Tancredo did 'Isaiah's job' well

Not only has Tom Tancredo exerted the greatest leverage of any Coloradan who ever ran for President. His endorsement of Mitt Romney is one of the most important the former Massachusetts governor has received, and it couldn't come at a better time for Romney's embattled campaign. Tom's backing will help Mitt say, "See, I'm your guy," to voters leaning toward all his major rivals in Iowa, New Hampshire, and the other early states. Against Huckabee, Romney can use the endorsement to show he's acceptable to a leading evangelical congressman and to heighten the contrast between his tough immigration position and Huck's mushy one. Ditto, as far as immigration is concerned, for Romney's urgent task of blunting the McCain surge in both Iowa and NH.

Thompson arguably has a purer hardline stance on securing the border than Romney does -- yet Mitt can now say that Mr. Immigration himself, Tancredo, looked the field over and picked him, not Fred. Likewise, Giuliani is unmatched in talking about taking the fight to the terrorists -- yet Tancredo, the most candid of them all in calling out radical Islam (think of his shopping-mall ad and his comments about bombing Mecca), didn't sign up with Rudy. No, the big Tank wheeled in alongside Romney's Rambler.

So there had to be joy in Mittville today. There should also be pride and gratitude in Tomtown. As many others have said, Tancredo put the illegal immigration crisis smack in the middle of this presidential campaign -- for both parties, no less -- when it was being ignored before he got in the race, and would likely still be ignored today had he not gotten in. He took on what Albert Jay Nock in a classic 1936 essay called "Isaiah's Job," the lonely prophetic task of saying what no one else will say at a critical time. As Nock imagines the Lord telling poor Isaiah back around 700 BC:

"There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."

Tom Tancredo is my congressman and my friend. I hoped he would run for president, and wrote an early column predicting it. I've used this blog to cheer for him and sometimes to chide him. I sent him a biggish check, and Romney a smallish one, and they are the only two candidates I've donated to this year. On this day, his 62nd birthday, and on Tuesday, Christmas with his well-loved family, Tom deserves to feel much satisfaction that the battle -- this round of it, anyway -- is over for him, for now, and that it has sharply awakened our political elites, as he hoped it would, to what the preservation of nationhood requires. Job well done, Isaiah.

Congratulations, Rep. Bruce

"The name of Douglas Bruce is synonymous in Colorado with fidelity to the Constitution, protection of the taxpayer, and selfless dedication to the common good," a leading conservative wrote prior to Bruce's win on Dec. 1 for a state House vacancy appointment in Colorado Springs, adding: "Never have those qualities been more needed in state government than in these times of secular progressivism on the march." The endorsement letter, now posted at DouglasBruce.com, concludes: "You have my gratitude for two decades of heroic work in the cause of TABOR, and my best wishes in winning the HD-15 seat." It was signed by yours truly -- from which it will be obvious that my evaluation of Bruce's usefulness in the legislature differs sharply from the negative appraisal in David Harsanyi's recent column for the Denver Post.

I wish my friend David, in seeking quotes about Doug Bruce from ex-legislators, would have gone a few more clicks into his rolodex and called former Sen. John Andrews instead of, or in addition to, former Sen. Norma Anderson, who is the very essence of a big-government Republican, a bossy grandma closely allied to that nanny state which Harsanyi so dislikes, and herself a master of the same acid, superior tone which supposedly disqualifies Bruce from effective public service.

I could have topped all of Harsanyi's anecdotes about the off-putting Bruce style twice over, based on long personal experience back to my 1990 campaign for governor against Roy Romer, when the TABOR author was simultaneously my valuable ally and a frequent complication to my efforts. But I would have pointed out, bottom line, that TABOR did run 10 points ahead of me that year, barely losing, and that since its ultimate success on the ballot two years later, it has made more of a beneficial difference for liberty and limited government in Colorado than anybody (me included) who served, or hoped to serve, as governor.

Libertarian conservatives like David and me should make no mistake about it: much credit is due Douglas Bruce when the history of our state from 1980 to 2020 is finally written. The laws, made by legislators and governors, are where the government tells the people what to do. But the constitution is one level higher; it's where the people tell the government what to do. For his leadership in altering Colorado's constitution back toward the intent of our power-suspicious Founding Fathers, Representative-elect Bruce deserves the gratitude of all, even of those who don't happen to know it.

That said, why do I believe his influence as a member of the General Assembly will weigh more in the plus column than in the minus, for friends of freedom like Harsanyi and Andrews? Because I believe, as stated in my endorsement letter to Douglas Bruce, quoted above, that the times call for the telling of hard truths and the drawing of bright lines -- even when some of the resulting discomfort, mainly felt by Democrats, may also spill onto my fellow Republicans. And Mr. Bruce, while he's no cuddly Sudanese teddy bear, is one of the few who can and will take on that thankless role.

In his candidate speech to the GOP House District 15 vacancy committee last Saturday, Bruce argued he scores pretty well on a "five I" test of integrity, intellect, issues, impact, and image. I recommend you read the whole thing on his website (see pdf file partway down left column). But notice in particular the candid self-awareness, and sardonic self-deprecation, in these closing paragraphs:

"The last 'I' test is Image. Here's where I am faulted. When liberals push silly schemes, I disagree. The media magnifies conflicts, so I'm called 'disruptive' by those who resent dissent. They wish our side would be silent, meek, passive, asleep, invisible. Fighting Big Government is always risky business. The Left hates to lose, so it takes revenge, using the politics of personal destruction.

"Yes, I am serious, intense, idealistic, and goal-oriented. I want to help all God's children to be free. Yes, I'm still working on my charm deficit. I plan to invite each legislator to a meal, one-on-one, to explore possible points of agreement. With liberals, those areas may be few, but I will still make the offer....

"Merely challenging the status quo is not 'making trouble;' it is the first step towards reform. To blow the whistle on wasteful spending requires making a noise! As for social graces, I admit I prize candor over coyness, substance over style, political principles over personal popularity. Tact is not my strong suit, but I'm trying. (Some would say I'm very trying!)

"I've always followed the advice that, before criticizing anyone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. That way, your opponent is a mile away, and barefoot!"

Douglas Bruce in the Colorado House of Representatives is going to be quite a spectacle, no doubt about it. Stay tuned for the fireworks when he takes his seat and the session opens next month. Barefoot opponents won't be the half of it.

You can expect Rep. Bruce to proclaim at every opportunity that the left-liberal emperor has no clothes at all -- bare naked yet shameless about it. If we want to revive the constitution and save the Republic, somebody has to say that. I believe Doug is just the man.

Where are the great?

(Denver Post, Dec. 2) Midgets everywhere. Rappers, starlets, shrinks, scolds, facilitators, litigators, hustlers, hucksters, victims, vegans. Ours is the age of the shallow, the small, the squalid. Where are the great? “There were giants in the earth in those days,” says Genesis. Granted, every era magnifies the memory of bygone times. But what now passes for excellence in manhood and womanhood, thought and expression, moral and civic life, would make our grandparents shake their heads. For a third of a century we’ve lived in a house I call Marcus Bend, after my mother’s father, who helped buy it. I’m here surrounded with books and mementoes as the old year wanes, sobered by Christmas clamor, candidate noise and war news, wondering and worrying: Where are the great?

Stacked on the desk are “From Dawn to Decadence” by Jacques Barzun, “America: The Last Best Hope” by William Bennett, “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis, Winston Churchill’s memoir “My Early Life,” an FDR biography by Conrad Black, books on Chesterton and John Paul II, “The Western Canon” by Harold Bloom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” and his Harvard address. Collectively they look upon 2007 and frown.

The scholarly Barzun, who turned 100 last week, is a great man of our time and a worthy judge of greatness. His book, a history of civilization from 1500 to the present, warns of today’s “urge to build a wall against the past…a revulsion from things in the present that seem a curse from our forebears.”

He writes of the 20th century as a time when elements that “made the nation-state the carrier of civilization… a common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service… were decaying and could not be restored.” He hopes for a 22nd century when boredom may stir new “radicals” to study afresh the old texts, “the record of a fuller life,” from which the West then rediscovers “what a joy it is to be alive.” Of the present century Jacques Barzun is less hopeful.

By what sickness of the soul could America and other nations blessed with the heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia come to see all of this as “a curse from our forebears?” Solzhenitsyn, another contemporary great, gives the diagnosis:

“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer…. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty.” It is not true, insists the Russian giant, that “man is above everything.” Nor is it right that “man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all.”

Courage, faith, integrity, and honor, ordinary virtues harnessed to extraordinary gifts, constitute human greatness or the potential for it. Guy McBride, retired president of the Colorado School of Mines, and Vernon Grounds, retired president of Denver Seminary, have that heroic stature with me. Some of those books I’ve found so inspiring, by or about the great, reached me through them.

Great souls ennoble our world in big and little ways. Think of the late Bill Hosokawa of the Denver Post, or former Sen. Bill Armstrong. Is there a touch of that in Peter Groff, recently chosen as Colorado Senate President? We’ll see.

Over the centuries, nations flourish and fade in a cycle, the Scots philosopher Alexander Tytler is supposed to have said. Out of bondage come faith and courage, then liberty and abundance. But when these breed complacency and apathy, dependence ensues and bondage returns. If this sounds like an American self-portrait, we need to value greatness more.

Campos flunks Federalist 101

Paul Campos, the CU law professor and Rocky Mountain News columnist, needs to acquaint himself with James Madison, the father of our Constitution and fourth president of the United States. In a piece published on election day, Campos enthuses over a book called Our Undemocratic Constitution by fellow law prof Sandy Levinson of Texas. With iconoclastic bravado he entertains such daring questions as "whether [anyone's] lifelong devotion to the [Constitution] makes sense" and "whether some of our most basic political arrangements need to be overthrown." What Campos and Levinson overlook is merely the little problem of how any large and populous republic can avoid self-destructing through a tyranny of the majority. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, co-authors of The Federalist Papers, struggled in print with this age-old difficulty, after they and 50 other gifted statesmen -- next to whom these pompous profs are as pygmies -- had struggled with it in convention for months at Philadelphia. Federalist No. 51, penned by Madison, sums up the challenge this way:

"...what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Campos suavely labels the checks, balances, and compromises of the Philadelphia Convention's workmanship as "products of political choices made 220 years ago... that are ripe for revisiting, given that the world has changed somewhat since the 18th century." He offers no proof, however -- nor could he -- that human nature with its failings and its power-lust has changed one bit in all these years. Indeed he shows no comprehension at all that abuse of political power is even a problem.

Apparently on Planet Campos the angelic conditions are present which Madison found lacking here on earth. O happy fortune to live in Boulder, where there is no need to "oblige [government] to control itself."

Note: After writing the above for the Gang of Four blog on PoliticsWest.com, I was delighted to receive supporting fire from Joshua Sharf on that same blog, and from Denver attorney Roger Castle as cited below:

Somebody with more voice than me needs to "school" these two law professors about the Constitution, and about logic! These are truly hare-brained ideas.

1. Who said anything should be, or is, best as a pure democracy? He assumes it is, without first establishing that. Shallow!

2. Did he ever read his history books about how the States agreed to come together, only with protection for their States' independence and rights? Moreover, his argument assumes that the "undemocratic" Senate reigns supreme, unchecked by the "democratic" House? Why is that wonderfully "democratic" House letting that nasty undemocratic Senate "steal" all those federal tax dollars? And why does he believe the "democratic" House's majority power should henceforth be allowed to "steal" tax revenues from the smaller (Senate) states against their consent?

3. Because both houses have to agree and the President can veto, he complains that this makes "legislative reform" difficult? Isn't that a choice word! In plain English, he really means that two houses make it more difficult to "pass new laws". Those Constitutional provisions limit the power of government and slow the process of knee-jerk change. It also gives some respect to the status quo and tradition. Those are principles to which the "progressive" law professor is no doubt opposed, but to which the vast majority of the "democratic-voting" Americans would readily agree. How many times have you heard someone complain recently about there not being enough laws being passed?

4. If, under our representative system, "only the rich and powerful can get laws passed", why would we want to give them even more ease in passing those laws....er,sorry..."reforms"? If a purely "democratic" Congress is the answer, why doesn't the current "democratic" House already block all those laws designed by the Senate for the "rich and powerful"? After all, the Senate and the President can do nothing alone!

5. Right now, we sure don't have too much partisan political posturing, campaigning, mudslinging, and carping do we? Our Congressional leaders are all just wholly committed to simply doing the business of the people? Right! *&%#@*^+**. So what do these two professors want to do? Have Congress constantly debating/posturing to have the current "incompetent" President removed early! Because after all, changing Presidents and having Presidential campaigns are just not happening enough to suit our tastes!

6.Query: why didn't Campos/Levinson advocate this Presidential removal provision during the Clinton years? It couldn't possibly be due to their politics, so it must be their newly enlightened view of how wonderful pure democracy is -- but which they don't bother to explain to us.

7. While technology, etc., has changed, human nature and political power have not changed one iota since "220 years ago" or the "18th Century". They still need to be held in check! And these two guys are prime examples.

Unionize for productivity? Right

The uproar over Governor Ritter’s executive order setting all state employees on a path to unionization has been extraordinary. Business outrage, legislative indignation, and editorial denunciation all indicate a political event of seismic proportion. Politics aside however, thoughtful observers were even more astonished by the governor’s bold assertion that his decision was a sure path to improved service and greater productivity on the part of state workers.

Unfortunately there is no persuasive evidence in this state, in this country, or for that matter the world that supports this assertion. In fact the preponderance of evidence points in precisely the opposite direction – poorer service and lower productivity. The historical record makes this quite clear.

Unions reached their peak a half century ago when nearly one in three American workers were members. During the first half of the 20th century unions provided a much needed corrective to the excesses of the capitalist system. Their valuable role in bringing about a reasonable equilibrium between labor and management cannot be denied.

Time however has passed unions by – a helpful influence in the first half of the last century became a dragging anchor in the second. Having outlived their usefulness to the American economy and American workers alike, unions have seen a steady decline in membership. Yet concurrent with this fifty-year union decline, the American economy, and the well-being of the American worker has soared to hitherto unimaginable heights. Positive developments in technology, competition, trade, deregulation, and management have fueled this astonishing explosion of productivity; unions have only hindered it.

Today, fewer than one American worker in seven belongs to a labor union, and it is most instructive to see where you find them.

Unions in the private sector are almost an endangered species, and those industries where they remain prominent – such as auto manufacturing- are in deep trouble owing to utterly unsustainable union contracts. In the public sector, however, union membership, wealth and political clout is thriving. Absent the public, sector unionism in America is a non-entity.

It is most useful to ask what explains this stark dichotomy between private and public sector unions.

Joseph Stalin famously described his success in disposing of political opponents with the phrase “No man, no problem”. In the union context that might read “no competition, no problem”.

What school districts, municipalities, state and federal government have in common is that all are essentially monopoly enterprises with no competitors.

Let us be clear that public service has been an honorable, satisfying, and worthwhile calling long before it encountered unions and will continue to be with or without unions.

It is equally clear that union leaders understand better than anyone that competition for them is the kiss of death and they will do absolutely anything in their power to snuff it out before it can demonstrate its inherent popularity and effectiveness. An example of this “preserve the monopoly at all costs” behavior is the recent flood of union money and manpower that poured into Utah to pass a ballot initiative overturning a new law that granted school vouchers to poor children.

This behavior and all the history that proceeds it should tell us all we need to know about any connection between unions and either productivity or the public interest.

Bill Ritter is a decent and sincere man who obviously wants what is good for Colorado. No doubt a case can be made for his recent executive order but trying to justify it as promoting improved service and productivity flies in the face of all history and common sense.

Not long ago Governor Ritter wisely and courageously vetoed a naked union power grab that had been jammed through the legislature by the usual suspects. Though incurring the furious wrath of his party’s left wing which had long viewed him darkly, Ritter caught the eye of the nation and suggested that Colorado had elected a truly “New Democrat” who harkened to the better angels of his party’s distant but honorable past, a man ready to defy the special interest on behalf of the public interest.

On a bleak Friday afternoon these illusions were shattered. We must all hope that for our governor and our state better days are ahead.

Colorado Education Commissioner from 1997-2007, Dr. Moloney is also a former member of the NEA and the Teamsters Union