"About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop." So supposedly said Elihu Root, New York lawyer and secretary of war and of state, and U.S. senator from 1909 to 1915.
Today it seems that many liberal "would-be clients" are in desperate need of what Root called "a decent lawyer."
Continued violence in Ferguson, Missouri, brings back memories of the urban riots of the 1960s.
As it happens, I had a front-row seat back then, as an intern in the office of Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh during the six-day riot in July 1967. At one point I was alone in the so-called command center with Cavanagh and Michigan Gov. George Romney.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, (www.washingtonexaminer.com), where this article first appeared, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Just about everyone noticed Hillary Clinton's scathing comments on President Obama's foreign policy in her interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg.
But almost no one has noticed where Clinton hasn't been seen. That's on the campaign trail or at fundraisers for Democrats running for the Senate.
Politicians have ranges of positions of varying widths that they find acceptable. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, has a very wide range of stands she finds acceptable, depending on timing and circumstances. President Obama's range of acceptable positions has been far narrower
This is reflected in their attitudes about military action in Iraq. Clinton was for it in 2002 and was against it by 2007. Obama was always against what he called a "dumb war."
Three hundred years ago, on Aug. 1, 1714, by the Julian calendar (Aug. 12 by the Gregorian calendar we use now), Queen Anne died. She was just 49 years old, but was weakened by obesity, gout and the effects of 17 pregnancies, from which only one child lived beyond infancy -- William, Duke of Gloucester, who died of smallpox at age 11 in 1700.
The standard thing to say about the various Republican primaries this year is that the tea party movement has lost one race after another. That's a defensible conclusion but also an oversimplification.
I see more turbulence and undercurrents among Republican primary voters than usual. The evidence is that incumbents -- both those the mainstream media call tea partyers and those they call the party establishment -- have been prevailing by tenuous margins in primaries that in the pre-tea party years would almost certainly not have been seriously contested.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, (www.washingtonexaminer.com), where this article first appeared, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at
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Earlier this week, I was thinking of writing a column about the lying and duplicity of Obamacare backers who argued that the difference between provisions providing subsidies in states with state-run health exchanges and providing no subsidies in states with federal exchanges resulted from inadvertence or a typographical error.
Typical among them was MIT health care expert Jonathan Gruber. The folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute found video of him in 2012 arguing that all or most states would create their own exchanges because they wouldn't get subsidies if they let the federal government run their exchanges. That was just a "speako" (the oral equivalent of a typo), Gruber replied.
Bipartisanship is dead. That's the conventional wisdom, and there's a lot of evidence to support it.
But there's evidence to the contrary as well. On two important issues, veterans' health and job training, congressional Republicans and Democrats have, with little notice, reached constructive bipartisan agreements.
"Pare down the parasitic fringe" of government. "Favor a gospel of work" instead of aristocratic entitlement. "Rationalize finance" and "reverse the Parkinson's law of bureaucracy."
All that sounds like rhetoric from the Tea Party or reform conservatives who assail what they call crony capitalism.
But it's not a contemporary criticism. Those are phrases from a long essay, written more than half a century ago, by the British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper, titled "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century."
Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, (www.washingtonexaminer.com), where this article first appeared, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Words mean what they say. That's the basis for the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Halbig v. Burwell invalidating the Internal Revenue Service regulation approving subsidies for Obamacare consumers in states with federal health insurance exchanges.
The law passed by Congress, Judge Thomas Griffith explained, provided for subsidies in states with state-created exchanges, but not in states with federal exchanges. That's factually correct, and under the Constitution, the government can't spend money not authorized by Congress.
Why do you think President Obama's job rating is falling, even though the economy is recovering? the interviewer asked.
Liberals just aren't very liberal these days. The word "liberal" comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade -- for minimal state interference in people's lives.
The flood of underage -- and non-underage -- illegal immigrants from Central America coming across the border in Texas is, to paraphrase a former Obama administration official, a "man-caused disaster." The man who caused it, more than anyone else, is Barack Obama.
Speaking at political fundraisers in Dallas and Austin last week -- he refused to do a "photo-op" on the border, first things first -- Obama placed the blame on House Republicans for not having passed a comprehensive immigration bill as the Democratic-majority Senate did in June 2013.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, (www.washingtonexaminer.com), where this article first appeared, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Skitter, scamper, scuttle. That seems to be the mode of the Obama administration of late.
Skitter away from your red line in Syria. Scamper off to a meeting you'd previously nixed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Scuttle as much as the Constitution as you can, at least until you get called on it by 9-0 majorities in the Supreme Court, as the justices did on recess appointments, warrantless cellphone searches and $75,000 a day fines for disturbing supposed wetlands.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, (www.washingtonexaminer.com), where this article first appeared, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Seldom in American history has the Supreme Court unanimously rejected positions advocated by presidents' administrations.
But in this respect at least, President Obama has produced the fundamental transformation he promised in his 2008 campaign. Over the last three years, the Court has rejected Obama administration positions repeatedly in unanimous 9-0 decisions.
Government just doesn't work very well. That's the persuasive thesis of three important books published this year.
I'm old enough to remember when American liberals cherished the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. They celebrated especially the freedom accorded those with unpopular beliefs and protested attempts to squelch the expression of differing opinions.
What should Republican lawmakers do about immigration? That's been a simmering source of controversy ever since George W. Bush's push for so-called comprehensive immigration legislation, with legalization and enforcement provisions, in 2006.
Most liberals and many economic conservatives argued that support for such legislation was a political imperative for Republicans. Otherwise, they would continue to lose Hispanic voters, an inevitably increasing segment of the electorate, by 2-1 margins.
America's two political parties seem to be coming apart.
Polls show that most Americans wanted the United States to withdraw from Iraq. Barack Obama did indeed withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, not troubling to negotiate a readily negotiable status of forces agreement that would have left a contingent of American soldiers there.
