Thomas Sowell, in a column on January 29, notes that if Hillary Clinton is to be elected this year that would mean something like 24-28 years of two families in the White House (Dr. Sowell miscalculates and says 16-20, but the point is the same): the Clintons and the Bushes.  To their respective critics, both of the last two Presidents have been among the worst in history; if not the worst.  Somehow I suspect that in neither case is this true.

As to President Bush, the most common complaint from the Left is his handling of the war on terror, followed by the fact that he has the gall to cut taxes and not use the surplus to justify even more massive entitlements than he has already supported.  (There are also the standard complaints that he uses God’s name while within the halls of Holy Government, that he doesn’t support with absolute, unwavering fanaticism, the right of women to “choose,” that he has not supported with nearly the same fanaticism minority and gay privileges, etc.)  But the most common complaint is the war. 

There are several problems with this thesis, though.  The first, of course, is that the complainers almost to a man (or woman, as the case may be) believe that an “immoral war” is any in which America does not immediately lay down its arms and capitulate to the nearest convenient genocidal dictator.  These people would have demanded we capitulate to Hitler had Germany not invaded the sovereign territory of Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, all the while breaking his pact with “Uncle Joe” Stalin.  Never mind Japan.  One must consider the source before one makes a judgment on the efficacy of a policy.  That would be like letting cigarette companies decide smoking laws.  

The second, and far more important problem, is that, regardless of who the President was at the time, most of the issues currently facing Mr. Bush would be facing either Al Gore or John Kerry.  September 11^th would have happened regardless of who was in the White House, and anyone who says differently is either grotesquely naïve, or lying through their teeth.  The issue of Iraq, its place in the War on Terror, and its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs – in the existence of which Bill Clinton also firmly believed, mind – would still have to be faced.  Hurricane Katrina would still – RFK Junior’s assertions to the contrary aside – have ravaged New Orleans, the levees would still have broken, and the city would still have flooded.  And FEMA’s response would likely have been the same.  And regardless of what another President would have done differently, it is merely conjecture that the decisions he made would have produced any better results.

From the Right, Mr. Bush’s immigration and spending policies are challenged, and rightly so.  My only concern here is that, based on the current crop of contenders for the GOP nomination, there isn’t anyone seriously running that has a particularly good record on either of those issues.  The politicians are, to a man, out of step with the people on Immigration.  Period.  And there isn’t a politician who successfully makes it to office on a “cut spending” platform.  They all want to spend money to pump up their own constituency, that’s the way of things across the river from where I sit.  The point, and I have one, is that there isn’t a Republican who would have been elected President that would have handled either issue any better that George Bush. 

Republicans and conservatives (I among them) tend to consider Bill Clinton’s administration the most corrupt and scandal-riddled in history.  They who rank Presidents tend to put the scandal-riddled ones at the bottom of the stack (Conveniently placing Republicans Nixon, Grant, and Harding at or near the bottom.)  Under that mindset, Bill Clinton would be so far below the bottom of the barrel that he’d have to climb a mile just to get to the dirt on which the barrel is sitting.  I do not, however, fall into the category of “scandal = bad.”  And a lot of Historians (some probably to justify not putting Clinton a mile under the bottom of the barrel) are starting to come around on that.  Warren Harding, usually considered the worst President in history (excepting W.H. Harrison and Garfield, who would die 1, and 6 months after their respective inaugurations, with Garfield lingering in ill health for two of those six), is getting a new look.  Historians generally agree that he was a fair President in his administrative and executive capabilities, and that he was probably utterly unaware of and almost certainly uncorrupted by the Teapot Dome scandal that came to light after his death in office.  The same assessment holds true for Grant, who had some very corrupt advisors, but he, himself was as clean as a modern surgical theater. 

As I indicated, scandal does not, in and of itself, make a presidency bad.  Bill Clinton was in office during an economic boom.  He did have a hand in balancing the federal budget (though he did it with higher tax increases than were strictly necessary.)  And, while his foreign policy is justifiably criticized as being particularly bad (Somalia, ignoring terrorism for the most part, Bosnia, allegedly failing to “get” bin Laden when he had the chance) one wonders if anyone else would have made different choices given what they knew at the time, and what those choices would have produced.  Again, we can hypothesize all we want, but we really can never actually know. 

This is not to say that either gets my vote as the greatest President ever or in the last 100 years.  As a matter of fact, I’m not a big fan of George Bush, and I’ve said a number of times that I greatly dislike Bill (and Hillary) Clinton, and neither rises out of the middle of the pack in my mind.

If anyone cares, I put Abraham Lincoln at the top of the heap, not because most historians do likewise, but because he had to unite a divided party to decide how to united a deeply divided nation.  He had to deal both with the “Radical” Republicans (abolitionists) who wanted uncompensated emancipation, and severe punishment for the rebellious states, and the “Conservative” wing of the party, that preferred to let the South off easy on both the questions of slavery and reconstruction.  Never mind preventing the Border States (most especially Maryland) from going over to the Confederacy.  He had to fight a war as unpopular as the current war in Iraq while dealing with a Cabinet that saw him as a political neophyte (which was true) whom they could and should manipulate to their own ends (which was not.)  His opponent in 1864 was (a) a former General who was both insubordinate and overly cautious to the point of inaction (and accusations of cowardice), which inaction probably lengthened the war by several years (b) the sort who blames his own failures on others and takes responsibility for nothing but successes in which he is involved and (c) ran at the head of a Democratic party that had a large wing whose main platform was capitulation and “peace at all costs” in an “unwinnable” war.  And he did it successfully enough to win the war, keep the party together, end slavery, and start to get the nation itself back together before he was murdered.  It’s also noteworthy that Lincoln managed to get re-elected at a time when the one-term President was the norm.   

Every year at this time, we have protests, news stories, columns, and the like reminding us of the infamous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.  The Left, as one might expect, considers that decision a watershed moment in US history, with the Court, in its infinite, divine wisdom, granting poor, oppressed women the right to “terminate their pregnancies.”  Of course, such a decision came about at a time of great social confusion and upheaval.  The radical Left (many of whom now run our schools, universities, and governments) originated a number of ideas stemming from the rejection of tradition.  “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was the mantra of the time (said, I think, by someone who was 31 at the time, making it a self-fulfilling prophesy).  The whole idea was to reject traditional values and morals and replace them with a doctrine of selfishness and self gratification.  The “if it feels good, it is good” mentality was pervasive at that time, and abortion “rights” were one natural consequence of the age.

Of course, the Supreme Court is not God, nor is it the Pope.  It is not infallible and cannot logically be considered so even by those who worship it as divine.  The Court, without any change in the Constitution, has reversed itself on segregation, capital punishment, and obscenity laws, just to name a few.  Its decisions can be questioned, and they can be wrong.  And one of the most wrong decisions the Court has ever made was Roe v. Wade.

Some will argue that the Dred Scott v. Sandford case was a horrible miscarriage of justice.  And some of the rhetoric in the decision itself would easily lend credence to that view.  But the case, which upheld the rights of slave owners over those of slaves, was actually legally correct.  In the case (and oversimplifying things a bit) Scott, a slave, had been moved by his owner several times, at one point residing briefly in Illinois and Wisconsin, free states.  If a slave was moved to a free state at the time, he could sue for freedom, and such freedom would be granted.  But Scott was not made aware of this provision (and his owners were under no legal obligation to inform him of this) and he did not sue until he was moved back to Missouri, a slave state.  The courts ruled against Scott as there was no provision in the Missouri or US constitution prohibiting slavery.  While it is true that the decision was not morally correct, and that the language of the decision seems bigoted from our perspective (“blacks cannot be citizens”) the fact of the matter is it was the legally correct decision, and legal correctness is all the court is obliged to uphold.  The decision was made moot by the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution which forbade slavery and protected the citizenship of anyone born within our borders (a provision that has had disastrous unintended consequences vis a vis immigration, but that’s for another day.  And in any event the provision was absolutely necessary and right at the time).

Roe v. Wade is a different animal altogether.  Much hay has been made by supporters of the decision on the idea of privacy rights, the right to choose whether to have children, and the right to practice contraception both before and after conception.  None of these rights exist explicitly or implicitly in the Constitution.  The Court simply based that idea on the “due process” clause in the Constitution, claiming that it includes a right to privacy.  That “due process” is essentially the idea that the government cannot arbitrarily punish people for perceived wrongs never enters into the debate.  If a law is in place, and that law does not contravene any of the natural rights in the Constitution, and that law carries specific punishments for its violation, which punishments are the same regardless of the violator, and the punishments cannot be enforced without the protections afforded the accused (no unreasonable search and seizure, trial by jury, no cruel or unusual punishments, etc.) then due process is followed.  Privacy is not an absolute inviolable right like speech or religion.  If it were, then even warranted searches of private property would be unconstitutional, crimes committed in the privacy of one’s own home (domestic violence, child molestation by parents, child abuse, etc.) could not be prosecuted, and, in this modern age, a sharp lawyer could make a case that electronic crimes fall under the privacy veil (as is the case with pornography, now).  In short the argument against the constitutionality of abortion laws as violations of rights is tenuous and based solely on the “living document open to reinterpretation as events warrant” argument which itself does not hold water.

The second legal problem with the decision is that the Supreme Court, in inventing a “right” out of thin air, nullified the laws of 46 states with regard to abortion.  There is some reasonable debate as to the authority of the Supreme Court vis a vis both state law and Judicial Review.  The Constitution does not include the right of the Court to either rule on state laws or nullify laws based on constitutionality.  The Constitution specifically sets the jurisdiction of the Federal Bench to federal laws, treaties, cases involving parties in two states, and cases involving foreign governments and citizens.  It says nothing about appealing a case based on state law to the Federal Bench.  Both Judicial Review and the handling of cases involving state law have been taken by the Federal Courts on their own and without the authority of the Constitution.  In the case of Roe v. Wade in particular, Judicial Review on a state law was imposed without any guidance from the Constitution.  It is not a case of Free Speech or the Right to Bear Arms or what have you, it is a case about abortion and whether it is legally acceptable to kill an unborn child. 

Finally, there is the obvious moral implication.  Abortion is wrong, period.  It can be argued that a number of abortions, especially those done illegally before Roe v Wade are done out of fear.  Either the fear of being caught in an illicit affair (extra-marital or simply non-marital) or the fear of violence from a partner who did not want to father children.  But nowadays, it is frequently done because it is fashionable, or because the mother doesn’t want her career or her freewheeling lifestyle burdened by children, or because the father wasn’t someone the mother wanted to have children with, just someone she wanted to play with.  The problem is that abortion has been at least as effective as Hitler in causing mass death, and has been working for far longer than Hitler did.  The Holocaust ran 6 years and killed roughly 6 million people.  Abortion has been legal for 35 years and has killed some 40 million people.  And while Hitler’s holocaust was done out of hate and political expediency, the atrocity of abortion is done mainly out of convenience and irresponsibility.  To have forced such a culture on the states is a horrible crime committed by the Court that must be reversed.

In my view, the Federal Government ought to stay out of the abortion debate completely (except for enforcing laws preventing the transportation of minors across state lines by people not their parents to avoid abortion restrictions).  There should be no impediment in either Federal law, the Courts, or the Constitution preventing the states from making their own decisions on abortion.  Personally, I’d like to see abortion eradicated, but that view is not shared by all.  In a free society we should be allowed to decide what laws are proper for our own states, not some federal judge with a personal agenda.

HJG