How the ACA Could Collapse

Court cases involving religion have a way of stopping big social legislation. 

By Amity Shlaes

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 23, 2014

Kathleen Sebelius

Some time in the coming months, the Supreme Court will hand down its opinion in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, the case of the retailer that claims that its religious freedom or that of its employees is violated by contraceptive coverage required as part of the Affordable Care Act. The attitude of the health-care act’s supporters toward such cases is irritation. How dare a little religious case trip up the mighty Affordable Care Act and jeopardize the ACA’s establishment as permanent law of the land?

Cases involving religious details, however, do have a way of stopping big social legislation, and not only because they violate the principles of the religious denominations involved. Regardless of the Court’s decision, even pro-choice Jews, Unitarians, and Muslims may eventually change their views on the ACA precisely because of Hobby Lobby and cases like it.

To see how this might happen, it helps to go back to a case involving a commensurately ambitious piece of legislation, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act.

The National Industrial Recovery Act, like the Affordable Care Act, aimed to do nothing less than change an entire sector of the economy — in that case, the industrial and business sector. After passage in 1933, NIRA created a bureaucracy labeled, in its turn, the National Recovery Administration, or NRA. NRA was hard to contradict: Its leader was a general; its emblem, the bald eagle. “Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to trifle with that bird,” General Hugh Johnson told the public. The courts seemed to agree: Nine in ten NRA cases at first were decided in favor of the government.

NRA administrators led companies in the writing of codes for their respective trades. Like the ACA’s rules, these codes were offered in agonizing and counterintuitive detail. In those days NRA codes mandated minimum wages, minimum prices, new health and safety regulations, and business practices that efficiency experts recommended whether or not firms themselves saw their logic.

Just as the ACA stumbled over its own website this past winter, the NRA stumbled over it own forms and names, which were long enough to provoke ridicule. The name of the code that governed a family of Brooklyn chicken butchers called Schechter, for example, was “The Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry for the Metropolitan Area In and About New York.” Nonetheless, as with the Affordable Care Act today, a general wait-and-see attitude prevailed. In 1933 and 1934 conservatives, mostly jurists, might protest that the NRA was too intrusive. But the rebuttal would come: “Intrude upon what? The Depression?” At a time when two in ten were unemployed, the country thought it had nothing to lose.

One of the many firms the NRA investigated was ALA Schechter Poultry, a Brooklyn butcher shop where authorities found numerous violations of the poultry code. After the Schechters were convicted in lower courts, the authorities grew increasingly confident that Schechter would be the case in which the Supreme Court would confirm the constitutionality of their law and the New Deal. Then as now, a kind of assumption, or at least a pretense, was at work. People pretended that the fact that the Schechters were Jewish and that the butcher shop they ran was kosher were ancillary details, a kind of coincidence, or even an annoyance.

But the fact that these particular butchers observed kashruth, the Jewish body of laws involving food, was not a coincidence of this case. It was causal. This was the early 1930s, after all. These were immigrants in an industry that had already seen convictions for racketeering. One could suggest they were the Jewish equivalent of Al Capone. The immigrants’ lawyers were not likely to be a match for the government’s untouchables, the legal-powerhouse solicitor general, Donald Richberg, and his talented deputy, Walter Lyman Rice (Harvard Law). A smelly business, a poultry butcher shop would be unattractive to the public. The pro-Roosevelt journalists could make a funny story out of the pathetic little immigrants with their chickens, and they did.

The distingushed columnist Drew Pearson (Phillips Exeter, Swarthmore, American Friends Service Committee) titled his book chapter on the Schechter case “Joseph and His Brethren” and wrote mockingly of the Schechters’ attorney, Joe Heller (Brooklyn Law). “In his Brooklyn Hebrew accent he told the jury how he had known the Schechter boys since they were children,” Pearson wrote of the lawyer. The government attorney could suggest, and did, that such a company’s practices were antiquated and that poultrymen endangered public health either by ignoring Jewish law or by enforcing it imperfectly. 

Perhaps the Schechters were hypocrites, as it is being suggested the Hobby Lobby proprietors are. Very early on, indeed, the federal prosecutors on the Schechter case began to contend that the Jews had broken their own religious law by selling many sick chickens.

But this contempt backfired, just as contempt for Christian pro-life culture may backfire on the government in Hobby Lobby. That is because the exposure the Schechters’ case got was extensive. The public, if it cared to know, learned that the butchers worked on Sundays but not Saturdays, that they allowed the customers to pick their chickens from the coop (another NRA violation), that their butchers had special Jewish titles — they were called “shochet” or “shochtim.” All this was transcribed in the newspapers. And that exposure gave the public time to think about what they were observing.

What was evident was that two large bodies of law were clashing. On the one hand was the elaborate and new NRA poultry code. On the other hand there was the code of the Jewish dietary law, based on the Bible itself. In a contest between NIRA (48 stat. 195) and Deuteronomy (14:21), perhaps Deuteronomy had more authority. The government had its health inspectors, but who were they to go up against Maimonides himself, who had proclaimed that Jews were forbidden to serve “unwholesome” food? As it turned out, the Schechters had not sold much, if any, bad meat — there was no actionable “sick chicken” in the Sick Chicken Case.

In the Supreme Court arguments, the standard jurisprudential challenges involving the Commerce Clause and delegation were standard. Violation of those principles turned the justices against the NRA. But what had also become clear to the justices and the public was that the Schechters were simple businesspeople. By now it was 1935, and recovery had commenced; the country understood that such businesses were needed if the recovery was to continue. When the Schechters’ lawyer, that same Heller, showed how ludicrous the regulations for chicken selection were, the justices and the whole room laughed. The same kind of slapstick humor that had worked against the butchers before now worked for them. Even the justices got in on the wordplay, writing in their 9–0 finding against the NRA that the Schechter case showed that not only the poultry code but also the entire NRA corpus must collapse, “bone and sinew.”

The best explanation for the shift in opinion is that such conflicts give the public a chance to consider what it is the government is intruding into or impinging on — not just a vacuum, but the private sphere, the personal sphere, the business sphere, and, yes, the sphere of faith. The spectacle of that intrusion is not easily forgotten once perceived. The chicken of daily business life and ritual can, from time to time, vanquish the eagle.

— Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

Paul Krugman’s Solar Delusions

Solar is getting cheaper, but it can never be a big reducer of carbon emissions

By Robert Bryce

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 22, 2014

Paul Krugman (Credit: Reuters/Brendan Mcdermid)

Solar energy can solve global warming. That’s what Paul Krugman claims in his April 18 column in the New York Times, “Salvation Gets Cheap.”

Krugman extolled “the incredible recent decline in the cost of renewable energy, solar power in particular.” He used to dismiss the claim that renewable energy would be a major source of global energy “as hippie-dippy wishful thinking.” But now, he says, thanks to the falling price of renewable energy, the process of decarbonization can be accelerated and “drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are now within fairly easy reach.”

Solar is getting cheaper. And solar capacity is growing rapidly. But Krugman is still wrong. Solar won’t result in “drastic cuts” in greenhouse-gas emissions for two simple reasons: scale and cost.

Before going further, let me be clear: I’m bullish on solar. I’ve invested in solar. A decade ago, I paid to have 3,200 watts of solar panels installed on my roof. Why? Simple: I got a big subsidy. Austin Energy paid two-thirds of the cost of my $23,000 system, and those panels now provide about 30 percent of the electricity my family and I consume.

I will also gladly stipulate that Krugman is right about the plummeting cost of solar. In 1980, the average global cost of a solar photovoltaic module (which converts sunlight into electricity) was about $23 per watt. Today, it’s less than $1 per watt. Those falling costs are helping accelerate solar deployment. Between 2007 and 2012, according to BP, global solar capacity grew ten-fold and now stands at about 100,000 megawatts.

But that torrid growth doesn’t spell the end of hydrocarbons. Even if we forget the incurable intermittency of solar energy — which requires grid operators to have stand-by conventional generation capacity (from natural gas, coal, or nuclear) available for periods when the sun isn’t shining — the reason why cheaper solar panels won’t lead to major cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions is that solar’s contribution remains infinitesimally small.

Between 2007 and 2012, the same period during which solar capacity grew tenfold, global coal consumption rose by the equivalent of more than 10 million barrels of oil per day. Meanwhile, in 2012, the contribution of global solar production was equivalent to roughly 400,000 barrels of oil a day.

Put another way, over the past half decade or so, just the growth in coal use is equal to about 25 times the contribution now being made by all of the world’s solar projects. And the coal-fired power plants that have been built over the past few years are likely to run for decades.  

Why is coal use soaring around the world? Because demand for electricity is soaring. Since 1985, global electricity production has been growing by an average of about 450 terawatt-hours per year. The International Energy Agency expects global electricity use to continue growing by about that same amount every year through 2035.

Germany has more installed solar-energy capacity that any other country, with about 33,000 megawatts of installed photovoltaic panels. In 2012, those panels produced 28 terawatt-hours of electricity.

Just to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand by using solar energy alone would require installing 16 times as much photovoltaic capacity as all of Germany’s existing capacity — every year. 

Despite the math, Krugman has been hyping solar for years. Back in 2011, Krugman claimed that we are “on the cusp of an energy transformation driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power.”

Sure, the costs of solar are falling, but it still remains far more expensive than coal, natural gas, or nuclear. Last week, the Energy Information Administration released its latest estimates for the cost of new electricity-generation capacity. By 2019, the agency projects, the cost of one megawatt-hour of electricity produced from solar photovoltaics will be $130. The same amount of electricity produced from natural gas will cost about half as much, $66, while a megawatt-hour of energy produced from a conventional coal-fired plant will cost $96. Nuclear, at $96 per megawatt-hour, will also remain less expensive than solar.

To bolster his claim that solar can save the world from global warming, Krugman cites the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying that the new document “asserts that the economic impact” of drastically overhauling our energy and power systems would “be surprisingly small” and would “basically amount to a rounding error, around 0.06 percent per year.”

But Krugman neglects to mention the outlandish assumptions the IPCC made in making its cost estimate. Those assumptions: “All of the countries of the world begin mitigation immediately, there is a single global carbon price, and all key technologies are available.”

A single global carbon price? If there’s one clear message from the last decade or so of climate-change meetings in places like Copenhagen, Bonn, Durbin, and elsewhere, it’s this: The countries of the world will not agree to a carbon tax. Hell, we can’t even get universal agreement to ban land mines, and yet the IPCC is making cost projections based on a universal price on carbon!

If Krugman and the IPCC scientists think that the transition to an economy based on renewable energy will be cheap, they haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in Europe. 

In Spain, subsidies for renewables have resulted in some $35 billion in governmental debt that must now be retired. Since 2000, Germany alone has spent about $100 billion on renewable energy, and Germany’s environment minister recently estimated that the country may have to spend as much as $1.3 trillion over the next 25 years as it attempts to reach its targets of producing 35 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

Krugman may not want to admit it, but here’s the truth: For all of its merits and rapidly declining cost, solar energy cannot even keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, much less replace significant amounts of hydrocarbons or allow “drastic cuts” in carbon dioxide emissions.

Climate change is among the most difficult issues of our time. If we are going to be serious about it addressing it, we have to be serious about the low-carbon sources that can provide the vast quantities of energy that the world demands at prices consumers can afford. Yes, solar will play a role in the years ahead. But the fuels of the future are N2N: natural gas to nuclear.

— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His fifth book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, will be published May 13. 

Cliven Bundy and The Rural Way

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On April 20, 2014 @ 6:26 pm In Agriculture,Culture,Politics | 22 Comments

http://pjmedia.com/

Frank Hanson, my grandfather, riding Paint in Kingsburg, California, in 1959.

I’m sure that Cliven Bundy ^[1] probably could have cut a deal with the Bureau of Land Management and should have. Of course, it’s never wise to let a federal court order hang over your head. And certainly we cannot have a world of Cliven Bundys if a legal system is to function.

In a practical sense, I also know that if I were to burn brush on a no-burn day, or toss an empty pesticide container in the garbage bin, or shoot a coyote too near the road, I would incur the wrath of the government in a way someone does not who dumps a stripped stolen auto (two weeks ago) in my vineyard, or solvents, oil, and glass (a few months ago), or rips out copper wire from the pump for the third time (last year). Living in a Winnebago with a porta-potty and exposed Romex in violation of zoning statutes for many is not quite breaking the law where I live; having a mailbox five inches too high for some others certainly is.

So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.

Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert. How strange, then, at this late postmodern date, for someone like Bundy on his horse still to be playing the law-breaking maverick Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in (the David Miller, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Abbey effort) Lonely Are the Brave.

But the interest in Mr. Bundy’s case is not about legal strategies in revolving fiscal disagreements with the federal government.

Instead, we all have followed Mr. Bundy for three reasons.

One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada. Note that “federal” and “government” are the key words and yet are abstractions. Rather, a few thousands unelected employees — in the BLM, EPA, Defense Department, and other alphabet soup agencies — can pretty much do what they want on the land they control. And note, this is not quite the case in Silicon Valley or Manhattan or Laguna Beach. The danger can be summed up by a scene I see about once a month on a Fresno freeway: a decrepit truck stopped by the California Highway Patrol for having inadequate tarps on a trailer of green clippings, just as a new city garbage truck speeds by, with wet garbage flying over the median. Who will police the police?

Two, this administration has a long record of not following the law — picking and choosing when and how to enforce immigration statutes, depending on the particular dynamics of the next election; picking and choosing which elements of Obamacare  to enforce, again depending on perceived political advantage; and picking and choosing when to go after coal companies, or when not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or when to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, or when to allow Lois Lerner to destroy the credibility of the IRS for partisan advantage.

In other words, the Obama administration regularly breaks the law as it sees fit. So we wonder why a federal agency sends out swarms of armed security agents to the empty desert on behalf of a tortoise, when it could just as easily storm Jay Carney’s press conference and demand that the president promise to enforce the Affordable Care Act. Or start apprehending those who are not just violating immigration law, but also serially signing false federal affidavits or providing employers with fraudulent identities.

Finally, Bundy, for all his contradictions, is a throwback to a different age. As the photo atop this article suggests, I had a Bundy-like Swedish grandfather — gassed in the Meuse-Argonne ^[2] and left with charred lungs — who became a sort of recluse. He broke horses for a living and in his long widowhood survived on his chickens, goats, rabbits, cows, and sheep, in subsistence fashion from 40 acres. He taught me how to dress out a pig, skin goats, and shoot. He also gave me lessons about the world of riding bareback on matched mules. He slept with a bottle of port on his nightstand and a loaded .30-40 Krag leaning against the headboard.

When we acted up, he “locked up” his grandchildren for ten minutes in his six-foot high birdcage with the quail and pheasants. I can remember his Swedish accented “eye yeye yi” each time one of us got bucked off his horse (one was called “Paint,” of course). He raised Fox Terriers for sale with names like “Rex” and “Skipper.” Frank looked like a Cliven Bundy, or a Slim Pickens (whom he knew well as a fellow Kingsburgian cowboy), and sounded exactly like Douglas Spencer (“Swede”) in Shane or John Qualen (“Lars”) in The Searchers.

My other grandfather was a refined Welsh version of the rural way, but no less independent as a small farmer who worked all his land himself until he quit one day at 86 and died that night in the hospital. He was as wiry as my other Swedish grandfather was a hulk. The one was a master horse rider, the other an expert at plowing with horses.  Growing up with them, I never much learned about the secrets of “business” or “how to make it” (sometimes I wish I had). Making it, as I at sixty look back at them now, was probably defined as talking bluntly, gaining a reputation for “straight shooting,” paying all your bills on time, never making excuses for failure, and in general being loyal to friends and of some worry to enemies. To understand Bundy’s fatalism is to appreciate the rural way and its polite contempt for the softer world of the city and the mush that now passes for making it. Losing nobly was preferable to winning badly — Old Ajax to the core.

So we are not threatened by the likes of Cliven Bundy. Instead, the scary lawlessness extends to the bureaucracy itself, given that under Obama the government is becoming tainted and an ideological tool of social transformation.  After just six years, we shrug that, of course, the IRS is biased. The Justice Department is politicized; ask Dinesh D’Souza or the AP reporters. No need to mention the NSA. The EPA makes laws up as ideologically required ^[3]. No one believes the State Department that in the weeks before the election a video-caused “riot” led to expert jihadists zeroing in with their GPS-guided mortars on a CIA annex in Benghazi. And so on.

Bundy is just different from what is now America — he looks different, talks differently, and dresses differently. These are the superficial veneers to someone who lives mostly through different premises from those of Pajama Boy nation ^[4], the world of Jay Carney and his cute Stalinist posters ^[5], the cosmos of Anita Dunn and her Mao gushes, or the metrosexual networking that is the gospel of Silicon Valley or the DC beltway.  Few of us rely on human muscle anymore to survive one more day. Fewer of those who do combine that with horse-power, and its world of leather and wood and rope. Bundy is self-employed, without an SEIU union, a PERS pension, or a GS-15 health plan.

Given all that, I suggest Cliven Bundy is far more endangered than is the desert tortoise, and that his kind will be gone shortly in a way the federally protected tarantula and Gila monster or delta smelt will not. He, not they, is in the federal crosshairs ^[6]. So, yes, I can make some allowances for the nihilism of Cliven Bundy. We could not live in a modern, high-tech world only of Cliven Bundys, but perhaps we cannot live in a world without a few of them now and then to remind us of what we have become.

Almost everything, natural and human, has conspired against these sorts: a hail storm that wrecked the plum crop two days before harvest, or a swaggering psychopathic neighbor who stole the irrigation canal water until stopped, or a no-good who filed a phony workers’ compensation claim for a stubbed toe, or an ancient wobbly grinder that sliced off a finger, or the thieving Packing Company that always sent back slips each year saying “45% cull rate,” whether the fruit was small or big, scarred or smooth, ripe, overripe, or green.

To be a cattleman in the Nevada desert in America of 2013 is to live on Mars, or rather to live among 24/7 enemies, human and animal alike. How a man survives from cattle ranching on leased land in the Nevada badlands I cannot imagine, but I wonder nonetheless and in that amazement wish to see him continue.

My cowboy grandfather, Frank Hanson, died at 80, while Reese Davis, my maternal one, died at 86, in a world where the former never, until his last day, went to the doctor after his year in a Belgium hospital (he was a Lewis machine gunner before the gassing), and the latter went just twice. Theirs was a pre-cholesterol-testing, no-colonoscopy world, in which you just chugged on eating the wrong food, getting up to hard physical work each morning until you “got a cancer” or “the ticker quit” and at your funeral the neighbors said “ya, he worked hard” and went home. I remember the oncologist saying to my father about his dead father, “Are you sure he didn’t smoke? Take a look at those burned lungs on the X-ray.” And my dad curtly answered the specialist, “That’s what mustard gas does.”

The point is Mr. Bundy is no Rahm Emanuel, Al Gore, or Jay Carney. He is no Jay-Z or Sean Penn. He is a world away from the Kardashians and the BMW meets Mercedes crowd of the California coastal corridor or the psychodramas of brats at Dartmouth. Bundy does not have the white privilege that those who have it — mostly liberal, wealthy, and seeking an apartheid existence — damn in others.

Money is not Bundy’s point.  Pleasing Harry Reid or the federal bureaucracy is not either. Making a living from the scrub of a desert by providing people good food probably is.

Grant him that. He’s our past, Harry Reid and the bunch in Washington our future. To paraphrase the ancients, sometimes we’d rather be wrong with Cliven Bundy than right with Harry Reid — and the SWAT teams that will revisit Mr. Bundy and his clan very, very soon ^[7] to enforce a dispute over grazing fees and insensitivity to a tortoise.

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Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/cliven-bundy-and-the-rural-way/

URLs in this post:

[1] Cliven Bundy: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/13/is-harry-reid-involved-seven-answers-to-seven-questions-youre-probably-asking-right-now-about-the-nevada-rancher-situation/

[2] Meuse-Argonne: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse-Argonne_Offensive

[3] as ideologically required: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/03/18/of-friendly-lawsuits-and-potemkin-protests/

[4] Pajama Boy nation: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/12/20/oh-that-death-of-the-grown-up-2/

[5] his cute Stalinist posters: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/14/what-if-the-presidents-press-secretary-had-nazi-propaganda-on-his-walls/

[6] is in the federal crosshairs: http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/18/protip-from-reid-bundy-supporters-are-domestic-terrorists-yknow/

[7] very, very soon: http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/15/harry-reid-on-the-bundy-ranch-standoff-this-aint-over/

The United States of SWAT?

Military-style units from government agencies are wreaking havoc on non-violent citizens. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 18, 2014

Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch.

They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces.

“Law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier,” journalist Radley Balko writes in his 2013 bookRise of the Warrior Cop. “The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop — armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”

The proliferation of paramilitary federal SWAT teams inevitably brings abuses that have nothing to do with either drugs or terrorism. Many of the raids they conduct are against harmless, often innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations.

Take the case of Kenneth Wright of Stockton, Calif., who was “visited” by a SWAT team from the U.S. Department of Education in June 2011. Agents battered down the door of his home at 6 a.m., dragged him outside in his boxer shorts, and handcuffed him as they put his three children (ages 3, 7, and 11) in a police car for two hours while they searched his home. The raid was allegedly intended to uncover information on Wright’s estranged wife, Michelle, who hadn’t been living with him and was suspected of college financial-aid fraud.

The year before the raid on Wright, a SWAT team from the Food and Drug Administration raided the farm of Dan Allgyer of Lancaster, Pa. His crime was shipping unpasteurized milk across state lines to a cooperative of young women with children in Washington, D.C., called Grass Fed on the Hill. Raw milk can be sold in Pennsylvania, but it is illegal to transport it across state lines. The raid forced Allgyer to close down his business.

Brian Walsh, a senior legal analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it is inexplicable why so many federal agencies need to be battle-ready: “If these agencies occasionally have a legitimate need for force to execute a warrant, they should be required to call a real law-enforcement agency, one that has a better sense of perspective. The FBI, for example, can draw upon its vast experience to determine whether there is an actual need for a dozen SWAT agents.”

Since 9/11, the feds have issued a plethora of homeland-security grants that encourage local police departments to buy surplus military hardware and form their own SWAT units. By 2005, at least 80 percent of towns with a population between 25,000 and 50,000 people had their own SWAT team. The number of raids conducted by local police SWAT teams has gone from 3,000 a year in the 1980s to over 50,000 a year today.

Once SWAT teams are created, they will be used. Nationwide, they are used for standoffs, often serious ones, with bad guys. But at other times they’ve been used for crimes that hardly warrant military-style raids. Examples include angry dogs, domestic disputes, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. In 2010, a Phoenix, Ariz., sheriff’s SWAT team that included a tank and several armored vehicles raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank, driven by the newly deputized action-film star Steven Seagal, plowed right into Llovera’s house. The incident was filmed and, together with footage of Seagal-accompanied immigration raids, was later used for Seagal’s A&E TV law-enforcement reality show.

The crime committed by Jesus Llovera was staging cockfights. During the sheriff’s raid, his dog was killed, and later all of his chickens were put to sleep.

Many veteran law-enforcement figures have severe qualms about the turn police work is taking. One retired veteran of a large metropolitan police force told me: “I was recently down at police headquarters for a meeting. Coincidently, there was a promotion ceremony going on and the SWAT guys looked just like members of the Army, except for the police shoulder patches. Not an image I would cultivate. It leads to a bad mindset.”

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution’s Third Amendment, against the quartering of troops in private homes, was part of an overall reaction against the excesses of Britain’s colonial law enforcement. “It wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia,” Balko writes. “It was England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement.”

There are things that can be done to curb the abuses without taking on the politically impossible job of disbanding SWAT units. The feds should stop shipping military vehicles to local police forces. Federal SWAT teams shouldn’t be used to enforce regulations, but should focus instead on potentially violent criminals. Cameras mounted on the dashboards of police cars have both brought police abuses to light and exonerated officers who were falsely accused of abuse. SWAT-team members could be similarly equipped with helmet cameras.

After all, if taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill and cede ground on their Fourth Amendment rights, they have the right to a transparent, accountable record of just what is being done in their name.

– John Fund is national-affairs columnist at National Review Online.

The Terrifying Implications of the IRS Abuse-DOJ Connection

Posted By Bryan Preston On April 16, 2014 @ 11:37 am In Corruption,Crime,Freedom,media,Politics | 57 Comments

http://pjmedia.com/

Thank God for Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George. His investigation of what turned out to be the IRS abuse scandal may well have saved the Constitution and the nation.

For his fair and impartial investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s abuse of Americans who dissent from President Obama’s agenda, Democrats have called for an investigation of him. George should not be investigated, but perhaps the Democrats who want him investigated — Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Matt Cartwright (D-PA) — should be. Their call for an investigation of the investigator might constitute interference with the ongoing investigation of the IRS abuse scandal. That would be obstruction of justice, in what may turn out to be the most widespread and damaging scandal in American history.

The implications of today’s email disclosure are stunning and terrifying.

Lois Lerner intended to use her position atop the IRS’ tax exempt approval office to coordinate the prosecution of political speech. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder had at least tentatively bought into that. The Federal Elections Commission was being roped in as well. Lerner’s emails prove that beyond doubt.

Democrats in Congress were involved. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) appears to have led the anti-constitutional attack on free speech in the House. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) led it from the Senate.

Two days before Lerner was forced to publicly disclose the scandal, she was moving forward with an insidious plan to stamp out conservatives and Tea Party activists’ ability to organize and raise money, by working with the IRS commissioner’s office and the Department of Justice. At the same time, there was no plan for any government crackdown on groups who agreed with President Obama. The traffic was entirely one-way. It was nakedly political, and everyone involved knew it. They also had reason to believe that they would succeed, or they would not have engaged in it. DOJ would serve two roles: Prosecute conservatives, and protect the bureaucrats who were pushing those prosecutions.

Was there a full-fledged plan to use the full power of the federal government to take the abuse, delay and invasive questioning of conservatives to a new level after President Obama’s re-election?
Was there a plan to criminalize the mere act of being a conservative activist? Was there a plan to drum up false charges of “lying” on applications in order to put conservatives in jail?

Lois Lerner’s communications with the Justice Department strongly suggest that there was. The disclosure provides strong, compelling evidence that Obama’s re-election had emboldened many, including government bureaucrats like Lois Lerner, to believe that they could move forward unchallenged to criminalize Americans for exercising their constitutional rights.

I also believe that the players in this scam had identified a target to single out, harass, investigate, silence, destroy, and send to prison. Her name is Catherine Engelbrecht.

Lerner’s email on March 27, 2013, suggests that there was an idea moving within the bureaucracy to hit one or just a few Americans, and prosecute and imprison them, to scare others out of political engagement.

“One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing the stuff,” Lerner wrote to IRS staff. “So, don’t be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity.”

It was all about conservative 501(c)(4) orgs. Liberal groups were left entirely alone. This was to be a leftwing reign of prosecutorial terror.

Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010 and filed for tax exempt status with the IRS that year. She was subjected to invasive questioning while Lerner’s IRS group held up her investigation. Soon thereafter, several executive branch agencies descended on her, her family and her business. The ATF, OSHA, the FBI all harassed her. OSHA fined her $25,000 for minor violations.

Fast forward to 2012. True the Vote is going strong, despite the IRS holding up its tax exempt application. It is making a difference. States are adopting voter ID and other election integrity improvements. Local groups are organizing to receive True the Vote’s poll training. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and his staff communicate with Lerner at the IRS, in what now appears to be a fishing expedition to find something — anything — to use against Engelbrecht.

Why Engelbrecht? True the Vote is not the largest activist group out there, and it is not partisan. It advocates election integrity legislation and it trains people to help ensure that our elections are fair and free from corruption. As such, it backs measures like voter photo ID. Voter ID is supported by about 70% of the American people. It’s not controversial, despite the left’s efforts to make it so.
Many Democrats including President Obama oppose such measures. Holder’s DOJ has even sued Texas to stop its voter ID law.

Rep. Cummings sought dirt on Engelbrecht and True the Vote not just to discredit it, and thereby halt election integrity legislation. It’s now clear that the next step, after re-election, was to turn activism for election integrity itself into a criminal offense. Not directly, of course. Congress would pass no law banning anyone from advocating for election integrity or voter ID or anything. But destroying Engelbrecht would serve the same end. No one would dare stand up for her if she faced prison. No one would dare step up and organize the next True the Vote election integrity group on the national level.

So let’s look at True the Vote’s “crime,” and how the Democrats intended to punish Engelbrecht and what it all means.

There was a plan by Democrats, in Congress and infested in the government bureaucracy, to use Barack Obama’s second term to destroy freedom of speech and the right to dissent, through prosecution and the fear of prosecution. Lerner’s emails disclosed today prove that. Only Russell George’s unstoppable disclosure forced her to shut it down and issue a modified, limited hangout to control the damage that was about to be done to her, the IRS and possibly the entire Democratic Party and the Obama White House. Lerner pleaded the Fifth Amendment to protect herself, and many others.

The purpose of the plan that Lerner was moving on was to stifle dissent and give Democrats total control of Congress in 2014, giving President Obama full control of all of government for his last two years in office.

Alongside that plan, was a plan to destroy anyone who advocated for election integrity legislation, legislation which gained steam and widespread passage at the state level after the 2010 mid-term elections. What this tells us is that the Democrats, at least some Democrats, fully intended to weaponize government against dissent while it watered down election law and used lawfare via the Justice Department to damage and even remove state-level election law improvements.

Criminalizing conservative activism was about consolidating the Democrats’ 2012 gains and winning back the House in 2014. Destroying voter ID by whatever means Democrats deemed necessary was about 2016. There’s only one reason to make it easier to commit election fraud. You only do that if you intend to commit election fraud.

And after that? Well, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants a law abridging the freedom of the press. And there’s always another tragedy to exploit to attack the Second Amendment.

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Article printed from The PJ Tatler: http://pjmedia.com/tatler

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/16/the-terrifying-implications-of-the-irs-abuse-doj-connection/

The Many Ways in Which The New Book About the Duke Lacrosse Case is Wrong

BY STUART TAYLOR JR.

http://www.newrepublic.com/

April 15, 2014

The most striking thing about William D. Cohan's revisionist, guilt-implying new book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud is what's not in it.

The best-selling, highly successful author's 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced then–North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone.

Unless, that is, one sees as new evidence Cohan's own stunningly credulous interviews with three far-from-credible participants in the drama who themselves add no significant new evidence beyond their counterfactual personal opinions.

They are Mike Nifong, the disbarred prosecutor and convicted liar; Crystal Mangum, the mentally unbalanced rape complainant and (now) convicted murderer, who has dramatically changed her story more than a dozen times; and Robert Steel, the former Duke chairman and Goldman Sachs vice chairman, who helped lead the university's notorious rush to judgment against its own lacrosse players.

Cohan is not deterred by the fact that Nifong admitted and Steel said, quite unequivocally, both in April 2007, that the lacrosse players were innocent of committing any crimes during the March 13–14, 2006 spring break party at their captains' house, where Mangum and Kim Roberts were hired to strip. Nifong said on July 26, 2007 that "there is no credible evidence" that any of the three indicted lacrosse players committed any crime involving Mangum. Steel said on April 11, 2007 that Cooper's exoneration of them that day "explicitly and unequivocally establishes [their] innocence." Nifong has since all but retracted his admission and Steel has waffled on his.

Cohan duly but inconspicuously includes these statements in his semi-free-association narrative. At the same time, he implies dozens of times that one or more players sexually assaulted Mangum in a bathroom during the party. In recent interviews, Cohan has made his thesis more explicit: “I am convinced, frankly, that this woman suffered a trauma that night” and that "something did happen in that bathroom,"Cohan told Joe Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer. In an April 8 Bloomberg TVinterview, he ascribed the same view to his three main sources: “Between Nifong, Crystal, and Bob Steel, the consensus seems to be something happened in that bathroom that no one would be proud of.” He said much the same on MSNBC's fawning "Morning Joe" the next day.

Cohan also asserted in a Cosmopolitan interview that Mangum now "describes it as somebody shoving a broomstick up her. All I know is that the police believed her, district attorney Mike Nifong believed her, and the rape nurse Tara Levicy believed her." This seems doubtful, since none of Mangum's many stories in March 2006 and for years thereafter mentioned anything about a broomstick being used to assault her, a scenario also ruled out by the physical evidence.

(Disclosure: I coauthored, with KC Johnson, a 2007 book concluding that all credible evidence points to the conclusion that no Duke lacrosse player ever assaulted or sexually abused Crystal Mangum in any way. I have also become friendly with some of their parents and lawyers. I thus have both a lot of relevant information and an obvious interest in discrediting Cohan's book. I have no complaint about its references to me.)

The rape-by-broomstick and other Cohan innuendos and assertions are not supported—indeed, they are powerfully refuted—by the long-established facts that his own book repeats, not to mention some facts that he studiously leaves out.

This has not prevented an amazing succession of puff-piece reviews in The Wall Street Journal, FT Magazine, the Daily News, Salon, the Economist, the Daily Beast, and The New York Times, whose reviewer (unlike the others cited above) at least knew enough to write that "Cohan hasn’t unearthed new evidence" and that "[t]here is still nothing credible to back up the account of an unreliable witness."

Some of the most sensational supposed revelations in Cohan's "definitive, magisterial account" (as touted in Scribner's press package) were proved false within two days of his April 8 publication date. 

• In an April 9 email responding to an inquiry from me, Robert Steel contradicted Cohan's claim that Steel thinks "that something happened in that bathroom that no one would be proud of." Steel told me: "I have no view now, nor have ever had a view of what if anything happened in the bathroom. Period." He added that he had never used, or heard, the words used by Cohan.
• James Coman, the veteran prosecutor who led Attorney General Cooper’s reinvestigation of the case, has denounced as "figments of [Nifong's] imagination" Nifong's assertion that Cooper had "sandbagged" Coman. To the contrary, Coman told reporter Joe Neff that, after an in-depth reexamination of the evidence, he and his colleague Mary Winstead insisted that Cooper declare the players innocent, and Cooper agreed. Cohan appears never to have called Coman or Winstead to check the accuracy of Nifong's self-serving speculation.
• Phil Seligmann, father of wrongly indicted lacrosse player Reade Seligmann, denounced as "patently false" Cohan's claim that the Seligmanns had never paid Reade's first two lawyers, Buddy Conner and the late Kirk Osborn, for any of their work. "We made hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal payments to Kirk and Buddy," for all the work they did, Seligmann said. He added that Cohan had never contacted him or Reade to check his false report.
• Cohan's claim that Duke University paid $60 million in 2007 to the three wrongly indicted lacrosse players to settle their threatened lawsuit against the university is flat-out false. The actual figure is widely known to have been one-third as much, as stated in more reliable reports. These reports also give the lie to Cohan's wild, book-promoting claims that the lacrosse case has cost Duke "near $100 million" in settlements and legal and PR fees.

 Sensational smears based on false information aside, the absence of new evidence does not deter Cohan from seeking to spin his own tendentious characterizations of old evidence—often contradicted by other evidence elsewhere in the book—into dark Nifongesque innuendos of sexual assault, or "something."

Along the way, Cohan repeatedly smears the falsely accused “Duke lax bros,” as he mockingly calls them on Twitter. Sometimes he disparages them in his own voice (as in, "the festering wound that was Duke lacrosse"). Sometimes he happily quotes Nifong, left-leaning professors (one of whom calls the players "arrogant, callous, dismissive"), and journalists. Cohan does not cite many specifics other than the lacrosse players' admittedly bad (but not very unusual) record of binge drinking and noisy parties at rented houses in a residential neighborhood near the campus. And sometimes, just for balance, he says nice things, especially about the only team member who gave him an interview.

He deprecates as "perfunctory" the conclusion of a committee chaired by liberal, black law professor James Coleman that the lacrosse players were generally polite, nondisruptive students who had "performed well academically," behaved in an "exemplary" fashion on trips, and been "respectful of people who serve the team," from bus drivers and airline personnel to the groundskeeper.

In a remarkably content-free exercise in character assassination by proxy, Cohan approvingly quotes Nifong’s attacks on all of the former DA's major antagonists—without, it appears, seeking responses from any of them, excepting Roy Cooper, who refused to talk to Cohan. With seeming approval, Cohan quotes Nifong trashing Cooper for "selling [his] soul to the devil" by exonerating the lacrosse players. He quotes Nifong denouncing as "corrupt" Superior Court Judge Osmond Smith. (Smith had sentenced Nifong to a night in jail for lying to him in court.) Corrupt? Nifong explains that he was told by someone who was told by someone that someone else had "overheard" Judge Smith at a wedding saying something that seemed to prejudge the case.

Cohan also endorses Nifong's attack on the three-person, North Carolina State Bar disciplinary panel that disbarred Nifong after a five-day trial. Nifong calls the panel a "kangaroo court" engaged in what Cohan calls a "sacrificial slaughter." The panel had found Nifong guilty of violating the state's ethical rules by his aggressive media campaign, early in the case, to tar the lacrosse players as racist rapists and "hooligans"; by seeking to hide highly exculpatory DNA evidence from the defense; and by lying to Judge Smith about that evidence. Cohan does not put the slightest dent into the overwhelming evidence supporting the actions of Cooper, Judge Smith, and the state bar panel.1

Cohan devotes dozens of pages to describing Nifong—and quoting his self-descriptions—in mostly glowing, if sometimes unintentionally ironic, terms, as in "Nifong developed a lifelong disdain for bullies."2 Indeed, Cohan's attitude toward Nifong's proven, extreme abuses of prosecutorial power is so astonishingly benign as to almost imply that because poor black kids often don't get fair treatment from the criminal justice system, rich (and not so rich) white kids should not get fair treatment either—no matter how innocent.

Cohan offers a breathtakingly misinformed (to put it charitably) argument dismissing as "a red herring" the charge that Nifong had hidden from defense lawyers exculpatory evidence that the DNA of four unidentified males (not Duke lacrosse players) and sperm from her boyfriend was found in or on Mangum. Why does Cohan deem it a “red herring”? First, he argues that Nifong did not try to hide the four males' DNA. But mainly, he asserts that "it didn't matter" because "Nifong had tried—and won—many rape cases without DNA evidence."

Perhaps he had, either before DNA evidence was available or in cases in which its presence or absence proved little. But DNA was dispositive in the Duke lacrosse case.The absence of lacrosse players' DNA on or in her body or clothing proved the innocence of the three indicted defendants. It's almost inconceivable that they could have brutally raped, sodomized, and ejaculated in Mangum for anything close to 30 minutes, as she originally claimed, without leaving DNA. The evidence of the four unidentified males' DNA was damaging to Mangum’s credibility, showing that she had concealed recent sexual activity from the police, among other points.

Even Cohan admits that if Nifong had released the state's exculpatory analysis of the DNA evidence as soon as he had it either to the public or to defense lawyers (who would have made it public), it "would likely have doomed Nifong's reelection [sic] effort" and been "the end of the case." (This was the appointed DA's first election.)

None of these actions by Nifong prevent Cohan from presenting him as a person of integrity who had made a few forgivable mistakes in his zeal to champion "my victim," Mangum. While straining to make excuses for Nifong, Cohan sneers repeatedly at the players' defense lawyers, whom he calls "masters at manipulating the media" (in theCosmopolitan interview) for their "shock and awe" campaign and "fat retainers."

Manipulating the media? The defense lawyers' media campaign consisted of making public what Cohan never denies was truthful and probative evidence of innocence. And unless I missed something while slogging through this seemingly endless tome, Cohan does not cite a single intentionally false, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate statement that any defense lawyer for a lacrosse player ever made.

Cohan also seems at times to lose track of the flow of events, repeatedly contradicting on one page claims that he makes elsewhere. On page 572, for example, Cohan states that Nifong "never said he agreed with Cooper's finding of innocence." This flatly contradicts what Cohan writes on the preceding page, where he quotes Nifong's above-referenced July 26, 2007 admission that "there is no credible evidence that [the three indicted players] committed any of the crimes for which they were indicted or any other crimes during the party."

Although Cohan seems to try to libel-proof his book by pasting in, with little analysis, dozens of pages of material favorable to the lacrosse players (as well as much more material hostile to them, and much deadly dull filler), there are some telling omissions. Two come in his discussion of sexual assault nurse Tara Levicy, who—alone among the three doctors and five nurses who interviewed or examined Mangum after she reported to Duke University Hospital as a self-styled rape victim—expressed confidence that Mangum was telling the truth and claimed (falsely) that there was physical evidence to back her up. Levicy was not in charge of the physical exam.

Cohan dismisses claims that Levicy was biased in favor of rape complainants as based on nothing more than her time with Planned Parenthood, her enthusiasm for Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, and her strong feminist convictions. But the defense never attacked her for feminist convictions. It suggested that she was incompetent. And when others (including KC Johnson and me) stressed Levicy's apparent bias, the most important evidence we cited was her highly revealing sworn deposition testimony that she had "never" doubted the truthfulness of any rape complainant and her pattern of changing her own analysis repeatedly to fit Nifong's changing theories of the case. Cohan omits both.

A Scribner-Cohan press release also claims falsely that Levicy's "report of what Mangum told her that night [actually, the next morning] is stunning and has never before been revealed." (Cohan said the same on the April 14 Diane Rehm Show, two days after KC Johnson had exposed it as false on his blog.) In fact, Levicy's report was obtained and summarized in detail more than seven years ago by numerous reporters and authors, including KC Johnson and me, and was publicly discounted as unconvincing by Attorney General Cooper's distinguished investigators.

More generally, after endorsing many times Nifong's assertions that the medical evidence supported Mangum's rape claim, Cohan acknowledges that Cooper's investigators had found that "[n]o medical evidence confirmed her stories." They also found that Levicy had "based her opinion that the exam was consistent with [Mangum's story] largely on [her] demeanor and complaints of pain rather than on objective evidence."

How does Cohan manage to fill 621 pages? He stuffs them with long, long, often repetitive quotations from his interviews with Nifong, news articles, op-ed columns (including two of mine), blog posts, and other previously published remarks. He also goes on for dozens and dozens of pages detailing and lamenting the well-known culture of underage binge drinking, overemphasis on athletics, and flaccid academic standards at Duke and other prestigious colleges.

These temperance lectures would be harmless, and even of some value, but for the author's underlying campaign. He is remarkably indulgent, on the whole, of the disgraceful rush to judgment against the Duke lacrosse players by Robert Steel, by Richard Brodhead, the cowardly Duke president, by other top administrators, and by almost 100 Duke professors.

The great mystery here is why a skillful, highly successful author and journalist would stoop so low. Dreams of a movie deal, perhaps? One also wonders why, to take one of many possible examples, Cohan didn't bother to check his facts with James Coman or Mary Winstead—an elementary precaution for any responsible journalist or author—before trumpeting Nifong's false claim that Cooper had "sandbagged" them when he exonerated the lacrosse players. Was the best-selling author of this "definitive, magisterial account"—which I would call deeply dishonest—afraid of letting stubborn facts spoil sensational stories? 

Stuart Taylor, Jr., a Washington writer and Brookings nonresident senior fellow, coauthored with KC Johnson the 2007 book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.