, of a French father who had not established his domicil there nor given up the intention of returning, were also deemed Frenchmen, as Laurent says, by “a favor, a sort of fiction,” and Calvo, “by a sort of fiction of exterritoriality, considered as born in France, and therefore invested with French nationality.” Pothier Trait des Personnes, pt. 1, tit. 2, sect. 1, nos. 43, 45; Walsh-Serrant v. Walsh-Serrant, (1802) 3 Journal du Palais, 384; S.C., S. Merlin, Jurisprudence, (5th ed.) Domicile, § 13; Prefet du Nord v. Lebeau, (1862) Journal du Palais, 1863, 312 and note; 1 Laurent Droit Civil, no. 321; 2 Calvo Droit International, (5th ed.) § 542; Cockburn on Nationality, 13, 14; Hall’s International Law, (4th ed.) § 68. The general principle of citizenship by birth within French territory prevailed until after the French Revolution, and was affirmed in successive constitutions from the one adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1791 to that of the French Republic in 1799. Constitutions et Chartes, (ed. 1830) pp. 100, 136, 148, 186.

Also, they sum up the same arguments from the debates over the 14th Amendment that I’ve already cited earlier, but I will provide them again since the justices give us some of their perspective as well (the [...] bits in this section are to exclude the page numbers that make it into Justia’s transcription):

During the debates in the Senate in January and February, 1866, upon the Civil Rights Bill, Mr. Trumbull, the chairman of the committee which reported the bill, moved to amend the first sentence thereof so as to read,

“All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States, without distinction of color.”

Mr. Cowan, of Pennsylvania, asked, “Whether it will not have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?” Mr. Trumbull answered, “Undoubtedly,” and asked, “is not the child born in this country of German parents a citizen?” Mr. Cowan replied, “The children of German parents are citizens; but Germans are not Chinese.” Mr. Trumbull rejoined: “The law makes no such distinction, and the child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European.” Mr. Reverdy Johnson suggested that the words, “without distinction of color,” should be omitted as unnecessary, and said:

“The amendment, as it stands, is that all persons born in the United States, and not subject to a foreign power, shall, by virtue of birth, be citizens. To that I am willing to consent,

[...]

and that comprehends all persons, without any reference to race or color, who may be so born.”

And Mr. Trumbull agreed that striking out those words would make no difference in the meaning, but thought it better that they should be retained to remove all possible doubt. Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st sess. pt. 1, pp. 498, 573, 574.

The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, as originally framed by the House of Representatives, lacked the opening sentence. When it came before the Senate in May, 1866, Mr. Howard, of Michigan, moved to amend by prefixing the sentence in its present form (less the words “or naturalized”), and reading,

“All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State herein they reside.”

Mr. Cowan objected upon the ground that the Mongolian race ought to be excluded, and said:

“Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? . . . I do not know how my honorable friend from California looks upon Chinese, but I do know how some of his fellow citizens regard them. I have no doubt that now they are useful, and I have no doubt that, within proper restraints, allowing that State and the other Pacific States to manage them as they may see fit, they may be useful; but I would not tie their hands by the Constitution of the United States so as to prevent them hereafter from dealing with them as in their wisdom they see fit.”

Mr. Conness, of California, replied:

“The proposition before us relates simply, in that respect, to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision in the fundamental instrument of the Nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States. . . . We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this Constitutional Amendment that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of

[...]

the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”

Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st sess. pt. 4, pp. 2890-2892. It does not appear to have been suggested in either House of Congress that children born in the United States of Chinese parents would not come within the terms and effect of the leading sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Doubtless, the intention of the Congress which framed and of the States which adopted this Amendment of the Constitution must be sought in the words of the Amendment, and the debates in Congress are not admissible as evidence to control the meaning of those words. But the statements above quoted are valuable as contemporaneous opinions of jurists and statesmen upon the legal meaning of the words themselves, and are, at the least, interesting as showing that the application of the Amendment to the Chinese race was considered, and not overlooked.

So, there you have it. The United States v. Wong Kim Ark case reaffirms the definition of natural born citizenship that has prevailed, as we’ve seen here and in my previous posts, throughout our nation’s history. As I have also proven here, those who quote Minor v. Happersnett clearly have no idea of the context of the case. The 14th Amendment, despite all of the birthers’ protestations, reaffirms that anyone born on our soil to people who are not untaxed Indians, children of ambassadors, enemies stationed on our soil, or any of the other aforementioned exceptions, are natural-born citizens–including those of aliens only temporarily living here. Pre-14th Amendment legal minds within the scope of this post’s timeline (roughly 1850-1900), also upheld this definition, creating a consistent strain of thought and canon of interpretation that dates all the way back to William Blackstone, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. To my understanding and based upon my research, there is not a single United States court case from 1760 to 1900 that cited de Vattel’s view of natural born citizenship in the majority opinion.

Additionally, in my studies, I have found the arguments put forward by the various birthers, including but not limited to Orly Taitz, Mario Apuzzo, and Leo Donofrio, are fraught with misinterpretations, misquotes, quotes taken out of context, and generally shoddy scholarship that demonstrates a lack of understanding of United States legal thought. I suspect that their method consists of grasping at whatever little quote they can, regardless of the context, and insisting it says what they say it does. Unfortunately for them, a modicum of applied research would disprove their arguments. They are a disgrace to the legal profession, a profession which has more than its share of disgraces, and to Constitutional law, and they are rightfully treated as pariahs. We on the Right are better than this, and liberty-mined Constitutional conservatives are right to reject them utterly. I would pull a William Buckley and kick them out of the conservative movement if I could. They do us no favors. I am not exactly excited to be defending the likes of Barack Obama (though I am happy to defend people like Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, etc.), but a corrective to their false narratives has to be supplied. I understand very well that I might not persuade a single birther, but if I can keep those on the fence from falling away and bolstering those of us who are sure of our beliefs that the birthers are wrong, I will be satisfied.

Part III is going to be up at some point, hopefully soon. It will deal with interpretations of the phrase “natural born citizen” from 1900 up until the present day. There will also be another post up to highlight an interesting peculiarity about the people who cite Vattel’s definition of citizenship in American history.

I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers to the extent the workers were helped and the illegal alien workers were removed. The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking, rampant in the strikes of the last 30 years. Lawbreaking begets more lawbreaking, and when these illegal aliens come in to break a strike they have to be harbored; they have to be transported; and labor contractors have to be used to direct them and supervise them.

What about the other laws? What about the contributions the employers have to make to social security and unemployment insurance? How are those contributions made? These men do not have social security numbers. They do not live here; they are just here for a little while to break the strike.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service steadfastly refuses to enforce the law; not only that, but then they get into a dispute with us because we call their shortcomings to their attention We accuse them of looking the other way while the strike is being broken and then they have a way of taking punitive action against us and our people.

Was this some right-wing anti-immgration zealot? A Tom Tancredo type? No, it was Cesar Chavez, the famous UFW union organizer and Mr. “Si Se Puede” himself, testifying before Congress in 1979. He also worked with Dolores Heurta, the socialist who President Obama recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s sort of strange that you find him celebrated as such a darling of the Reconquista, La Raza, and Mexican pride, as he probably would have found common cause with the Minutemen.

All of this just goes to underscore that the concerns over how 800,000 newly legalized young immigrants will affect the unemployment situation in this country. Since the vast majority of these are Hispanics, it’s important to note that the current unemployment rate for Hispanic teens 16-19 was 30.4%, as of May, and the numbers for Hispanic men and women 20 and older aren’t great either at 9.6 and 9.2 percent respectively. These numbers are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I suspect if they measured from 20-30 years old specifically, the numbers there would be much worse than 9 or 10 percent.

I bring this up because that’s the election year we ought to be looking to as we head toward November. We might not think of Mitt Romney as the next Ronald Reagan, but that doesn’t make the stakes any less high or the incumbent any less incompetent.

So, since I’m such a speechophile, I’m taking Ronald Reagan’s epic 1980 Republican nomination acceptance speech and updating to the best of my ability to fit our own time. In fact, the original title was “The More Things HopeandChange, the More they Stay the Same” because so much of the speech was still relevant to our day as-is.

For the most part, I’ve essentially stuck to revising or removing references in the speech, but there are a couple of wholly new parts that I’ve had to add.

For those interested, here’s the full of the original speech on Youtube:

Here’s the original text via the American Presidency Project. For my revision, I am operating under the presumption that the Supreme Court throws out all of Obamacare (which it may or may not, but the mandate should be toast). Furthermore, I am not going to speculate on who the Vice President will be, so I have just put in the generic name “John Smith”.

Now, having said that, here’s what I’ve done:

——————————————-

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice President to be, this convention, my fellow citizens of this great nation:

With a deep awareness of the responsibility conferred by your trust, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. I do so with deep gratitude, and I think also I might interject on behalf of all of us, our thanks to Tampa and the people of Florida and to this city for the warm hospitality they have shown. And I thank you for your wholehearted response to my recommendation in regard to [John Smith] as a candidate for vice president.

I am very proud of our party tonight. This convention has shown to all America a party united, with positive programs for solving the nation’s problems; a party ready to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.

More than anything else, I want my candidacy to unify our country; to renew the American spirit and sense of purpose. I want to carry our message to every American, regardless of party affiliation, who is a member of this community of shared values.

Never before in our history have Americans been called upon to face three grave threats to our very existence, any one of which could destroy us. We face a disintegrating economy, a weakened defense and an energy policy based on the sharing of scarcity.

The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership–in the White House and in Congress–for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us. They tell us they have done the most that humanly could be done. They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.

My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves. Those who believe we can have no business leading the nation.

I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose. We have come together here because the American people deserve better from those to whom they entrust our nation’s highest offices, and we stand united in our resolve to do something about it.

We need rebirth of the American tradition of leadership at every level of government and in private life as well. The United States of America is unique in world history because it has a genius for leaders–many leaders–on many levels.

As President, Mr. Obama has advocated for what Ronald Reagan called a “Trust me” government. “Trust me” government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs–in the people. The responsibility to live up to that trust is where it belongs, in their elected leaders. That kind of relationship, between the people and their elected leaders, is a special kind of compact.

Remember, as Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Three hundred and sixty years ago, in 1620, a group of families dared to cross a mighty ocean to build a future for themselves in a new world. When they arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, they formed what they called a “compact”; an agreement among themselves to build a community and abide by its laws.

The single act–the voluntary binding together of free people to live under the law–set the pattern for what was to come.

A century and a half later, the descendants of those people pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to found this nation. Some forfeited their fortunes and their lives; none sacrificed honor.

Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln called upon the people of all America to renew their dedication and their commitment to a government of, for and by the people.

Isn’t it once again time to renew our compact of freedom; to pledge to each other all that is best in our lives; all that gives meaning to them–for the sake of this, our beloved and blessed land?

Together, let us make this a new beginning. Let us make a commitment to care for the needy; to teach our children the values and the virtues handed down to us by our families; to have the courage to defend those values and the willingness to sacrifice for them.

Let us pledge to restore, in our time, the American spirit of voluntary service, of cooperation, of private and community initiative; a spirit that flows like a deep and mighty river through the history of our nation.

As your nominee, I pledge to restore to the federal government the capacity to do the people’s work without dominating their lives. I pledge to you a government that will not only work well, but wisely; its ability to act tempered by prudence and its willingness to do good balanced by the knowledge that government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

The first Republican president once said, “While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.”

If Mr. Lincoln could see what’s happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. But, with the virtues that our legacy as a free people and with the vigilance that sustains liberty, we still have time to use our renewed compact to overcome the injuries that have been done to America these past three-and-a-half years.

First, we must overcome something the present administration has cooked up: a new and altogether indigestible economic stew, one part high unemployment, one part recession, one part runaway taxes, one party deficit spending and seasoned by an energy crisis. It’s an economic stew that has turned the national stomach.

Ours are not problems of abstract economic theory. Those are problems of flesh and blood; problems that cause pain and destroy the moral fiber of real people who should not suffer the further indignity of being told by the government that it is all somehow their fault.

High taxes, we are told, are somehow good for us, as if, when government spends our money it isn’t inflationary, but when we spend it, it is.

Those who preside over this energy crisis tell us to use less, so that we will run out of oil, gasoline, and natural gas a little more slowly. Conservation is desirable, of course, for we must not waste energy. But conservation is not the sole answer to our energy needs.

America must get to work producing more energy. The Republican program for solving economic problems is based on growth and productivity.

In particular, we cannot continue to depend so much on foreign sources for our oil. We must set ourselves on the road towards energy independence. Large amounts of oil, and also natural gas, lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.

Coal offers great potential. So does nuclear energy produced under rigorous safety standards. It could supply electricity for thousands of industries and millions of jobs and homes. It must not be thwarted by a tiny minority opposed to economic growth which often finds friendly ears in regulatory agencies for its obstructionist campaigns.

Make no mistake. We will not permit the safety of our people or our environment heritage to be jeopardized, but we are going to reaffirm that the economic prosperity of our people is a fundamental part of our environment.

Our problems are both acute and chronic, yet all we hear from those in positions of leadership are the same tired proposals for more government tinkering, more meddling and more control–all of which led us to this state in the first place.

Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, “Well done?” Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the Obama Administration took office with where we are today and say, “Keep up the good work?” Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, “Let’s have four more years of this?”

I believe the American people are going to answer these questions the first week of November and their answer will be, “No–we’ve had enough.” And, then it will be up to us–beginning next January 21st–to offer an administration and congressional leadership of competence and more than a little courage.

We must have the clarity of vision to see the difference between what is essential and what is merely desirable, and then the courage to bring our government back under control and make it acceptable to the people.

It is essential that we maintain both the forward momentum of economic growth and the strength of the safety net beneath those in society who need help. We also believe it is essential that the integrity of all aspects of Social Security are preserved and made solvent for future generations, and we’ll do the same for Medicare and Medicaid. And in all of these programs, we will strive to eliminate the waste and fraud that plagues them.

And when it comes to healthcare policy, we will enact common sense reforms in an honest way that is transparent to the American people. The old way of governing with kickbacks and behind closed doors is over. We will harness the powerful forces of the free market to drive our reforms. We’ll start by allowing companies to offer health insurance across state lines, returning control of Medicaid funding to the states with help from block grants, gradually increasing Medicare deductibles, expanding medical savings accounts for the same, allowing people on Medicare to seek out private options if they so choose, and we will enact other reforms where necessary. A great nation should have a great healthcare system.

Beyond these essentials, I believe it is clear our federal government is overgrown and overweight. Indeed, it is time for our government to go on a diet. Therefore, my first act as chief executive will be to impose an immediate and thorough freeze on federal hiring. Then, we are going to enlist the very best minds from business, labor and whatever quarter to conduct a detailed review of every department, bureau and agency that lives by federal appropriations. We are also going to enlist the help and ideas of many dedicated and hard working government employees at all levels who want a more efficient government as much as the rest of us do. I know that many are demoralized by the confusion and waste they confront in their work as a result of failed and failing policies.

Our instructions to the groups we enlist will be simple and direct. We will remind them that government programs exist at the sufferance of the American taxpayer and are paid for with money earned by working men and women. Any program that represents a waste of their money–a theft from their pocketbooks–must have that waste eliminated or the program must go–by executive order where possible; by congressional action where necessary. Everything that can be run more effectively by state and local government we shall turn over to state and local government, along with the funding sources to pay for it. We are going to put an end to the money merry-go-round where our money becomes Washington’s money, to be spent by the states and cities exactly the way the federal bureaucrats tell them to.

I will not accept the excuse that the federal government has grown so big and powerful that it is beyond the control of any president, any administration or Congress. We are going to put an end to the notion that the American taxpayer exists to fund the federal government. The federal government exists to serve the American people. On January 21st, we are going to re-establish that truth.

Also on that date we are going to initiate action to get substantial relief for our taxpaying citizens and action to put people back to work. None of this will be based on any new form of monetary tinkering or fiscal sleight-of-hand. We will simply apply to government the common sense we all use in our daily lives.

Work and family are at the center of our lives; the foundation of our dignity as a free people. When we deprive people of what they have earned, or take away their jobs, we destroy their dignity and undermine their families. We cannot support our families unless there are jobs; and we cannot have jobs unless people have both money to invest and the faith to invest it.

There are concepts that stem from an economic system that for more than 200 years has helped us master a continent, create a previously undreamed of prosperity for our people and has fed millions of others around the globe. That system will continue to serve us in the future if our government will stop ignoring the basic values on which it was built and stop betraying the trust and good will of the American workers who keep it going.

We are spending ourselves into economic exhaustion and stagnation, crushing our ability and incentive to save, invest and produce. This must stop. We must halt this fiscal self-destruction and restore sanity to our economic system.

I remember that Mr. Obama, as a nominee in 2008, promised to go through the Federal Budget “line by line” to eliminate wasteful spending. As with any Obama promise, though, it has an expiration date. Under Mr. Obama, the percentage of government spending as a portion of our gross domestic product has risen to its highest point since World War II.

We also find ourselves beset with billion dollar boondoggle bailouts, wasted stimuluses that have cost billions, and unwise green energy loans to failed green energy companies like Solyndra that have wasted billions more. All of this is in addition to the waste and fraud that plagues government programs of all kinds.

To paraphrase the popular saying, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money. And we are. Just take a look at our deficits and debt. For the first time in our history, we have had to confront trillion dollar deficits, far more than any previous President. The situation with our debt is even sadder. In the three and a half years he has held office, Mr. Obama has given us over $5 trillion in debt, also far more than any President before. So much of our debt belongs to nations across the world, especially China. How much longer will they trust the American brand long enough to continue buying?

But let’s be fair, it’s hard to go through a budget line by line when our government, aided and abetted by Democrats in Congress, hasn’t had a budget in almost 1200 days. It would be comical if it wasn’t so serious.

The three times the President’s budgets have made their way to Congress, they have been so laughable that they failed to garner a single vote in either house, not even from his own party. In fact, Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget is the only budget that has passed a house since 2009, but it was killed without a vote in the Democratic controlled Senate. After all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that there will be no budget brought to the table this year, and President Obama has not tried to change his mind.

President Obama likes to tell us that he had no choice in these matters. All the spending woes of the past three and a half years are George Bush’s fault. Whatever happened to the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who told us “The Buck Stops Here”?

President Obama seems to thrive off of this projected impotency. He wants to make it look like he had no choice in the matter, but he had a choice: he could have given us a budget. A serious, responsible budget that would get our nation back on a sound fiscal footing. As President, I will not make the same mistakes.

Within the context of economic conditions and appropriate budget priorities during each fiscal year of my presidency, I will strive to do better. We and we can start with two simple things: the first is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. The second is to make our corporate income tax, now the highest in the industrialized world at 35%, competitive with other developed nations. I propose phased cuts over two years, with the end result being 15%. I’d also include improvement in business depreciation taxes so we can stimulate investment in order to get plants and equipment replaced, put more Americans back to work and put our nation back on the road to being competitive in world commerce.

My administration will work to reduce the cost of government as a percentage of our gross domestic product. We will also take steps toward paying off our debt, especially to our foreign debtors. Finally, with the help of the Congress and the states, we will pass a Balanced Budget Amendment.

The first task of national leadership is to set honest and realistic priorities in our policies and our budget and I pledge that my administration will do that.

When I talk of tax cuts, I am reminded that every major tax cut in this century has strengthened the economy, generated renewed productivity and ended up yielding new revenues for the government by creating new investment, new jobs and more commerce among our people.

The present administration has been forced only reluctantly to extend the Bush tax cuts. When those in leadership call for tax increases and tell us we must also do with less, have they thought about those who have always had less–especially the minorities? This is like telling them that just as they step on the first rung of the ladder of opportunity, the ladder is being pulled out from under them. That may be the Democratic leadership’s message to the minorities, but it won’t be ours. Our message will be: we have to move ahead, but we’re not going to leave anyone behind. Thanks to the economic policies of the Democratic Party, millions of Americans find themselves out of work. Millions more have never even had a fair chance to learn new skills, hold a decent job, or secure for themselves and their families a share in the prosperity of this nation.

It is time to put America back to work; to make our cities and towns resound with the confident voices of men and women of all races, nationalities and faiths bringing home to their families a decent paycheck they can cash for honest money.

For those without skills, we’ll find a way to help them get skills.

For those without job opportunities, we’ll stimulate new opportunities, particularly in the inner cities where they live. And not just there. We’ll pay special attention, as well, to stimulating jobs for our young people who have just graduated from college and cannot find work.

For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!

When we move from domestic affairs and cast our eyes abroad, we see an equally sorry chapter on the record of the present administration.

—88,000 of our men and women are stationed in Afghanistan under leadership that can’t figure out a reason why.

—Next door, the oppressive Iranian regime moves closer each day towards building a nuclear bomb.

—Meanwhile closer to home, our borders remain as porous as ever.

—America’s defense strength is at its lowest ebb in a generation, while we find enemies and competitors abroad spending more and more on defense and developing weapons.

Adversaries large and small test our will and seek to confound our resolve, but we are given weakness when we need strength; vacillation when the times demand firmness.

The Obama Administration lives in the world of make-believe. Every day, drawing up a response to that day’s problems, troubles, regardless of what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow.

The rest of us, however, live in the real world. It is here that disasters are overtaking our nation without any real response from Washington.

This is make-believe, self-deceit and–above all–transparent hypocrisy.

I’ll tell you where I stand. I do not favor a peacetime draft or registration, but I do favor pay and benefit levels that will attract and keep highly motivated men and women in our volunteer forces and an active reserve trained and ready for an instant call in case of an emergency. Furthermore, for our veterans who have been honorably discharged, we will insure that they receive the proper healthcare and rehabilitation into civilian life that they need.

There may be a sailor at the helm of the ship of state, but the ship has no rudder. Critical decisions are made at times almost in comic fashion, but who can laugh? Who was not embarrassed when the administration departed upon its worldwide apology tour? Who is not concerned over the aimless and dithering leadership in Afghanistan?

Who does not feel a growing sense of unease as our allies, facing repeated instances of an amateurish and confused administration, reluctantly conclude that America is unwilling or unable to fulfill its obligations as the leader of the free world?

Who does not feel rising alarm when the question in any discussion of foreign policy is no longer, “Should we do something?”, but “Do we have the capacity to do anything?”

The administration which has brought us to this state is seeking your endorsement for four more years of weakness, indecision, mediocrity and incompetence. No American should vote until he or she has asked, is the United States stronger and more respected now than it was three-and-a-half years ago? Is the world today a safer place in which to live?

It is the responsibility of the president of the United States, in working for peace, to insure that the safety of our people cannot successfully be threatened by a hostile foreign power. As president, fulfilling that responsibility will be my number one priority.

We are not a warlike people. Quite the opposite. We always seek to live in peace. We resort to force infrequently and with great reluctance–and only after we have determined that it is absolutely necessary. We are awed–and rightly so–by the forces of destruction at loose in the world in this nuclear era. But neither can we be naive or foolish. In our time, we have seen our cities attacked by terrorists. In our time, we’ve seen the prosecution of two wars as well. We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.

We simply cannot learn these lessons the hard way again without risking our destruction.

Of all the objectives we seek, first and foremost is the establishment of lasting world peace. We must always stand ready to negotiate in good faith, ready to pursue any reasonable avenue that holds forth the promise of lessening tensions and furthering the prospects of peace. But let our friends and those who may wish us ill take note: the United States has an obligation to its citizens and to the people of the world never to let those who would destroy freedom dictate the future course of human life on this planet. I would regard my election as proof that we have renewed our resolve to preserve world peace and freedom. This nation will once again be strong enough to do that.

And let me say this: we will enforce our borders. We don’t need a comprehensive plan. We will follow the laws already on the books, and we will amend and reform them as necessary to meet our needs.

This evening marks the last step–save one–of a campaign that has taken us from one end of this great land to the other, over many months and thousands of miles. There are those who question the way we choose a president; who say that our process imposes difficult and exhausting burdens on those who seek the office. I have not found it so.

It is impossible to capture in words the splendor of this vast continent which God has granted as our portion of this creation. There are no words to express the extraordinary strength and character of this breed of people we call Americans.

Everywhere we have met thousands of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans from all economic conditions and walks of life bound together in that community of shared values of family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom. They are concerned, yes, but they are not frightened. They are disturbed, but not dismayed. They are the kind of men and women Tom Paine had in mind when he wrote–during the darkest days of the American Revolution–”We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Nearly 150 years after Tom Paine wrote those words, an American president told the generation of the Great Depression that it had a “rendezvous with destiny.” I believe that this generation of Americans today has a rendezvous with destiny.

Tonight, let us dedicate ourselves to renewing the American compact. I ask you not simply to “Trust me,” but to trust your values–our values–and to hold me responsible for living up to them. I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the Earth who came here in search of freedom.

Some say that spirit no longer exists. But I have seen it–I have felt it–all across the land; in the big cities, the small towns and in rural America. The American spirit is still there, ready to blaze into life if you and I are willing to do what has to be done; the practical, down-to-earth things that will stimulate our economy, increase productivity and put America back to work. The time is now to resolve that the basis of a firm and principled foreign policy is one that takes the world as it is and seeks to change it by leadership and example; not by harangue, harassment or wishful thinking.

The time is now to say that while we shall seek new friendships and expand and improve others, we shall not do so by breaking our word or casting aside old friends and allies.

And, the time is now to redeem promises once made to the American people by another candidate, in another time and another place. He said, “For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government–federal, state, and local–costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching. As an immediate program of action, we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government…we must consolidate subdivisions of government and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.”

“I propose to you, my friends, and through you that government of all kinds, big and little be made solvent and that the example be set by the president of the United States and his Cabinet.”

So said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention in July 1932.

The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our own hands. But, to do this will take many of us, working together. I ask you tonight to volunteer your help in this cause so we can carry our message throughout the land.

Yes, isn’t now the time that we, the people, carried out these unkempt promises? Let us pledge to each other and to all America on this July day 80 years later, we intend to do just that.

I have thought of something that is not part of my speech and I’m worried over whether I should do it.

Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians, the peoples of Asia living under oppressive governments, of Cuba, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, and those suffering at the hands of Islamic extremism.

I’ll confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest–I’m more afraid not to–that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.

God bless America.

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And that’s it. I hope what I’ve done here is good enough. It’s probably too long for an actual acceptance speech, but I’m not willing to cut any more, especially since my goal was to preserve as much of Reagan’s speech as possible. This is a demonstration of what we need to hear at the Republican National Convention this year from Mitt Romney. Hopefully, he’s paying attention. Hopefully, we’ll hear something similar.