The Constitutional Alamo

Apparently, forming a one-world government that ruled in the interest of climate change wasn’t quite pressing enough to push through this year.

by Michael Naragon

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the COP15 summit to be held from Dec. 7 until Dec. 18 would not offer a legally binding climate treaty for signature.  The treaty, which has become famous from its widespread denunciation by climate change skeptics like Lord Monckton, will be reconsidered in Bonn in 2010.

According to the Times:

U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders on Sunday supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, but European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action.

Some argued that legal technicalities might otherwise distract the talks in Copenhagen and it was better to focus on the core issue of cutting climate-warming emissions.

“Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible,” Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the leaders.

Score one, at least temporarily, for the good guys.

In a push for 2010–and undoubtedly testing the waters for his own presidential possibilities–Newt Gingrich has said that he wants the Republicans to formulate a new Contract With America.  Is this what’s really needed?  And is Newt the one to lead it?

by Michael Naragon

Newt Gingrich.  His name became familiar in 1994, when Republicans took control of Congress following Bill and Hillary Clinton’s disastrous attempt to take over the health care industry.  In the year or so that followed, Republicans instituted welfare reform and balanced the budget for the first time since LBJ’s presidency.  Clinton, of course, was quick to take credit for the new fiscal conservatism in Washington, and he and the Congress were just as quick to spend the “surplus.”

Many of the Republicans who won in 1994, as Newt will readily proclaim to all who will listen, were moderates.  Therefore, moderate Republicans made him Speaker of the House.  Within a few years, those moderate Republicans had become carbon copies of their Democrat colleagues, spending money like the proverbial drunken sailors, far more concerned with their re-election campaigns than with doing the work of the people.

The same Newt Gingrich that rode the reaction against Clinton’s attempt to take over health care has sat on the sidelines while the Republicans in Congress have fallen away from nearly every tenet of the original Contract.  Now Newt is endorsing liberal Republicans like Dede Scozzafava, claiming to anyone that will listen that the GOP will always be a minority party unless it accepts candidates like Scozzafava, who dropped out of the NY-23 race and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens.

His overarching argument seemed to be eerily similar to the one made by Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA) at a recent town hall meeting when a voter asked of his decision to support Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.  “She had the votes,” Marshall explained.  “If I didn’t vote for her, it would have been very difficult to bring home the kind of programs and funding [i.e., pork] Georgia needs.”

In an interview with Sean Hannity after the election, Newt defended his choice to endorse Scozzafava by explaining that he would never have become Speaker without the election of the so-called moderates.  He then proceeded to fall into the tired “big tent” diatribe that liberals love to parrot when they discuss the imminent downfall of Republicans.  Moreover, Gingrich has said that running conservative candidates against liberal Republicans in any of the 2010 races would be “destructive,” according to a Politico interview.

Now, this same Newt Gingrich is asking Republicans and Chairman Michael Steele to compile a new Contract, presumably focusing on fiscal responsibility and deficit spending.  If the GOP, which is still essentially run by liberals and moderates (see: Election 2008, John McCain), formulates such a contract, could someone please ask Newt to put in some sort of time element, so we can at least plan for the day when all the new Republicans in the House and Senate will begin acting like their Democrat counterparts and continue to spend us all into oblivion?

If the Republican Party supports power over principle, then what exactly is the advantage in voting for the GOP in 2010 or beyond?

The hits just keep on coming, folks.  Up next, Washington looks to extend its reach to the country’s rail systems in a proposal by the Obama administration.  Apparently, they’re not satisfied with their unconstitutional control of banks, the auto industry, the energy industries, and health care.

by Michael Naragon

In a story that first surfaced Sunday in The Washington Post and was reprinted by FOXNews.com, President Obama’s subordinates have expressed a desire to get a grip on the nation’s rails.

Administration officials cite poor management and lack of oversight as their reasons for taking over the light-rail industry, which leads me to wonder: could the American people take back the federal government using the same line of logic?  Cities affected by the federal usurpation would include Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and every other city, large or small, that uses a rail system, such as a subway.  Washington officials are using last summer’s Metro Red Line crash in D.C. to justify taking over the systems across the country.

“After the [Metro] train crash,” said Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation, “we were all sitting around here scratching our heads, saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do something about this.’  And we discovered that there’s not much we could do, because the law wouldn’t allow us to do it.”

It appears from the Post’s piece that the measure has at least some degree of bipartisan support, as two Republicans, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), said the administration was right in raising concerns.  To be fair, Coburn did qualify his statement by saying the federal government should be limited in its regulation to rail lines that cross state lines.

It is striking that, after allowing our federal government to become so bloated and ineffective, that officials still have time to sit around and think about other areas they’d like to control, as if the federal government’s track record at regulation is so effective that they feel compelled to take over and fix things.  Does not the FAA regulate airlines?  Do we not still have incidents?  However, the pervasive school of thought in 21st century America is to give all our problems to Washington, where they can be solved.  Or, if not solved, at least buried so deeply in bureaucracy and political pandering that they become unsolvable problems and, therefore, are no longer our direct concern.  Comfortably numb, as Pink Floyd put it.