Can'em or keep'em?

(Denver Post, Apr. 5) “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” Reagan’s words speak defiance to statism, but they are only as true as we make them. The 2010 election is Coloradans’ chance. Supreme Court justices Mary Mullarkey, Michael Bender, Alex Martinez, and Nancy Rice will be up for another 10-year term. Poor stewards of the law since they last faced voters in 2000, all four deserve dismissal. Whether they’re retained or bounced will signal how much we cherish liberty. Voting judges into office ended here in the 1960s. Gubernatorial appointments replaced the unseemly spectacle of jurists soliciting campaign funds. The people can still vote judges out, however, and no court can overrule us. Nor need we explain why. In this, at least, we’re still sovereign.

Capriciousness isn't justified. “Prudence will dictate” avoidance of political changes “for light and transient causes,” the Declaration of Independence cautions. But terminating a dishonest judge is warranted – and so is termination for breach of trust. Mullarkey, Bender, Martinez, and Rice have failed their constitutional trust.

The justices up for renewal are poster kids for the “living constitution” racket of legislating from the bench in disregard of the written text. Under Chief Justice Mullarkey, as Vincent Carroll wrote after last month’s TABOR ruling, “the Colorado Supreme Court seems to think that it is… free to redefine words however it likes.” Let’s answer their abuse of judicial review with electoral review and retire them.

Is this a wild revolutionary idea as some lawyers and professors will claim? No, it’s an eminently conservative remedy of checking power with power and reminding the government it answers to the nation, not the other way around.

Termination wouldn’t deny the thorniness of such questions as when a tax vote is required, how citizens can petition to discourage illegal immigration, whether low-income scholarships are allowable in public schools, who draws congressional districts, or why a juror’s Bible should annul a murder sentence. It would simply express our displeasure with the four activist Supremes by ordering them replaced.

Replacement, should it occur, may itself be thorny. If defeated in November 2010, Mary Mullarkey (appointed in 1987), Michael Bender (1997), Alex Martinez (1998), and Nancy Rice (1998), Democrats all, would leave office in January 2011 and have their places filled by either Gov. Bill Ritter or his successor. Republicans voters are more likely to want the seats vacated if they foresee a new governor, but that’s no sure thing.

Amendment 40, the judicial term limits proposal I led in 2006, led early but sank as the GOP base saw Bob Beauprez’s gubernatorial hopes fading. Its mandate for appellate judges with over a decade of service to leave after 2008 – which would have opened up five of the seven Supreme Court seats – was less attractive to center-right voters when a Ritter victory seemed likely. Might that dynamic recur next year?

It depends on how energetic and well-funded the do-not-retain campaign against Justices Mullarkey, Bender, Martinez, and Rice turns out to be. California chief justice Rose Bird and two of her liberal colleagues were tossed in 1986 by voters outraged at their leniency to killers. That Colorado murder case I mentioned, the one with the Bible, may gain notoriety as the 2010 race heats up.

Plus there’s the March 16 decision allowing billions in higher taxes without voter approval, which Beauprez calls “the kind of blatant judicial activism that infuriates the citizenry and increases the call for voting against retention of wayward justices.”

A dismissal drive called Clear the Bench Colorado is already being organized by Arapahoe County activist Matt Arnold. Politicians of both parties will probably keep their distance while a nonpartisan “can’em or keep’em” contest determines the four justices’ fate. I say can’em.

When will Atlas shrug?

(Denver Post, Mar. 15) What is the breaking point? Where will the resistance form? Heavy questions, but unavoidable in the current political climate. The productive members of society can only be pushed so far, some say. What they envision is not defiance of law or a reversal of the election. It is people’s growing disengagement from a new economic order that punishes effort and rewards envy – the creepy future that Bill Ritter and Barack Obama intend for us. National columnist Michelle Malkin calls that withdrawal, “going Galt.” Malkin was the first speaker last weekend when several hundred Coloradans gathered for a free-market leadership conference in Colorado Springs. Her reference was to John Galt, the individualist hero of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” She told of seeing a placard at the protest rally for Obama’s stimulus bill signing that warned: “Atlas will shrug.”

So what, you ask. So in human behavior, incentives matter. People are choosers, not automatons. Mess them over enough and they’re out of here. All history proves it. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” the bitter joke among Soviet factory drones, sums up collectivism’s ultimate failure wherever tried.

Of course in the 1950s, when Rand was writing her epic about a slow-spreading spontaneous strike among Americans fed up with big government, tomorrow supposedly belonged to New Soviet Man. Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II, the three champions of freedom who would prove otherwise, weren’t yet heard of.

But we’re now told that 2008, with its routine recession and its celebrity election, showed freedom is untrustworthy after all. Economic makeover via legislative intervention is the fashion fad of 2009, driven by DC Democrats under Pelosi and Reid along with Denver Democrats under Carroll and Groff. Suddenly everyone’s a socialist, crows Newsweek. Suddenly the headlines mirror “Atlas Shrugged,” laments the Wall Street Journal.

The novel -- with John Galt as capitalist superman and Dagny Taggart, Ayn Rand’s alter ego, as railroad tycoon – may not be great literature. But its message of radical self-reliance has inspired millions across the decades. And the story is set right here. “We can’t lose Colorado. It’s our last hope,” says a Taggart employee at the start. A Rocky Mountain valley is the retreat from Galt triumphs at the end.

Retreat attendees at The Broadmoor, where Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute spoke after Malkin and “Atlas Shrugged” was assigned reading, weren’t about to unplug Galt-style from daily life in protest against wind power, national health care, and charity-choking taxes. But they took seriously the disincentive effects against wealth creation and social comity in these and other collectivist proposals. We should too.

As ever more people ride in the wagon and fewer are left to pull it, there will come a breaking point. Crowding taxation onto the highest earners and debt onto our kids, as President Obama proposes, invites collapse. Ignoring the constitution at will, as Gov. Ritter and the spending lobby do, breeds contempt. Ruin must result. Did the USA learn nothing from the USSR’s implosion, wondered Vladimir Putin recently.

Yes, we did. Cold War victory taught us the power of ideas. The East crumbled when the West asserted the superiority of liberty, wakened by thinkers like Hayek with his expose’ of the road to serfdom and Bastiat with his ridicule of “everyone seeking to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Also influential was Rand with her capitalist commandos. Galt and Taggart’s crusade was idea-powered. With moral truth they defeated the lies of something for nothing and freedom through coercion. Not even the government office of Morale Conditioner, censoring radio, could stop their entrepreneurial comeback.

Their strike against the redistributionist guilt trip was fiction. But we can shrug it off for real. Colorado could be our last hope.

Economics, academics & liberty

(Denver Post, Mar. 1) One thing will get Colorado out of this recession, and it’s not big government. It is the human spirit. All economic growth is the improvement of material resources by creativity and work. Silicon, ignored for eons as beach sand, became microchips humming with intelligence. Petroleum was worthless tar seeps before men made it black gold. Our state was labeled “the Great American Desert” on early maps. People transformed it into the place of opportunity and productivity we now enjoy. Wealth multiplies when men and women combine the intellectual capital for producing goods and services with the moral capital for honest dealing and deferred gratification. Americans have always known this. “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged,” says the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The Constitution hadn’t been written, and we had barely crossed the Appalachians. But the founders put first things first.

Even today, sophisticated and stimulus-dependent as the nation has become, we sense that the truth from Washington’s time is still true: Moral and intellectual capital will make or break the American dream. Hence our endless arguments about education.

From preschool to grad school, Coloradans can’t get enough of the classroom – and can’t agree on what it’s for. That’s a good thing on both counts. The push to improve ourselves, improve everyone and leave no one behind, is laudable. The contention over education’s meaning expresses liberty in all its messy glory.

So it’s okay that the University of Denver will host a debate on Monday between Prof. Alan Gilbert and state Sen. Shawn Mitchell on trying former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as a war criminal. And that CU-Boulder on Thursday will allow back on campus the disgraced plagiarist Ward Churchill and the unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

I abhor the anti-American falsehoods that will echo at both forums. But this petty childishness is a small price for free speech and unfettered dissent. It was even a “good” if distasteful thing when a Metro State professor could smear Sarah Palin, or when a terror apologist could address the 9/11 commemoration at Colorado College.

Such unruly eruptions in the thought-life of a free society are tolerable on one condition – competitiveness in the education marketplace. As long as students have alternatives, outrageous utterances by academic malcontents hurt no one. In fair combat amongst the campuses, Jefferson’s assurance was right: lies won’t stand.

This is where it gets dicey for Coloradans. In March 2004, concerns over professorial mistreatment of conservative and religious students yielded written assurances to legislators by the presidents of CU, CSU, UNC, and Metro for better protection of academic freedom. But little has changed.

Fortunately, competition in higher ed isn’t limited to the old-line public and private colleges. Other choices include for-profit upstarts like Colorado Tech or the University of Phoenix, as well as faith-based options like Regis and Colorado Christian University. Both of the latter uphold a 1787 understanding of education’s moral and religious benefits.

CCU, where I now work, is proudly counter-cultural. One of its objectives, in addition to academic excellence, is “to impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, free markets, natural law, original intent of the Constitution, and Western civilization.” Heretical, perhaps, but healthy.

CCU President Bill Armstrong, a former US senator, instead of railing at the Boulder leftists, politely counters by bringing to his Lakewood campus such eminent conservative speakers as Michael Novak on democratic capitalism and Thomas Krannawitter on America’s greatness. Take that, Bill Ayers.

All hail the open mind and the unregulated marketplace of ideas. A rebounding economy is sure to follow.

Other states envy TABOR

(Denver Post, Feb. 15) How dumb do they think we are? The state is in a $600 million hole because Gov. Bill Ritter and Democratic legislators ignored advice from Republicans – and even some fellow Democrats – to restrain spending and save for a rainy day. Now those same spendthrifts want us to remove constitutional guardrails so they can rev the budget again when good times return. Family budgets are breathing easier, after Ritter and former Speaker Andrew Romanoff got spanked by voters on three tax increases last November – Amendments 51, 58, and 59. But we’re taken for suckers on this too. Dem leader Paul Weissmann already talks of “floating an issue back to the voters” that would goose revenues and gut the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR). Meanwhile, a judge has red-flagged the governor for raising property taxes $120 million without taxpayer approval as constitutionally required. The state Supreme Court hasn’t yet ruled on this money grab, but the spending lobby must expect to win. They’re now brazenly planning another evasion of TABOR without citizens’ permission – this time to bust the 6% general fund growth limit. Sue them if you dare.

The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, part of the Colorado constitution since 1992, states that “its preferred interpretation shall reasonably restrain most the growth of government.” That means we the people get the benefit of the doubt. Gov. Ritter, Sen. John Morse and other Democrats, Rep. Don Marostica and other Republicans, are all sworn to support the constitution. Have they forgotten?

They give off an air of casualness toward that oath of office, impatience if not scorn for TABOR and its limitations, and ill-concealed disdain for the millions of Coloradans who don’t know what’s good for us in terms of rosy scenarios, free-wheeling fiscal policy, and a “trust me” approach to government. Their track record forfeits our trust.

“Trust me” became California’s fiscal motto back in the ‘80s, after their voter-approved tax and spending limit was undone by education mandates. (Sound familiar?) The state is now $42 billion in the red and Gov. Schwarzenegger has ordered furloughs. He has wished aloud for something like TABOR to stop the madness.

Taxpayers in many other states share Arnold’s wish, as I recently confirmed with an hour of phoning. Budget analysts from Tempe to Kennebunkport, unless they’ve drunk the big-government Koolaid, endorse the wisdom of a population-plus-inflation growth formula, tempered with flexibility and recession reserves. They say people here should realize how fortunate we are.

“Watch out, Colorado. Without TABOR you could end up like Ohio,” warns David Hansen of the Buckeye Institute in Columbus. He describes a “generation-long spending spree” that has turned their low-tax, high-growth state into one with high taxes and no growth, “totally uncompetitive in the 21st century.”

Reports are similar from neighboring Pennsylvania and distant Arizona. Spending grew twice as fast as population plus inflation in both states since 2002, leaving them today with deficits far worse than Colorado’s. Absent fiscal guardrails, politicians “rode the revenue roller coaster sky-high, then crashed with it,” citizen lobbyist Tom Jenney told me from Phoenix.

TABOR may pass this year in Maine, polls suggest, after Democrats spent recklessly following defeat of a 2006 proposal. Oklahoma fiscal reformers have similar complaints and hopes. Ken Braun of the Mackinac Center observes that spending limits and rainy-day provisions after 1995 would have spared poor Michigan its budget agonies since 2002.

How irresponsible for Colorado’s philosopher kings to propose trading our prudent discipline for these nightmares. Delivered from temptation, a character in Bunyan exclaims: “Then it came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.” Nothing personal, but we should likewise hotly distrust the TABOR-busters.

'Responsibility Era' unlikely

(Adapted from Denver Post, Feb. 1) How flattering for a commentator when the President of the United States echoes your stuff. Mr. Obama and I seem to agree it’s time responsible America made a comeback. I said seem. He has far to go to earn our trust. In his inaugural address, the President called for “a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world.” This was not a campaign theme of his, but if sincere, it’s welcome. This column has often called attention to America’s responsibility deficit, our national failure to recognize that we’re all bound in relationships of duty and trust. “It’s time for a new force in American politics,” I wrote in July 2007. “We need a responsibility movement to challenge both parties and reach beyond them.” My reference was partly to the GOP’s fiscal irresponsibility that had cost them control of Congress and would later cost them the presidency. But as a conservative who preferred McCain to Obama and other Republicans to McCain, I didn’t expect to applaud the incoming Democrat on Jan. 20. His responsibility message sounds good, though. How credible is it, and what would it mean in practice?

President Obama says he will convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” to head off the entitlement train wreck impending with Social Security and Medicare. As a senator four years ago, he gave President Bush no help in a similar effort, but that was then. If Obama can bulldog Democrats and the senior lobby into accepting reforms, it will be a new era indeed.

While the inaugural had its debatable points, irresponsible rhetoric was absent. He had qualified praise for market economics, pledged “to spend wisely,” and said “programs will end” if they don’t work. Hmmm; time will tell. The reckless stimulus bill, long on statism and short on stimulation, is not a good start.

That day he did not equate our economic situation with the 1930s, which is sensible since it’s still less severe than the early ‘80s. He blamed “our collective failure to make hard choices,” not capitalist villainy. But he has since suggested making profits isn’t responsible. Fasten your seat belt.

To the jihadists (regrettably not named as such) with whom “our nation is at war,” he vowed on Jan. 20: “you are on the wrong side of history… we will defeat you.” In these words, as in the makeup of President Obama’s national security team, there was notable continuity with President Bush’s legacy. The next day, however, an opposite policy of coddling terrorists and appeasing our enemies began to emerge

In Obama’s renewed promise “to begin to leave Iraq” there was the key word “responsibly” – really the least he can do. We can only hope. He churlishly omitted any tribute to the brave Iraqi people and the noble US-led coalition that liberated them.

We must “set aside childish things,” urged the new president, quoting St. Paul. His allusions to race were statesmanlike, in contrast to the ungracious remarks of Rev. Joseph Lowery. Obama’s measured tone signaled no polarization of left and right. Less becoming was his juvenile swagger later in the week, calling out Rush Limbaugh and blurting to GOP congressmen, “I won.”

So we’re left wondering: was that Scripture mere garnish? Is the “era of responsibility” for real, or a cynical leftist’s misdirection? Maybe he just needed a substitute slogan after Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom,” the theme advertised earlier, was dropped. (Surely it didn’t flunk with focus groups?)

“Remaking America,” another potent phrase from Jan. 20, could easily become a pretext for all manner of utopian irresponsibility. Such irresponsibility could include emboldening radical Islam, muzzling broadcasters, rigged union elections, climate hysteria, amnesty for illegals, unethical cabinet officers, endless deficits and bailouts. All may now await us.

Responsibility, in contrast, would mean stronger defenses, limited government, low and uniform taxes, free enterprise, market health care, school choice, secure borders, protection for marriage and the unborn.

Obama’s words in the lofty inaugural left room for either scenario. But his actions since then have veered down the irresponsible road. And this vague notion of “duties to ourselves, our nation and the world” hints of unlimited government.

Remember when Michelle Obama said if we let Barack lead, he’ll make demands on us? Honestly that concerns me. It would concern George Washington, whom the smooth-tongued Messiah invoked. I wish our new president had specified personal responsibility, whereby free men and women make their own choices and take the consequences.