This is a great commentary from Jonah Goldberg about the fallacy-laden arguments that occur over time when the government gets its nose into something it never should have and then people attempt to disconnect that market intrusion many years later.

In his 1973 Libertarian Manifesto, the late Murray Rothbard argued that the biggest obstacle in the road out of serfdom was “status quo bias.” In society, we’re accustomed to rapid change. “New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly.” Not so with government. When it comes to police or firefighting or sanitation, government must do those things because that’s what government has (allegedly) always done.

“So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services,” Rothbard laments, “that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself.” The libertarian who wants to get the government out of a certain business is “treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial.”

If everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, writes Rothbard, the proponent of shoe privatization would be greeted as a kind of lunatic. “How could you?” defenders of the status quo would squeal. “You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes . . . if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? . . . What material would they use? . . . Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?”

It’s worth keeping this fable in mind as the reaction to last week’s CNN–Tea Party Express debate hardens into popular myth. Moderator Wolf Blitzer had asked Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) what should happen if a man refuses to get health insurance and then has a medical crisis. Paul — a disciple of Rothbard — explained that freedom is about taking risks. “But, congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

At this point, a few boneheads in the audience shouted “Yeah!” and clapped, though liberal pundits and activists imagine they saw an outpouring of support.

Paul calmly replied that he’s not in favor of letting the man die. A physician who began his career before Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, Paul noted that hospitals were never in the practice of turning away patients in need. “We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves,” he observed. “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”

Read the rest. It’s great stuff. Government doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It makes one wonder how people think we educated ourselves prior to the advent of the Department of Education.

You know when you’re watching a football game, and the spunky, sprite running back is twisting and juking, amazing the crowd, and all of the sudden, at the worst possible moment, the running back fumbles, giving momentum to the other team, and then the coach sits the distraught player down for the rest of the game. Well, this week that running back was Michelle Bachmann and her fumble was a backfired attack on Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

While it’s legitimate or at least debatable to score points against Perry for his cronyism with Merck (et. al.) or his mandate that all schoolgirls receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine, it comes off as downright wacky McCarthyism (Jenny, not Joe) to imply a link between vaccination and “mental retardation.”

Here’s Ed Morrissey:

[Bachmann] “There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

Huh? “Mental retardation” typically takes place in a pre- or neo-natal event. Autism becomes apparent in the first couple of years of life — and primarily affects boys. Gardasil vaccinations take place among girls between 9-12 years of age. Even assuming that this anecdote is arguably true, it wouldn’t be either “mental retardation” or autism, but brain damage.

The FDA has received no reports of brain damage as a result of HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix.  Among the reports that correlate seriously adverse reactions to either, the FDA lists blood clots, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and 68 deaths during the entire run of the drugs.  The FDA found no causal connection to any of these serious adverse events and found plenty of contributing factors to all — and all of the events are exceedingly rare.

The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases.  That started with a badly-botched report in Lancet that allowed one researcher to manipulate a ridiculously small sample of twelve cases in order to reach far-sweeping conclusions about thimerasol.  That preservative hasn’t been included in vaccines for years, at least not in the US, and the rate of autism diagnoses remain unchanged.

The most charitable analysis that can be offered in this case for Bachmann is that she got duped into repeating a vaccine-scare urban legend on national television.  It looks more like Bachmann sensed that she had won a point and wanted to go in for the kill, didn’t bother to check the facts, and didn’t care that she was stoking an anti-vaccination paranoid conspiracy theory, either.  Neither shines a particularly favorable light on Bachmann.

Rick Santorum took the correct position on the Gardasil issue.  We mandate certain vaccines in children because we mandate children be gathered for educational purposes for many years (in private or public schools), and certain diseases are easily communicable in those settings.  By mandating vaccinations against whooping cough, measles, and mumps, we are protecting children who would otherwise get exposed without any action on their part except compliance with the law.  That’s not true with HPV, and parents should decide for themselves whether to inoculate their sons and daughters with Gardasil or Cervarix.  If Perry wanted to make those inoculations more accessible, he could have crafted an opt-in system rather than forcing parents to opt out.

Other than solid backing from Tea Partyists I don’t think Bachmann had much chance for a presidential bid. However, this fumble may have eliminated her from the VP slot as well.

Here’s the best retort and thought of the week on what I call the entitlement-hooligan riots in the U.K.

Presumably, London-type riots would not last long in either Texas, or Arizona. — Adam Baldwin on twitter.

Indeed. Thank God for the Second Amendment. I say thank God rather than “Thank Jefferson” because even Jefferson would have understood that such a right is natural, bestowed by The Creator, or if you’re not religious at very least by virtue of having been born a human being. Contrast that with the grand Ponzi scheme, house-of-cards, and castle built on sand known as the Entitlement State, which you better believe is bestowed by consent of the government, rather than by the governed. Things legislated as exceptions and fractions have grown into behemoths as rule and whole. Even so, fully expect that as our 80-million-checks a month government grows amok such riots will no doubt begin here once those government dole checks end. That’s the trap of Socialism-lite — rather difficult to replug that genie once it’s out.

Obama’s rhetorical floundering is the sound of a bewildered politician trying to be heard over the long, withdrawing roar of ebbing faith in a failing model of governance. From Greece to California, with manifestations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois and elsewhere, this model is collapsing. Entangled economic and demographic forces are refuting the practice of ever-bigger government financed by an ever-smaller tax base and by imposing huge costs on voiceless future generations.

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

– George Will.

Oh, wait, can I say coffin, or might that instigate a mass murderer into action?

The mainstream media’s “blame Palin” crosshairs map has just about died a natural death despite a few blatant liberal mobilizers, the vast majority of the American public being far more rational and reasonable than the vast majority of New York Times reporters and MSNBC/CNN et. al. blowhards.

But there was this little gem from the Washington Post just days after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

Hours after the statement’s release, two law enforcement sources said that FBI agents had found a 2007 letter from Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) to the shooting suspect, with the words “Die, bitch” and “Die, cops” scrawled on it.

The letter, which thanked Loughner for attending an event of hers, was found in a safe in his Tucson home, the sources said.

2007? Sarah Palin wasn’t even part of our political lexicon in 2007.

The notion that there’s a causal relationship between politicians’ rhetoric and a mass murderer is as stupid and silly as when serial killer Ted Bundy attempted — in one last grasp of straw to avoid the electric chair — to blame pornography for his murders.

And that gets us to some entities that do deserve some blame, in incrementing order: the Pima County Sheriff’s office, our mental health system, and most culpable beyond Jared Loughner himself — Mr. Loughner’s parents.

The police have the least blame of the three parties but should be included because Sheriff Clarence Dupnik’s odd behavior seems to be an attempt to shift the spotlight from his department to the conservative body (Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, maybe Ronald Reagan if he looks hard enough). What’s he trying to hide? I don’t think much, honestly, but John Fund brought up some solid points last week:

His fellow lawmen in Arizona are appalled because all of the evidence so far suggests that the gunman is a deeply disturbed individual with no coherent political motives. “I just hope he’s not giving this 22-year-old an alibi by blaming talk radio,” Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told the Los Angeles Times. …

Sheriff Dupnik would do far better to spend his time figuring out how Jared Loughner managed to buy a gun last November to commit his crimes. He apparently passed a federal background check solely because he had no prison record. But Reuters reports that Sheriff Dupnik acknowledged that “there had been earlier contact between Loughner and law enforcement after he had made death threats, although they had not been against [Rep. Gabrielle] Giffords.” The sheriff’s department was aware that Loughner had been asked by police at a local community college to stop attending classes because of his odd behavior. Several of his fellow students expressed fear of him and said they believed he was unstable.

The real debate in the aftermath of the Arizona shootings should be why a troubled individual was able to compile such a record without attracting more attention from Sheriff Dupnik and his fellow law enforcement professionals. Perhaps if Loughner had been convicted of making death threats, he wouldn’t have been able to clear the federal background check he needed to purchase a firearm last November.

Now saying the police should have acted and the police actually having enough evidence and cause to arrest Loughner are two different things. I tend to think that cops usually get the short end of the stick on such hindsight “what ifs.”

Next, I think the country would be better served by a national conversation on the state of our mental health care than on our political rhetoric. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey demonstrates the importance of just that by explaining how Arizona has one of the worst mental health systems in the Union:

The truth is that these tragedies [mass shootings] are happening every day throughout the United States. The only reason this episode has received widespread publicity is because there were multiple victims and one victim was a member of Congress. Such senseless killings have become increasingly common over the past 30 years, starting in about 1980, when Allard Lowenstein, coincidentally a former congressman, was killed by Dennis Sweeney. Sweeney was a young man with untreated schizophrenia who had been Lowenstein’s protégé in the civil rights movement. Congress was also prominently involved in 1998, when Russell Weston, who also had untreated schizophrenia, killed two policemen while trying to shoot his way into the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

These tragedies are the inevitable outcome of five decades of failed mental-health policies. During the 1960s, we began to empty the state mental hospitals but failed to put in place programs to ensure that the released patients received treatment after they left. By the 1980s, the results were evident—increasing numbers of seriously mentally ill persons among the homeless population and in the nation’s jails and prisons.

Over the past three decades, things have only gotten worse. A 2007 study by the U.S. Justice Department found that 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of local jail inmates suffer from mental illnesses.

A 2008 study out of the University of Pennsylvania that examined murders committed in Indiana between 1990 and 2002 found that approximately 10% of the murders were committed by individuals with serious mental illnesses. There are about 16,000 homicides a year in this country. Using the Indiana study as a guide, roughly 1,600 of them are likely committed by people with serious mental illnesses.

In Arizona, public mental-health services are among the worst in the nation. In a 2008 survey by the Treatment Advocacy Center, Arizona ranked next to last among all states in the number of psychiatric hospital beds per capita. If you don’t have hospital beds and outpatient clinics to treat mentally ill people, those people don’t get treated. Thus the tragedy was somewhat more likely to happen in Arizona because mentally ill individuals are less likely to receive treatment there. Although Arizona is the worst state, except for Nevada, in psychiatric-bed availability, there is no state that currently has enough beds for its mentally ill population, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center study. This tragedy occurred in Arizona, but it could easily have happened in any state.

The big picture is even scarier. Based on Arizona’s 2010 population and on estimates by the National Institute of Mental Health of the number of individuals with untreated schizophrenia at any given time, there are today in Arizona over 21,000 individuals with untreated schizophrenia. Most of them, thankfully, are not violent. But a small number of them—about 10% according to my meta-analysis of relevant studies—do become violent, usually because of their delusional thoughts and what their voices (auditory hallucinations) are telling them. This situation holds in every state. It is thus not a question of if such tragedies will occur but rather when and how often.

Okay, so there’s work to be done in this system. Even so, as the old saying goes, one can lead a horse to water but one cannot make the horse drink. Are the parents of Jared Loughner not culpable?

[WSJ] The documents also demonstrate the challenges facing campus police when students exhibit disturbing, even threatening, behavior—even when parents are notified. School administrators and counselors met repeatedly with Mr. Loughner, who twice appears to have been accompanied by his mother, according to the documents. Campus police talked to Mr. Loughner’s father when they delivered the suspension letter to the family’s home on Sept. 29.

The parents may not have known what their son would end up doing, but they certainly knew he was very troubled — troubled enough to be kicked out of college for very bizarre behavior. We can blame all these other forces until Kingdom come, but in the end if the family isn’t willing to help themselves, then nobody else will too.

I haven’t blogged a single post in almost a month. Unlike the vast majority of political aficionados out there the closer to an election one gets the less I write because frankly there isn’t much to be said that hasn’t already been said. I get tired of the political advertisements especially. Besides the battle lines were drawn months ago and have since solidified.

But I’m going to leave you with one good commentary, courtesy of Kimberly Strassel, prior to the election next Tuesday:

Here’s a key fact of 2010: The biggest political spender of this cycle is, as usual, a union (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, at $90 million). Another overlooked fact: Democrats are floating in money. A recent study by the nonpartisan Center for the Responsive Politics reports that Democrats in competitive districts have raised 47% more than Republicans and spent 66% more. They’re losing for lack of credibility, not dollars.

… Mr. Obama recently explained he was so busy passing his agenda he forgot to “advertise” its benefits. “We didn’t have time to unpack it,” echoes David Axelrod. And not only are Americans ill-informed—the president explains they are too “scared” to think straight.

One or two Americans presumably managed to avoid every one of Mr. Obama’s 344 days of public interaction his first year—including 42 press conferences, 158 interviews, 23 town halls and seven campaign rallies. The rest haven’t, and that’s the Democrats’ real problem. A recent Public Opinion Strategies poll found 89% of Americans familiar enough with “ObamaCare” to rate it on a positive/negative scale. A majority said an “acceptable” outcome of this election would be repeal. Don Draper couldn’t sell this turkey.

Exactly. When the liberal idea falls flat they blame the complexity of nuance. ‘Oh, the American public just don’t get it. It’s them, not us. ‘ But there was nothing nuanced about the way they took a highly unpopular health care bill and jammed it down the throat of the public.

Just a few weeks ago the WSJ reported that McDonald’s “may be forced to cancel its current coverage for 29,500 employees as a result of ObamaCare.” It opined additionally, “the choice is between relatively affordable coverage that isn’t as generous as Democrats think it should be and dumping coverage entirely.” Put another way, perhaps when you lose McDonald’s, and all those franchise paying small business owners, you lose America.

More importantly, there’s nothing nuanced about a persistent 10 percent unemployment rate. We’ll see how much the Democratic Party is hurt by the economy in just a few days, but if this election follows history, well, the political party in power simply does not survive double digit unemployment rates. Even the hugely popular FDR, while his party survived for the first couple of elections, could not save Democrats by 1938. That year they lost 6 Senate seats and 71 House seats, prompting FDR adviser Raymond Moley to call the Republican gains, “a comeback of astounding proportions.”

Will Tuesday be another comeback of astounding proportions?

Here’s Avik Roy on American’s aversion to socialized medicine (Also, it can summarized in one word via an older post — Cancer):

Liberals find it odd, and perhaps slightly irrational, that Americans so heavily criticize the British National Health Service. This has been of particular relevance in light of Donald Berwick’s “love affair” with the agency.

Britain’s Conservative prime minister, after all, often talks “of how proud we in Britain are of the NHS.” Just as with Medicare in the U.S., British politicians who talk of dismantling the NHS get hammered in the polls. (Despite Her Majesty’s Government’s surprise announcement this week of incremental market-oriented reforms to the program, the Tories under David Cameron have repeatedly pledged to preserve its funding.)

But describing the NHS as “popular” with British voters is a bit like describing cocaine as “popular” with crack addicts. Once people become dependent on heavy state subsidies, it is natural for them to feel insecure at the thought of losing them. Tocqueville long ago articulated how this problem inevitably arises from majoritarian democracies. And people who live under a single-payer regime have no way, short of moving abroad, of appreciating that there are better alternatives.

Having said that, Britons are frustrated by the indifference and inhumanity of the National Health Service. Its problems are covered widely in the British press. Here are some examples (and readers are welcome to provide others):

• NHS doctors routinely conceal from patients information about innovative new therapies that the NHS doesn’t pay for, so as to not “distress, upset or confuse” them.
• Terminally ill patients are incorrectly classified as “close to death” so as to allow the withdrawal of expensive life support.
• NHS expert guidelines on the management of high cholesterol are intentionally out of date, putting patients at serious risk, in order to save money.
• When the government approved an innovative new treatment for elderly blindness, the NHS initially decided to reimburse for the treatment only after patients were already blind in one eye — using the logic that a person blind in one eye can still see, and is therefore not that badly off.
• While most NHS patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery, leaving them immobile and disabled in the meantime, the actual waiting times are even worse: 11 months for hips and 12 months for knees. (This compares to a wait of 3 to 4 weeks for such procedures in the United States.)
• One in four Britons with cancer is denied treatment with the latest drugs proven to extend life.
• Those who seek to pay for such drugs on their own are expelled from the NHS system, for making the government look bad, and are forced to pay for the entirety of their own care for the rest of their lives.
• Britons diagnosed with cancer or heart attacks are more likely to die, and more quickly, than those of most other developed nations. Britain’s survival rates for these diseases are “little better than [those] of former Communist countries.”

These problems are not an accidental side effect of socialized medicine — they are inherent to socialized medicine. Liberals who believe that technocratic experts can rationally allocate health care resources ignore the real-world examples, like Britain’s, of how that model fails in practice.

The American health-care system has its flaws, and real reform is urgently needed. But the reason why Obamacare is so unpopular is that most people would never trade our approach, warts and all, for that of Donald Berwick’s NHS.

The recess appointment of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) head Don Berwick is unlike previous and common recess appointments by past presidents, explains Avik Roy, for several reasons. First among them is that generally presidents use recess appointments because Congress drags its feet on hearings. But in Berwick’s case, Obama used the recess appointment precisely to avoid hearings which Republicans were eager to have to expose Berwick’s extreme views on health care. Once more the Obama administration displays that it has no intention of keeping its promise of an open, transparent and debate-healthy administration.

4. Berwick is an advocate of socialized, government-controlled health care. As we and others have documented, Berwick is “starry-eyed” about Britain’s National Health Service, in which government owns the insurers, the hospitals, and the doctors’ offices. He is a highly intelligent and articulate defender of that position. Liberals claim that Republicans are taking his views out of context. If that is true, why not give Berwick a public platform to explain himself? The answer is clear: Berwick would only generate more controversy if he aired his views in Congress. And we’re not talking “controversy” in the mountain-out-of-a-molehill sense: We’re talking about the basic philosophy of whether or not we should have a free or centrally-planned health care system. The American public and, more importantly, the American idea, are not on Berwick’s side.

Read the rest.

Another example: this way Obama doesn’t have to worry about Berwick answering a question such as: “According to the Boston Globe the ‘The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.’ How will government-funded medical programs at the federal level not meet the same fate?”

If only George Will were in Congress he could ask Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan these questions:

– It would be naughty to ask you about litigation heading for the Supreme Court concerning this: Does Congress have the right, under its enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce, to punish the inactivity of not purchasing health insurance? So, instead answer this harmless hypothetical: If Congress decides that interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers? If not, why not?

– The government having decided that Chrysler’s survival is an urgent national necessity, could it decide that “Cash for Clunkers” is too indirect a subsidy and instead mandate that people buy Chrysler products?

– If Congress concludes that ignorance has a substantial impact on interstate commerce, can it constitutionally require students to do three hours of homework nightly? If not, why not?

– Can you name a human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce? If courts reflexively defer to that congressional pretense, in what sense do we have limited government?

– In Federalist 45, James Madison said: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.” What did the Father of the Constitution not understand about the Constitution? Are you a Madisonian? Does the doctrine of enumerated powers impose any limits on the federal government? Can you cite some things that, because of that doctrine, the federal government has no constitutional power to do?

– Is it constitutional for Arizona to devote state resources to enforcing federal immigration laws?

– Is there anything novel about the Arizona law empowering police officers to act on a “reasonable suspicion” that someone encountered in the performance of the officers’ duties might be in the country illegally?

– The Fifth Amendment mandates “just compensation” when government uses its eminent domain power to take private property for “public use.” In its 2005 Kelo decision, the court said government can seize property for the “public use” of transferring it to wealthier private interests who will pay more taxes to the government. Do you agree?

– Should proper respect for precedent prevent the court from reversing Kelo? If so, was the court wrong to undo the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregating the races with “separate but equal” facilities is constitutional?

– In 1963, President John Kennedy said Congress should “make a commitment . . . to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Was he right?

– In 1964, Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a principal sponsor of that year’s Civil Rights Act, denounced the “nightmarish propaganda” that the law would permit preferential treatment of an individual or group because of race or racial “imbalance” in employment. What happened?

– William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, writes: “The astonishingly quick and complete transformation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from a law requiring all citizens be treated equally to a policy requiring that they be treated unequally, is one of the most audacious bait-and-switch operations in American political history.” Discuss.

– In a 2003 case affirming the constitutionality of racial preferences in law school admissions, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” If you are a sitting justice in 2028, do you expect to conclude that such preferences can no longer survive constitutional scrutiny because they no longer serve a compelling public interest?

– The president is morose about the court’s Citizens United decision holding that the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make “no law” abridging freedom of speech, means no laws abridging a corporation’s freedom to speak, including nonprofit advocacy corporations such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club. The court called it “censorship” for government “to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear.” Do you agree?

– You have noted that the court often considers legislative motives when deciding First Amendment cases. Should the court consider legislators’ motives if, in response to Citizens United, they impose new burdens on corporate speech?

– When incumbent legislators write laws restricting the quantity, content and timing of speech about legislative campaigns, are not their motives presumptively suspect?

– Regarding campaign finance “reforms”: If allowing the political class to write laws regulating the quantity, content and timing of speech about the political class is the solution, what is the problem?

– If the problem is corruption, do we not already have abundant laws proscribing that?

– If the problem is the “appearance” of corruption, how do you square the First Amendment with Congress restricting speech to regulate how things “appear” to unspecified people?

– Incumbent legislators are constantly tinkering with the rules regulating campaigns that could cost them their jobs. Does this present an appearance of corruption?

– Some persons argue that our nation has a “living” Constitution; the court has spoken of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” But Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking against “changeability” and stressing “the whole antievolutionary purpose of a constitution,” says “its whole purpose is to prevent change — to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away. A society that adopts a bill of rights is skeptical that ‘evolving standards of decency’ always ‘mark progress,’ and that societies always ‘mature,’ as opposed to rot.” Is he wrong?

– The Ninth Amendment says: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 14th Amendment says no state may abridge “the privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens. How should the court determine what are the “retained” rights and the “privileges or immunities”?

– The 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) is, as former Delaware governor Pete du Pont has said, “to the Constitution what the Chicago Cubs are to the World Series: of only occasional appearance and little consequence.” Were the authors of the Bill of Rights silly to include this amendment?

– Should decisions of foreign courts, or laws enacted by foreign legislatures, have any bearing on U.S. courts’ interpretations of the Constitution or federal laws (other than directly binding treaties)?

– The Fifth Amendment says private property shall not be taken by government for public use without just compensation. But what about “regulatory takings”? To confer a supposed benefit on the public, government often restricts how persons can use their property, sometimes substantially reducing the property’s value. But government offers no compensation because the property is not “taken.” But when much of a property’s value is taken away by government action, should owners be compensated?

– In Bush v. Gore, which settled the 2000 election, seven justices ruled that Florida vote recounts that were being conducted in different jurisdictions under subjective and contradictory standards were incompatible with the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” Were they right?

– In Bush v. Gore, five justices held that Article II of the Constitution gives state legislatures plenary power to set the rules for presidential elections. The Florida legislature fashioned election rules to produce presidential electors immune from challenge by Congress. But the legislature said that immunity depended on electors being chosen by a certain date, which could not be met if further recounts were to ensue. The court held that allowing more recounts would have contravened the intent of Florida’s legislature. So the recounts were halted. Was the court’s majority correct?

– Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom you clerked, said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” Can you defend this approach to judging?

– You have said: “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.” But that depends on what the meaning of “is” is. There was no constitutional right to abortion until the court discovered one 185 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the right was spotted lurking in emanations of penumbras of other rights. What is to prevent the court from similarly discovering a right to same-sex marriage?

– Bonus question: In Roe v. Wade, the court held that the abortion right is different in each of the three trimesters of pregnancy. Is it odd that the meaning of the Constitution’s text would be different if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number?

This is astounding… creepy too.

[Mark Steyn] Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians [AAP] noted that certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “female genital mutilation.” So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They’re not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a “ritual nick” to young girls.

A few years back, I thought even fainthearted Western liberals might draw the line at “FGM.” After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, many of us hapless Western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

Der Spiegel, an impeccably liberal magazine, summed up the remorseless Islamization of Europe in a recent headline: “How Much Allah Can the Old Continent Bear?” Well, what’s wrong with a little Allah-lite? The AAP thinks you can hop on the sharia express and only ride a couple of stops. In such ostensibly minor concessions, the “ritual nick” we’re performing is on ourselves. Further cuts will follow.

To say that this is multiculturalism and diversity tolerance run amuck is to give the word amok a bad name. If this is the recommendation of  pediatricians then one may as well go back to seeing one’s barber for surgery. Pass the leaches. The apologists make the false comparison to circumcision, but while religiously traditional it’s not a sexual control.

Steyn is right. If we can’t draw the line here we may as well start paying our jizya “protection money” as dhimmis. If you don’t know what that is yet, don’t bother Googling it, for we may learn the hard way in our lifetime.