Electoral College on Dems' hit list

It's time for a civics lesson. “Civics” is the old-fashioned word for how to understand your country’s politics and government. Since your country is the world’s leading superpower and the mightiest nation from any standpoint the world has ever seen – to say nothing of the fact that your country is simply yours – her politics and government are worth understanding. Oops. I fell into another anachronism, albeit a beautiful one. I referred to our country in the feminine. Ever wonder where this curious habit comes from? It comes from an older age when public discourse was dominated by men, and men – good ones, at least – love their country in a similar way to that in which they love a woman.

They want to provide for her, protect her, vindicate her honor when it is called into question, and – as she does for him – help her to improve and grow where she needs improvement and growth. Oh, and they think about her frequently and are extraordinarily proud of her. Even in our egalitarian age, isn’t this so much richer than referring to your country as “it”?

Here’s another way in which our ancestors were wiser than we: remember that odd system called the Electoral College? It comes up every four years when we elect a president. Presidents are elected most immediately by states, not by popular vote. Popular votes determine which candidate wins each state, but then people called electors cast their state’s official presidential ballots. Whichever candidate wins a majority of electoral votes becomes President, regardless of who has the most popular votes. Because the number of electors each state gets is determined by its population, usually the two vote tallies coincide, but, as Bush v. Gore in 2000 showed, this is not always the case. Gore won the popular vote, but Bush won the Electoral College vote.

This system runs deeper and influences presidential elections, and thus the direction of national politics, more significantly than almost anyone realizes. It is one of the foremost examples of the genius of the American founders and of the depth of political understanding the entire founding generation held. Why did they do it?

It’s very simple: the American founders did not want to create a democracy. Democracy is chaotic and too easily results in the tyranny of the majority. Since a simple majority of any group of people is often wrong and, not infrequently, very wrong – witness the massive crowds attending the rallies of Barack Obama, who in his speeches either says nothing but feel-good platitudes or promotes the worst kind of liberalism directly opposed to the wisdom that made this country great – the founders, foreseeing how easily crowds can be seduced by a good but empty speaker, created a system of institutions that filters and moderates popular impulses.

It also preserves our constitutional system as a federal republic, and keeps it from degenerating into a direct democracy controlled only by big cities and big states. If there were no Electoral College, candidates would never come to Colorado and Wyoming – they would spend all their time campaigning in New York, California, Texas, and Florida, and in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. In a direct democracy, carrying nothing but California, New York, and the big cities could get you very close to the presidency.

In fact, that’s exactly what Al Gore did in 2000. If you look at one of those red/blue maps you saw so many of while the 2000 hanging chads were still being counted, you’ll notice that all of the major urban areas are blue. All of the rural areas in between the concentrated blue areas are red. In terms of square miles, Bush won going away. In terms of people, Gore won. The electoral college – as it was designed to do – protected the interests of massive rural areas and their durable American values against the heavily concentrated populations of more educated but less virtuous urbanites, in the process protecting the interests of small states against big ones and the very meaning of what it means to be a state in the United States.

All of this classical American political wisdom the Democratic Party wants to do away with, and has already done away with in its own state primaries and caucuses. If you are following the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, you are noting that the winner of a particular state doesn’t matter all that much because delegates are assigned proportionally to the popular vote. If you win 53% of the popular vote in a state, you get 53% of the delegates for that state. This destroys the meaning of delegates and, to a large degree, of states – delegates become merely a direct proxy for the popular vote. The candidate who wins the Democratic nomination will have won the largest number of individual votes, not the largest number of states and state delegates. This is not a republic, but a directly democratic form of government, which is why the Democratic Party is called Democratic.

In contrast, note how Republicans conduct their primaries. For the most part (there are exceptions), winner takes all. If you win a state, you get all that state’s delegates. This is how a federal republic operates, which is why the Republican Party is called Republican. This is, moreover, how the founders designed the presidential election system to work (the Electoral College is set up in Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, and was modified by the 12th Amendment), and is the kind of connection that explains and is explained by the fact that Republicans, with notable exceptions like Sen. John McCain, generally defend historic American political values while Democrats, their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, typically oppose historic American political values and want to reconstruct the Constitution in their own image.

Hillary Clinton is already on record calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. If you want to see how this looks, just look at how the Democratic Party is conducting its primaries and caucuses now. Not only is there very little federalism or states rights in it, but on top of the popular vote the party has constructed a system of “superdelegates” who are not tied to any state; they are party elites who can vote for whomever they wish. The number of superdelegates is so large that they can easily sway an election, regardless of the popular vote; indeed, after Tuesday’s election victories by Hillary Clinton, we are assured that this year’s Democratic nominee will be chosen according to which way the superdelegates swing. The Republican Party has no superdelegates.

This is educational: while Democrats pay lip service to serving the people in their efforts to deconstruct historic American political structures, what they do in reality is replace those political structures with increased power at the top. The people are not empowered; the rhetoric of empowering the people is used, just as Stalin and Mao and Trotsky used it, to clear the way for government by a small band of elites. This is the most pernicious effect of direct democracy the American founders foresaw, and against which we are protected as long as we defend the structures they put in place. The Electoral College while it filters popular government, does so to protect government of, by, and for the people.

So the next time your friend, coworker, family member, neighbor, priest, pastor, or friendly neighborhood professor bad-mouths the generation of Americans who founded your country, remind them she – not “it” – is great for a reason, and no other generation of nation builders has ever been so supremely successful in their efforts to endow their posterity with the blessings of wise liberty.

The Telling of the Truth: William F. Buckley’s Life in Letters

“It is always fascinating to watch people react to the telling of the truth,” wrote Bill Buckley in his first book, God and Man at Yale. It is equally interesting to watch people react to the passing of someone who told the truth. Not your truth or my truth. Not the truth as he saw it. Not the truth as best he knew it. Not the kind of truth that feels good today but is opposite to the wisdom of the ages and of the sages, both past and future, and thus destroys tomorrow. The simple truth; or, as Christian apologist and philosopher of history and culture Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying, true truth: about life and about eternity, as it is available to any honest mind. The truth of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, their grandparents, and their grandchildren – linguistically adorned, philosophically beatified, and internationally contextualized to tell a true story that properly placed the man on the street, his full human and spiritual dignity intact, into the drama of the life of the nation and the life of nations.

Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston phone book than by the entire Harvard faculty not because he wanted to be cute, but because he wanted to tell the truth.

It was the same kind of truth Buckley told about Yale in 1951 at the tender age of 25. By then he in his exceptional talents had already discerned that even, or perhaps especially, many in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League had developed a curious aversion to true truth. It is an aversion that has almost universally swallowed up American intellectuals, and which Buckley was providentially destined, singularly equipped, and, it seemed, inordinately pleased to battle his entire life.

Even by the standards of the most literate literati, his vocabulary was staggering. And he wielded it not in the pretentious, ostentatious manner in which the mainstream, “drive-by” media are prone to wield theirs in an attempt to justify, mainly to themselves, their right to occupy the august, influential post to which they have risen. Rather, he wielded his with the commanding ease of a man who knew God was bigger than he was, and who was thus less interested in the great words he knew than in the great ideas – indeed, the great ideological worlds – he knew lay behind the words, and less interested in glorifying himself than in, as he put it, standing athwart history crying, in all wise benevolence, “Stop!”

His humor was of a type that has become a bit of a hallmark in conservative circles: the kind that is less a positive creation for entertainment than an unavoidable adaptation to the telling of the truth and the negative or embarrassed reaction the truth engenders. When you repeatedly tell the truth, and that truth is not only repeatedly rejected, but repeatedly caricatured, studiously avoided, and, when the inevitable calamity arrives as a result, repeatedly blamed for having created the calamity, one develops a certain modestly self-aggrandizing humor that every genuine conservative recognizes and that no such conservative begrudges another. So Buckley, when asked why he tended to sit during his TV episodes of “Firing Line” and most other TV interviews: “It’s difficult to stand up under the weight of all I know.”

It’s not arrogance; it’s an attempt to advertise a healthy confidence in the truth in an age peopled by, as G. K. Chesterton once quipped, a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication tables.

His literary output was enormous, for a time almost single-handedly sustaining a post-war renaissance in conservative – that is, true – thought about God, man, Yale, society, state, and history. Like few others – his friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, did something notably similar – he put words, ideas, and history behind and around the thoughts, knowledge, emotions, convictions, hopes, and political visions of millions of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who sensed in the latter half of 20th century the rise of an aggressive totalitarian ideology that was finding a weaker and weaker United States, and a weaker and weaker spiritual, moral, and political backbone in the West, as its only meaningful world opposition.

The talk in the last week about Buckley as a defender of a more urbane, sophisticated, polished, and agreeable brand of conservatism than that to which we – sigh – are now condemned in the wake of his death is mere media kerfuffle. It is the kind of talk that comes from people not substantive enough to know what to say when an authentically great man passes. When Ronald Reagan passed, we heard much the same sort of thing from people who had spent their entire public careers criticizing, caricaturing, slandering, and opposing him. Now that he’s gone, what fond memories we have of him! What a better sort of conservatism he stood for! What dignity, what learnedness, what charity, what disagree-without-calling-your-opponents-names know-how he had! If only we had more like him!

The move is mendacious: a back-handed way of insulting those conservatives – that is, truth tellers – who remain, with whom both Reagan and Buckley consorted and identified their entire lives, and with whom still resides the only authentic stewardship of the life and legacy of either man.

Then, of course, there are the polite but empty compliments from respectable, moderate folk: even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, by God, at least you knew where he stood! Or, even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, you had to admire his talents and passion on behalf of what he believed in! The point being not to praise Buckley for anything genuinely praiseworthy, but to, again in a back-handed way, partake oneself of the immediate trend among the fashionable – the thing one is really in a habit of caring about – of honoring the venerable dead without oneself having to do anything like what the venerable dead did to earn the honor. That is, pay one’s easy respects to the dead without having to agree that this particular dead took the risk of telling the truth; of doing it for a long time; of sacrificing the many lucrative and fashionable engagements that one is oneself angling for and which would have easily been his had he chosen that easier pathway through life; and of putting up with the marginalization and condemnation from enemies, and not infrequent abandonment by ostensible friends, that inevitably attend such a courageous career.

In short, one is offering polite courtesies without offering the one thing that would truly honor the venerable dead: a frank admission that he was right, and you were wrong to disagree with, publicly oppose, or maintain a convenient silence toward him and what he believed, and toward what his genuine friends and heirs still believe.

The modern conservative movement in America – and the movement conservatives who comprise it – recognize innately that Buckley’s influence will last as long as our movement does. Many of us not only grew up with faithful, interested parents who kept copies of National Review on their coffee tables and in toilet-side baskets, but we still now have dusty, closeted boxes full of back issues with cartoon caricatures of Al Gore on the cover and Buckley’s inimitable columns in the back.

Yes, if only we had more of him. Eagles flock not, but one day, if God is gracious, there will be another collegiate Elijah who arises with the kind of spirit to, before he is 30, take on an Ivy League establishment, a political establishment, a world of easy, empty, errant words, with the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker’s truth that man is made in the image of God, and that what has happened once in six thousand years – a Gentile nation consciously and publicly founded on that truth – is not likely to ever happen again.

The audacity of conservatism

The intra-party brouhaha over the imminent nomination of Sen. John McCain as the GOP candidate for president is, as modern elections are regularly becoming, a spiteful referendum on political conservatism. That our nation has lost its cultural, its political, and, most deeply, its spiritual way has long since been beyond doubt. The only question is increasingly – and this election cycle demonstrates it in spades – how a principled conservative ought to respond when the standard for political leadership has dropped so embarrassingly low that he senses an undeniable tug of the conscience toward abstaining from an election altogether. Outside the broad mushy middle of the political world – that portion of the “mainstream” spectrum where one resides when one knows not what one believes or why – everyone agrees there is a point where such recusal is the only conscientious choice. In an election, say, between Ronald Reagan and Antonin Scalia, does anyone seriously believe Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or many of the self-righteous pundits in the media now scoffing at lifelong conservative leaders such as Dr. James Dobson for his decision not to vote if Mr. McCain is the GOP nominee, would be found darkening a presidential oval?

By the same token, many Republicans, including many conservatives, calling for other conservatives to get on board the inevitable McCain bandwagon – “What, are we just going to let a liberal Democrat win?” – know there is a point where they, too, would choose intelligent, convicted abstention over casting a vote for someone they know is unworthy of the presidential office. Picture an election between, say, Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon – Nixon being well to the political right of John McCain – or between, say, Bill Clinton and Sen. Larry Craig, who is also well to the political right of Sen. McCain. Just get on board the GOP bandwagon? What, are we just going to let a Democrat win?

This is how third parties get started.

Recusal is not only the intelligent choice but the only wise choice in many life circumstances. Judges regularly and admirably recuse themselves when their personal connections, interests, or history make, or even give the appearance of making, a disinterested judgment improbable. An attorney will decline a case in which he has no expertise, as will a business manager who knows a particular decision is outside the realm of his knowledge or experience. Members of school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress regularly abstain from votes for a multitude of reasons, not infrequently because they simply wish to broadcast their protest against an array of options so pathetically weak that only the lowest form of pragmatism, political expediency, and peer pressure could persuade one to participate by casting a vote one simply does not believe in.

A vote is more than just a protest against the party or issue opposed. It is, at the same time, an affirmation of the party or issue supported. This is the nature of a vote. A vote says something about us as people. Twelve years from now, when we are gathered at the house with friends during the momentous election year of 2020, the question of who we voted for “back in that year, you know, when Hillary and Barack were running, when was it?” is one we can expect to come up, and our answer one on which we can expect, however light-heartedly and good-naturedly, to be evaluated. Many conservatives are deciding that “I held my nose and voted for McCain” is an answer they will be able to live with. I may yet take that route myself. For the moment, “For the first time since I came of voting age, I voted down-ballot but sat the presidential race out” is sounding like an answer I’d be comfortable with.

Even if I ultimately take a different route from Dr. Dobson, his stand is refreshing. He and the conservative talk radio universe that has opposed McCain consistently since the beginning of the race are right, and other conservative leaders, particularly among the intelligentsia, who are now falling over themselves to curry favor and secure access with McCain, are foolish. Even if one votes for McCain, one need not commit one’s public influence, or that of the organization with which one is associated, to supporting a candidate so far from what we admire, revere, hold dear, and still hope for in a great political and world leader. Now is the time for conservative leaders to be trumpeting what conservatism is and calling the GOP back to it, not myopically looking for ways to defend Mr. McCain and secure access to his potential administration.

Opposing Democrats is easy. We show how dearly we hold our conservative principles by how willing we are to hold Republicans to the same standard.

Three obvious truths, two of them timeless, need to be stated clearly once again. First, the temporary one: Mr. McCain is not a conservative. He is a liberal Republican. He is not the most liberal Republican. There are currently 48 Republican members of the U.S. Senate. Perhaps the most liberal is Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. Perhaps the most conservative is Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Those who know his record know that Mr. McCain is 7 or 8 senators to the right of Snowe, and 40 or so senators to the left of Coburn. The list of issues and occasions on which he has sold out the conservative movement runs into the dozens.

The laughable claim by President Bush that McCain is “a solid conservative,” or by Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention that McCain “has moved to a more conservative position on taxes, he has expressed appreciation for the pro-life position, and has proclaimed regularly, ‘I am pro-life,’” reflect the pragmatic low standards and neglect of real history that are rampant among the political and chattering classes today and which have brought the Party of Reagan to its knees over the last two decades. Dr. Land’s dismissal of Rush Limbaugh as someone who “needs to get out and talk to average folk more” is a manifestation of the precisely backward way in which short-sighted leaders – including those in the church – justify their expedient choices, alliances, and maneuverings rather than take an unpopular stand for the truth. Dr. Land, I can say it respectfully as someone who admires your body of work and who is a student at your convention’s flagship seminary: you have a D.Phil from Oxford and have been in high church and Republican circles for decades. Limbaugh doesn’t even have a college degree, talks to “average folk” by the dozens every day on his radio show, and has for 20 years shown more backbone in standing up to compromising politicians, including Republicans, than most anyone on the national scene. Again with respect, it is you, sir, who might benefit from talking to average folk a bit more.

Second truth, first timeless one: political conservatism is not a knee-jerk reaction or simple dislike of Hillary or a set of talking points for after the golf round. It is the stuff of the American grassroots. It is the stuff of the American founding. It is the stuff of strength, of truth, of right, of principle, of courage, of honor. It is the stuff of legends. It represents now, and will always represent, a hope far more audacious than Barack Obama ever conceived or wrote about, or that John McCain may ever realize he has systematically negotiated over the course of his political career: it is the hope that authentic truth, justice, and wisdom may yet arise to lead the planet’s greatest commonwealth in our lifetime, and that a dying American culture may yet be redeemed by authentic political virtue on high.

Third, final, and, to many, most annoyingly timeless truth: political conservatism is rooted in Christianity, and Christianity is by its nature conservative. Being conservative means believing in the steadfast conservation of God-given political and social institutions against the corrupting influence of human vice, ambition, mendacity, machination, and manipulation. Christianity preserves and conserves because it tells the truth about God, man, society, state, and history. Christian leaders like Dr. James Dobson do not abstain because they are grumpy; they abstain because they feel the weight that C.S. Lewis felt when he wrote that Christianity, considered only from an ethical standpoint, is hot enough to boil all the other systems of the world to rags. Christianity is fierce because evil and folly are fierce. Christianity’s standards are high because the standards of evil and folly are so despicably low. And all the greatest Christian saints in history have been equally fierce in their defense of truth not because they were grumpy, but because they knew that, in the course of human events, today’s pragmatic sellout is tomorrow’s political, cultural, and historical calamity.

One of the greatest truths Christianity teaches is that human politics, even at their best, are a pathetic imitation of the Real Thing. As the American Founders knew and wrote as eloquently as any group of political men in history, and as American conservatives still sense deeply today, the Real Thing is yet to happen. When the clouds are rent and the trumpet sounds, and the Son of Man descends for the second time to gather His elect from the four winds, there will be no more compromised political candidates or pathetic attempts to hide a history of negotiated principles. Rather, the entire world – some joyfully and some in terror – will join in recognizing for the first and final occasion that, in the fullness of time, government as we always dreamed and feared it could be – a deeply and abidingly and permanently conservative government – has finally come of age.

What is GOP's paramount object?

Today, on Lincoln's birthday, and in the midst of a struggle over the soul of our party, we Republicans need to remember his example in balancing principle and prudence when facing a dilemma. Determined as he was to keep slavery "in the course of ultimate extinction" as he believed the Founders had intended, Lincoln could still insist at a dark hour early in the Civil War:

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union... If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

The Great Emancipator knew his paramount object and allowed nothing to divert him from it. In doing so, he was able to achieve his other cherished object as well. It couldn't have worked the other way around. He knew that if the Union were broken in the 1860s, slavery's future would be extended -- exactly as slavery's human, moral, and political cost would have been greater if the Union had never been formed to begin with in the 1770s and '80s.

Republicans now, as America's conservative party, must think with the same cool clarity as Lincoln in fixing our paramount object for 2008. Is it purity in the presidential nominee? Is it electoral victory at any price? Is it avoidance of a Democratic president even at the cost of a (further) liberalizing makeover to the GOP identity? Is it arm-twisting McCain and his supporters to move right in the spring or face certain defeat in the fall?

None of those objects is paramount, in my opinion. I see the first as unattainable, the second as unworthy, and the others as desirable but lesser objects. None of the four involves a principle by which personal inflexibility and costly sacrifices can be justified. All come under the heading of prudential judgment -- messy choices in the gray area. (See Lincoln's blunt acceptance of freeing some slaves and not others; exactly what he later did by proclamation.)

Protecting America's constitutional heritage and our national interest in the world, over the span of decades and not just months or years, is the paramount object in this struggle as best I can tell. Show me a better. And show me how that paramount object can possibly be served by actions this year that result in splitting the GOP and electing Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. and political cost would have been greater if the Union had never been formed to begin with in the 1770s and '80s.

Republicans now, as America's conservative party, must think with the same cool clarity as Lincoln in fixing our paramount object for 2008. Is it purity in the presidential nominee? Is it electoral victory at any price? Is it avoidance of a Democratic president even at the cost of a (further) liberalizing makeover to the GOP identity? Is it arm-twisting McCain and his supporters to move right in the spring or face certain defeat in the fall?

None of those objects is paramount, in my opinion. I see the first as unattainable, the second as unworthy, and the others as lesser object. None of the four involves a principle by which personal inflexibility and costly sacrifices can be justified. All come under the heading of prudential judgment -- messy choices in the gray area. (See Lincoln's blunt acceptance of freeing some slaves and not others; exactly what he later did by proclamation.)

Protecting America's constitutional heritage and our national interest in the world, over the span of decades and not just months or years, is the paramount object in this struggle as best I can tell. Show me a better. And show me how that paramount object can possibly be served by actions this year that result in splitting the GOP and electing Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Tax Ritter rides again

Republicans wouldn't have dreamed of this storyline, but for the second time in less than a year, Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter is proposing a major tax increase. And just like last time, he doesn't want to let you vote on it.

Taxpayers who have just received their property tax bill could be forgiven for mistaking last year's tax "freeze" for a tax hike. After all, when the legislature and the governor pass a new law that causes you to pay more than you would have otherwise, most people understandably think their taxes have been raised.

But since your taxes were "frozen," you don't get to vote ­ even though the Taxpayers Bill of Rights in the state constitution says you should. (If only you had a law degree or a union membership, it would all make perfect sense.)

Now the governor wants to pull a similar legal slight of hand on the cost of renewing license plates on your vehicle.

Ritter's latest plan, cooked up by another of those infamous blue ribbon commissions, is to raise the cost of licensing your vehicles by an average $100 per vehicle per year to raise money for highways.

This would generate about $500 million a year, which sounds like a mighty hefty tax increase. Except that it's called a "fee," not a "tax." Colorado has no Feepayers Bill of Rights, so when lawmakers raise "fees," you don't get to vote.

How subtle is this distinction? It's merely a matter of accounting. Your vehicle registration receipt shows the vehicle's ownership tax and license fee side-by-side.

If the governor wanted to raise the ownership tax by $100, he would need you to approve it at the next election. But if he can get the legislature to raise the license fee, maybe you will forget about it by the next election.

Fat chance, since you will remember each time you renew the license plates on every vehicle you own.

Even the Governor's Blue Ribbon Panel on Transportation recognized that smacking taxpayers with a $100-per-vehicle increase without a vote would be playing with fire.

In November, the commission noted that "the legislature can pass an increase without voter approval. However, referral of the fee to the voters may be more acceptable to the public." Unfortunately, that word of caution is mysteriously absent from the final report.

What's also subtle -- and downright underhanded -- is the legislature's habit of raiding existing highway funds (more than $40 million last year alone) to spend on other pet projects.

Ritter could have protected transportation funding by vetoing those bills, but he didn't. Before taking more money from Colorado drivers, he should demonstrate his commitment by restoring those funds and stopping future raids.

Certainly, a case can be made that funding for the state's transportation system is lagging. Fuel tax revenues don't begin to keep up with inflation because gas and diesel are taxed at a fixed amount per gallon (22 and 20.5 cents, respectively) rather than a percentage of the price.

At $1.062 billion, the transportation budget is at its highest level since 2001-02 when it was bolstered by much lower gas prices and proceeds from Gov. Bill Owens' TRANS bonds which voters approved in 1999.

Since then, gas prices have increased and so have fuel efficiencies and the use of hybrids and alternative fuels, all of which keep fuel consumption relatively flat. Meanwhile, population and miles driven have increased substantially.

The vehicle fee increase would boost transportation funding by about 50 percent, but the blue ribbon commission is backing a much bigger package that would raise more than $1.5 billion a year in from taxes and fees. Also on their wish list are increases in fuel taxes (13 cents a gallon), sales taxes, oil and gas production taxes, and hotel and car rental fees.

"We probably haven't made the case yet to get that on the 2008 ballot," Ritter recently told state legislators.

Definitely not, and if the governor thinks that case will be stronger after drivers are smacked with a $100-a-vehicle "fee" increase, he is in for a big surprise.