TOP NAV
BOOK
CHAPPIES
JV CHAPPIES
CHAPTERS

American Thinker
Instapundit
NRO
RealClearPol
TCS Daily
FrontPage Mag
Civitas
Cato Institute
City Journal
Manhattan Inst
Spectator uk
Mr. Chalk
Insp Gadget
WelfareState We'reIn
School Choices
Integral Inst
Lucianne
Day by Day
Bookworm Room
vague notions
StaticNoise
ConChristian
Global Perspectv
Reform
18 Doughty St
Conserv Home
Govt Spending
Dr Crippen
TruthLaidBear
Friendly Socs
Global Guerrillas
Jackalope
Evolvg Excelnc
Cafe Hayek
Climate Audit
Antiplanner
SolarCycle24
PC Bloggs
Liberal Fascism
Daily Mash
EG West Centre
Carpe Diem
Amer Digest
Marriage Savers
BusEconCulture
WattsUpWithThat
Reform (UK)
NASA SatIm
Ctr for Freedom & Prosperity
Demographia
IntelliWeather
GenSocialSurvey
Climate Science
Prometheus
JohanNorberg
CO2 Science
Gene Expression
Mumsnet
climate4you
Money Down Drain
Measuring Worth
Canada Free Press
Greg Mankiw
Roy Spencer
BuzzMachine
Fred Turner
Wash Times
Dana Loesch
Free Enterprise Nation
Smart Girl Nation
Enlightened Women
NoPartyNow
YoaniSanchez
CONSERVATIVES and other opponents of ObamaCare have been flapping on about "consent of the governed" as the Democrats twist this way and that to get out of their box canyon.
Michael Barone has just summed up the Dems' problem pretty well. So let's go with it. He writes of three cases to consider when trying to pass legislation:
You can pass popular legislation on party-line votes, and you usually get some support from the other side, even if unsolicited.
The Dems passed Medicare on this basis, and on final passage they picked up Republican votes. But what about unpopular legislation? The way to do it is the method used to pass the TARP bailout of the banks.
TARP was passed, after one misfire in the House, by bipartisan coalitions of members of both parties with safe seats. Members of both parties with vulnerable seats, with only a few exceptions, were left to protect themselves by voting against it.
But, of course, that is not the strategy being used by the Dems to pass ObamaCare. They thought they could ram it through on a party-line vote. Probably, they thought, a year ago, that they would be able to swing public opinion their way and bully the Republicans into voting for it. But they failed to move public opinion. In fact, every time that ObamaCare gets into the news the president's approval numbers go down, as yesterday when the president hit -21 on the bellwhether Rasmussen Poll. The poll for the last few months has shown steady erosion in the president's strong supporters.
There's a reason it's hard to pass unpopular legislation on party-line votes. It's not the Senate rules. It's called democracy.
In other words, if you are trying to pass unpopular legislation and the opposition thinks that it is a bad idea and the American people also think that it's a bad idea you really have a problem.
Let's rehearse this into a simple set of rules.
The Democrats are now trying to solve their problem by proposing to pass ObamaCare without even having a vote in the House. They are considering a rule in the House to "deem" it passed.
My advice to Dems. Don't do it. You cannot imagine the rage you will provoke if you try to get ObamaCare through by cheating. As the French 68ers said years ago, the whole point of bourgeois democracy is the process. It's the process that keeps people from forming a head of rebellion. Smash the process and you smash your legitimacy.
|
| perm | comment(0) | 03/11/10 11:28 am ET
LIBERALS JUST can't get enough of the idea that conservatives are reactionaries, trying to turn the clock back.So you would expect that the Wall Street Journal's tame liberal, Thomas Frank, would be eager to take a whack at the subject whenever he gets a convenient hook.Mostly though he is outraged that Glenn Beck hates college professor President Woodrow Wilson. OK, so Wilson vetoed prohibition...
|
| perm | comment(1) | 03/10/10 11:41 am ET
THERE ARE ALL kinds of conservatives and all kinds of conservatism.Some people say there are three kinds of conservatives: economic, social, and national-security.Then there's Ken Blackwell's six-legged stool: social conservatives, Christian conservatives, Second Amendment conservatives, economic conservatives, philosophical conservatives, national security conservatives.How many conservatives...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 03/09/10 11:27 am ET
I CAPTURED an interesting comment from former Majority Leader Tom DeLay over the weekend. He was critiquing the Pelosi operation in the house. Let's look at his comment in full.DeLay accused Democrats of “arrogance” after CNN host Candi Crowley asked DeLay how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have a Democrat-controlled House, Senate and White House, but haven’t...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 03/08/10 11:23 am ET
IN THE OFFICIAL liberal belief system, the key to it all is "conflict avoidance." Because if only we could avoid conflict then everyone could live in peace and justice.Er, no. Not quite, chaps. In reality, life in the world is all about conflict. We humans, occasionally, create a moment in which conflict recedes to the margin. But not really. Conflict still continues, but in a sublimated...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 03/05/10 11:36 am ET
EVERYTHING about ObamaCare is smoke and mirrors, starting with the idea that the system is broke. But the president did us the courtesy of actually listing the four things that ain't so in his health plan, writes Jon Ward of The Daily Caller. Ready?It's not a government takeover. OK, technically it isn't. But the government will increase government supervision by a very big leap. It's the...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 03/04/10 11:33 am ET
TODAY, ACCORDING to reports, the president will announce that he is going for "reconciliation," the tactic of passing his huge ObamaCare reform through the Congress by a method that is intended to reconcile budget disagreements between the two houses of Congress.Some have said that in doing this, the president "crosses the Rubicon," after the famous act of Julius Caesar in marching his army...
|
| perm | comment(0) | 03/03/10 11:02 am ET
| March blogs | February blogs |
LAST WEEK DR. Judith Curry, climate scientist from Georgia Institute of Technology, admitted on Whats Up With That that climate scientists needed to do a better job of communication, in order to reestablish trust after the debacle of ClimateGate. In reply, both sides, warmist ...
This week the Tea Party conservatives launched their | more | comment | 02/24/10
Liberal Condescension Isn't the Problem
Budget Fun with Fannie and Freddie
THE SUPRISE OF REDNECKS debouching from the Appalachians into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the past, now that God was dead.... more
Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, and Stoll, David, Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America
Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education
Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system
James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls
E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century
F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law
Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract
John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present
James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century
David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again
David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China
Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state
David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world
Lee Harris's analysis of the Tea Party movement.
The end of the road for Barack Obama?
Simon Heffer takes Obama apart.
cluelessness about the Tea Party movement from the MSM
Marvin Olasky reprises Hernando de Soto's Other Path
The President vs. Health-Care Reform
Holman Jenkins says it: the president doesn't understand health insurance.
> more
cruel . corrupt . wasteful unjust . deluded
Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Heres how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>
The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the kings peace, the law of contract, and private property.
But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Tear down theory, poetic systems No more rules, no more models Genius conjures up
rather than learns Victor Hugo
Csar Graa, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.
E. G. West, Education and the State
When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
When we received Christ, Phil added, all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is merely relative, is asking you not to believe him. So dont.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
©2008 Christopher Chantrill
mysql close 0