Respect for Self Government

View 708 Thursday, January 05, 2012

Making recess appointments when Congress is not in recess – the Constitution is very clear on that, neither House can recess for more than three days without consent of the other:

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

The House has not consented to an adjournment of the Senate. The Senate remains in session, and recess appointments, allowed in the Constitution because at one time the Congress was recessed for months and Offices had to be filled, are not appropriate, customary, or constitutional. Mr. Obama has demonstrated his respect for custom, tradition, and the Constitution he is sworn to uphold and defend.

Newt Gingrich continues his campaign against Romney; indeed, it looks as if Newt’s sole purpose now is to see that Romney will not be nominated. Negative advertising in the primaries is effective only if knocking off your major opponent will bring in more support for you (it also makes it much harder to win in the general election because the enthusiasts of the candidate you destroyed are unlikely to rally around you for the ground game that wins elections). In Mr. Gingrich’s present situation there are plenty of other attractive candidates to take up the non-Romney slack, and in the event of a Romney failure the Romney third of Republican primary voters are likely to rally to anyone but Gingrich.

A President must try to unify both his party and his country. It is not possible to win the 2012 election without attacking Obama. That will make it hard to unify the nation to begin with.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/pro-gingrich-group-posts-anti-romney-ad-featuring-mccain/

This ad was put up by a pro-Gingrich Super-PAC; in theory it was not approved by Gingrich himself or his campaign staff, and Newt is not required to comment on it. After McCain’s endorsement of Romney it was clear that Romney is the preferred candidate of what is commonly called the Republican Establishment or what I have for years called The Country Club Republicans, linear descendants of the Rockefeller Republicans who sat on their hands during the Goldwater election of 1964, and did their best to purge the Party of the Goldwater Republicans; as Bush I worked to fire every Reagan staffer at the White House, and his agents worked their way down through the party structure. The result has been an overturn of the way parties function. When I was a professor of political science I could truthfully say that the United States was, in effect, governed by a few hundred thousand self-selected volunteers who worked through from Precinct leader up. Since that time money and media have become the most important factors to parties; the Democrats rely on union members and hired campaign workers. Republicans continued to employ volunteer precinct workers for the ground game – getting the voters to the polls on election day, but over time they seem to have given that up. To some extent that has fallen to enthusiasts – the Religious Right, Tea Party – but it is not as well organized as the Democratic union-based machines.

But that’s another essay. I will say that a well constructed ground game organization can be decisive, and there is still time to build one; but the essence of the old party structure was that one supported the ticket, and got out the vote for the ticket, even if your favorite candidate was not the nominee. The Country Club Republicans relied on that kind of party loyalty to get conservative enthusiasts working for them, but they always found a good reason to abandon non-establishment Republicans, and over time the party system decayed.

With the Democrats the structure is so in thrall to unions that working your way to a decisive position in the Party starting at the precinct level seldom happens now.

But that’s for another essay.

Apparently Newt has decided to take down Romney with little regard to consequences. It’s easy to understand that attitude. It’s harder to approve it. This nation is in big trouble, and we ought to be reserving our resources and ammunition for the defeat of Obama. I continue to believe that Newt was correct when he said it would be better for the nation for any of the Republicans to be elected against Obama. But then I was a Goldwater and then Reagan Republican, and that was before Gingrich left the office of Speaker. After that came Big Government “Conservatism”. We’ve been through that discussion before. There are things Government must do, such as supporting technology development particularly military technology, and some of them can be Big; but government spending for the general purpose of doing good is neither constitutional nor effective and is almost always counterproductive. The Soviet Union pretty well demonstrated that. It began with the Five Year Plan, a supposedly rational allocation of national resources by the smartest people in the world. It ended with “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us for it.” But we’ve gone through that before.

I wish the Republicans, including Mr. Gingrich, would devote their resources to building grass roots organizations capable of supporting a real ground game in November. That would win; and dif such an organization was once more allowed to have its rightful influence on the nomination of candidates from city and state office up, the result would be beneficial for the Republic.

Mr Obama is appointing officers without the advice and consent of the Senate. Now consider this

http://www.infowars.com/dhs-officers-armed-with-semiautomatics-set-up-unannounced-id-checkpoint/