As published for The Arena on Politico.com on March 11th, 2010:

Dana Perino:

I had the honor and pleasure of reading Karl’s book, “Courage and Consequence,” over the last several months – and for full disclosure, not only am I his friend, but I also helped him with his publicity tour. “Courage and Consequence” is an excellent read – no matter your policy convictions, people interested in politics, current events and history will enjoy it. Karl is a great story teller – and don’t miss Chapter 32 for a few laughs.

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Scott Stanzel:

                          

As published for Critical Condition on nationalreview.com on March 11th, 2010:

I have a new piece online from the April Commentary, which argues that contrary to the conventional wisdom, health care has been a poor political issue for the Democrats, and that a measured approach has tended to work better. Given this two-decade history, Democrats should be very wary of the politics of voting yes on their trillion-dollar overhaul.

In addition to the historical politics of the issue, the short-term politics are problematic for the Democrats as well. Today’s CBO score should not be very reassuring to the Democrats on a number of fronts:

1. More Costs — CBO states that we should expect as much as $70 billion in additional discretionary costs that they did not score. This includes $5 to $10 billion for the IRS, “at least” an additional $5 to $10 billion for HHS, and “at least $50 billion in specified and estimated authorizations of future discretionary spending for a number of grant programs and other provisions of the legislation.” That $5 to $10 billion to the IRS, in particular, should worry lawmakers and citizens alike.

2. Continued Access Problems — At great cost, the bill will cover 31 million people by 2019, but that will still leave 24 million people uncovered. In addition, over half — 16 million — of the newly covered people will be covered throughMedicaid, and not through private coverage. This is both a fiscal challenge, as Medicaid’s long-term finances are extremely shaky, but also a political challenge, as many doctors refuse to take Medicaid patients. Putting more people on Medicaid will not solve the access problem if doctors refuse to see them.

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As published for The Corner on nationalreview.com on March 11th, 2010:

We’ve been called war criminals by left-wing bloggers because we worked in the Bush administration and believe that President’s Bush’s national security policies kept the nation safe after 9/11. We don’t think we are, and we hope our friends and family don’t either, but we’re grownups and can handle name-calling. We’ve chosen to enter the political realm and the public debate, so that kind of thing sort of comes with the territory.

That’s one reason why we are having a hard time sympathizing with the lawyers at Justice who represented Guantanamo detainees or other suspected terrorists. They are not in cahoots with al-Qaeda. They should be allowed to work at the Department of Justice and advise Attorney General Eric Holder on detainee issues, assuming they comply with their ethical obligations to avoid conflicts of interest.

But they are political appointees hired in large measure because of their political viewpoints and policy preferences; they are not career officials for whom such considerations would be prohibited. So, forgive us if we think they should have a bit thicker skin. Like us, they chose to enter the fray. They are trained advocates who can defend themselves, and we are sure they are more than capable of withstanding a little bit of political heat.

Not to mention that many of them were more than happy to be identified by name in more friendly settings. Go online and you can find numerous press releases from their law firms, law schools, and advocacy centers celebrating the lawyers for their work on behalf of detainees.

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As published for Post Partisan on washingtonpost.com on March 11th, 2010:

Defenders of the habeas lawyers representing al-Qaeda terrorists have invoked the iconic name of John Adams to justify their actions, claiming these lawyers are only doing the same thing Adams did when he defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate.

For starters, Adams was a British subject at the time he took up their representation. The Declaration of Independence had not yet been signed, and there was no United States of America. The British soldiers were Adams’ fellow countrymen — not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country.

Second, the British soldiers were accused of a crime. The constitution was not yet in place, but as I pointed out in my column this week, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy explains that the great American tradition later enshrined in the Sixth Amendment “guarantees the accused — that means somebody who has been indicted or otherwise charged with a crime — a right to counsel. But that right only exists if you are accused, which means you are someone the government has brought into the civilian criminal justice system and lodged charges against.” Unless they have been charged before military commissions or civilian courts, the al-Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo do not have a right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. They are not accused criminals. They are enemy combatants held in a war authorized by Congress.

In the 234 years since Adams and his compatriots fought for our independence, the United States has held millions of enemy combatants — and not one had ever filed a successful habeas corpus petition until the habeas campaign on behalf of Guantanamo detainees began. Thanks to this campaign, Guantanamo detainees now enjoy unprecedented rights far beyond those afforded to lawful prisoners of war with full Geneva protections. Nothing in the Geneva Conventions provides POWs with the right to counsel, access to the courts to challenge their detention, or the opportunity to be released prior to the end of hostilities. Yet thanks to the habeas campaign, al-Qaeda terrorists who violate the laws of war now enjoy all these privileges.

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As published for the April issues of Commentary Magazine:

In 1991 the political world was rocked by the unlikeliest of victories. Harris Wofford, a former aide for John F. Kennedy, upset two-term Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh in a special election to fill the seat of the late Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz. Wofford was guided to his victory by a little-known campaign manager named James Carville, who told him to make a bold and unequivocal case for “universal health care.” Wofford’s underdog victory left the GOP shell-shocked.

Fast-forward 19 years: it is the Democrats who are now faced with divining the results of another underdog’s victory. In January, a little-known state senator named Scott Brown defeated Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in a special election for the United States Senate. Universal health care was once again on center stage. This time around, though, the Republican seized on widespread antipathy to what has come to be seen as an incoherent Democratic scheme for an unworkable federal takeover of health care.

The unlikely victory not only defied the odds of a Republican winning in Democrat-owned Massachusetts; Brown’s ascent also put him in the storied seat of the liberal lion Ted Kennedy. Before Brown, no Massachusetts Republican had won a Senate election since Edward Brooke in 1972; no Republican presidential candidate had secured Massachusetts’s electoral votes since Ronald Reagan in 1984; even more striking, the Bay State had not sent any Republicans to the House of Representatives since 1996. However, beyond the mere realization of an improbable data point, this special election called into question much of the received political wisdom of the past 20 years. Brown’s victory directly contradicted the liberal claims that Democrats own the health-care issue and that comprehensive reform is popular. As a candidate, Brown ran on a platform promising to serve as the health-care roadblock he instantly embodied on being elected.

In fact, the Brown election can be seen as the closing of the door on a two-decade era in which Democrats, Republicans, and most of the political class came to believe that the Democrats possessed an inherent electoral advantage on the health-care issue. The history of the past 20 years reveals two Democratic presidencies, first Bill Clinton’s and now Barack Obama’s, upended by health care, whereas a single administration—that of a Republican, George W. Bush—benefited from it. In 2004, Bush was able to secure a narrow re-election victory in part because of his success in securing a form of targeted health-care reform through the creation of a Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

The combination of Democratic wishful thinking and an American electorate suspicious of the intentions of those pushing relentlessly for an ever greater government involvement in health care has proved a ballot-box disaster for Democrats. How did this happen? And why?

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As published for Critical Condition on nationalreview.com on March 11th, 2010:

The New England Journal of Medicine’s Career Center has a report by the Medicus Firm talking about how the Democrats’ health bills would drive doctors out of the profession. According to the report, “nearly one-third of physicians responding to the survey indicated that they will want to leave medical practice after health reform is implemented.” At the same time, they report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the U.S. will need 22 percent more doctors by 2018. Worse, 46 percent of primary-care docs said that they would leave or try to leave medicine as a result of the proposed overhaul’s changes to the system.

Reasons that doctors would want to leave include a fear that “reform could result in a significant decline in the overall quality of medical care nationwide” and that “reform will cause income to decrease, while workload will increase.”

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Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

                          

As published for The New York Times on March 11th, 2010:

By Peter Baker

Karl Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy White House chief of staff under President George W. Bush, on Tuesday published a memoir, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.” The Times caught up with him in New York to talk about democracy in Iraq, the impact of the C.I.A. leak case and questions about his mother’s suicide and his father’s sexual orientation. This is an edited transcript:

Question: You’ve said you wanted to use the book to set the record straight and you write about the “Myth of Rove.” What do you think is the biggest misconception about you and about President Bush?

Mr. Rove: One of the biggest myths is that Bush needed a brain. Bush is a very smart, able leader and people who didn’t like his policies tried to diminish him by depicting me as his brain. The second thing is the myth that Bush got there by – he got there by running a campaign that was based around big ideas, running into a headwind and won, and then won reelection in a year with a lot of headwinds, again by emphasizing big things. This was not mini-ball.

Question: And what about you personally?

Mr. Rove: The thing that always gets me is that people say, well, Rove wins elections and has won elections in the past consistently by smashball politics, dirty, backhanded, underhanded campaigns that vilify his political opposition and distort reality. Which is all based on the assumption that people are easily fooled and manipulated by such tactics, whether it’s the South Carolina primary or the 2002 elections or my races in Texas. People are not as dumb and stupid as some of those advocates of the myth of Rove assume they are.

Question: History often reduces complicated presidents to a single line – Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union, FDR beat the Depression and the Nazis, Reagan won the Cold War. A hundred years from now, what will be President Bush’s one line?

Mr. Rove: Bush laid the foundation for victory in the Global War on Terrorism and the expansion of democracy abroad. And at home he was a bold reformer who moved to solve the big challenges facing boomer and post-boomer America.

Read the full interview here

                          

As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 11th, 2010:

Republicans are prepared to turn the next several elections into referenda on ObamaCare.

As Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants cajole, entreat and threaten House Democrats to approve the Senate health-care bill, they argue that any problem with it can be fixed before it becomes law.

Pro-life House Democrats are deeply disturbed by the Senate abortion-funding language. Blue Dogs are upset by the fact that the Senate bill adds hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. Liberals are angry that it doesn’t include a “public option.” Democrats from Republican-leaning districts are concerned about backroom deals that greased it through the Senate. And some Democrats are unhappy with the Senate bill’s tax on the “Cadillac” insurance plans of their allies in Big Labor.

Fear not, sayeth Speaker Pelosi, all will be fixed with the magic dust known as “reconciliation”—a process that allows budget and spending bills to move through the Senate with 51 votes instead of 60. There’s only one problem: Senate Republicans plan to use every parliamentary tool at their disposal to stymie any fix that gives House Democrats cover for voting for health-care reform. If the House approves the Senate bill with some warts intact, then House Democrats will own it.

There is no guarantee that Senate rules will allow the GOP to block every reform House Democrats want. Vice President Joe Biden, who is also the president of the Senate, has enormous leverage to overrule the Senate’s parliamentarian to tilt the process in his party’s direction. But House Democrats can’t be sure when they vote for the Senate bill that its problems will be fixed before the president signs health reform into law.

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