Who Romney Should Pick for His Veep: NOT a Bushie

Over the weekend, there was a lot of buzz about whether Mitt Romney might tap Condoleeza Rice as his running mate.  Oof.  I hope not!  In fact, Romney should do himself a favor and distance himself as far as possible from anyone associated with the Bush administration.  

Rice was the National Security Advisor for what were arguably among this nation's worst national security decisions ever.  On her watch, we under-committed manpower to the war effort in Afghanistan and then invaded Iraq in a war of choice, on the pretext of  what turned out to be cherry-picked, unreliable intelligence.  And then, to top it all off, we attempted to "export democracy" to both countries, an ill-conceived venture that only resulted in dragging both wars out for a decade, with Afghanistan still ongoing today.  Rice may be a brilliant scholar, but someone down in the mud under the Ivory Tower could have told her that wars in distant landlocked countries are the most difficult and expensive to undertake, and should therefore be conducted with swift and punishing force, and concluded just as quickly.  A country should never be left as an ungoverned area - that only invites more security problems - but it is far more efficient to employ stabilization measures that fit the local culture and conditions, than to devote years, and American blood and treasure, attempting to impose a form of government that is neither a true democracy, nor suited to the people it governs.  That is not a good national security decision, in either the short term or in the long term.

Then there were the controversies surrounding the US interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, the establishment of the never-ending Gordian knot of a prison at Guantanamo, secret "renditions" of terrorism suspects to third-party countries, and the whole definition of torture (hint: the Americans hold that the same actions constituted torture, when the Japanese were doing them to us during WWII; sorry, but they don't magically become okay when we do it, and this has cost us a huge amount of respect and standing in the world).  Of course Rice did not personally make all of these decisions, but as a key Cabinet member and advisor, she bears a significant portion of the administration's collective responsibility for them, good and bad.  

Unfortunately, just about every key leader in the Bush administration remains surrounded by a huge amount of negative controversy thanks to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars:  Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith - even Colin Powell.  Rice is no exception.  If Romney has been paying a lick of attention to national and world events since 2001, he should know that not only is Rice not a great pick to run for Vice President, but he needs to avoid any obvious associations with the whole Bush crowd.  And that means - yes - the Cheney-sponsored fundraiser of 12 July may have been a political mistake.

And to surround himself with the same principals that surrounded G.W. Bush would be more than a political mistake; it could well be a national security mistake.

How the Supreme Court Decision on the Individual Mandate Threatens Every American's Economic Freedom

The Wall Street Journal offers the very best, clearest explanation I have yet seen on the dangers of the Supreme Court decision upholding the individual mandate to buy health insurance.  The decision has opened a Pandora's Box of potential abuses in many venues other than that of health care.  In effect, Congress can use this precedent and Chief Justice Roberts' logic to regulate our personal economic decisions.  I find myself wondering if that was not the real prize that Roberts, a conservative justice appointed by President Bush, had in mind when he presented his convoluted reasoning in support of this key aspect of the Obamacare plan.  There is personal freedom, economic freedom and political freedom, and this decision is a direct threat to one of those three essential freedoms.

Some excerpts from this excellent article (please read the original at the Wall Street Journal!): 

"His [Roberts']  first error is the act of rewriting the plain text of a law, instead of practicing the disinterested interpretation that is the task of the judiciary... The second error is converting the health insurance mandate's penalty into a tax.... the Supreme Court until Thursday has never held that Congress can call anything it wants a tax.... That boundary [between taxing power and plenary police powers] held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power.... The result is that Chief Justice Roberts has created the only tax in U.S. history that exceeds its own constitutional limits and is meant to execute powers that the Court otherwise ruled were invalid. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises... From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires....  Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it."

I was so glad to see this explanation, because it crystallizes and informs my own very negative reaction to the ruling.  I've been bothered by the apparently cavalier (political?) way that Chief Justice Roberts declared the mandate a "tax" and then concluded that this makes it constitutional.  Saying a thing doesn't make it so, and I wondered:  wasn't it a penalty, not a tax?  The two are not the same, as the Wall Street Journal explains.  The Obama administration itself has been denying that the mandate constitutes a tax, even as they celebrate the political victory that was made possible only by labeling it thus.  Meanwhile, the Republicans are chortling that Obama has pushed through one of the biggest tax increases ever (even though their own candidate could suffer similar criticisms for a similar state-level law during his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts).  

Whether it is or is not a tax, approving the whole concept of the individual mandate as constitutional is a dangerous, wide-sweeping precedent.  I do not want my government telling me what commercial products I must buy, and I suspect that this decision has opened the way for all manner of similar orders.  I mean, hey, next time some car maker in Detroit is about to go under, why not bail them out by ordering every American taxpayer to buy one of their cars?  Cool.  Problem solved.  The possibilities are endless, and they make the Catholic Church kvetching about paying for contraception look like the least of anyone's worries.

I am a political independent, but I find myself fervently hoping that the Republicans manage to repeal this fiasco.  I am very much in favor of reforming our national health-care system, but this is not the way to do it; I believe it is unconstitutional, and I believe it will prove ineffective.   Our problems are tied mainly to the enormous per-capita costs of health care in this country, and really fixing that will absolutely be a long, hard slog and will require some political will in the face of big-business interests.  There is no magic wand.  For once, our politicians need to choose the hard right over the easy wrong.  That's called integrity.  This "solution" is lazy, not a solution at all, and now it has opened the way for worse things.  Even if Congress does repeal Obamacare, the fact remains that we have a very dangerous precedent on record, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts.