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10/8/08, What will the NRA do? »»

10/8/08, "Time" for change »»

10/6/08, Our First Radio Ad »»

10/3/08, Congressmen who sold-out the taxpayer »»

10/3/08, House Should Stand Firm and Kill the Wall Street Bailout »»

10/2/08, Where have all our representatives gone? »»

10/2/08, Senators who voted 'NO' on the bailout »»

9/29/08, Reason Goes Hollywood »»

9/29/08, Radio Ad Contest »»

9/26/08, Barr Will Save You Money »»

Cato-at-liberty

10/11/08, Do Economists Count? »»

Jonathan Chait, a journalist who frequently attacks supply-side economics, derides Peter Robinson of National Review for making a big deal out of a statement by 100 economists (or maybe it’s only 90) warning about the dangers of Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and restrict international trade. Robinson may have gone a bit far in calling the statement “The Booming of the Big Guns.” As Chait says, 100 economists isn’t all that many. After all, 200 economists warned against the Wall Street bailout, and you see how much good that did.

But Chait also sneers at the quality of the economists who signed this statement opposing new burdens on production and trade. “The list certainly does not suggest excessive discrimination about credentials. It’s heavily larded with GOP apparatchiks now residing in the right-wing think tank world.” Actually, it’s not. There are maybe half a dozen who list think-tank affiliations, including people like Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution, who–perhaps Chait does not know–holds a Ph.D. from MIT and taught for years at the highly regarded University of Rochester econ department. And then there are five Nobel Laureates–Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith.

After his snipe at “GOP apparatchiks now residing in the right-wing think tank world,” Chait says “(my favorite is “economist” George Schultz of the Hoover Institution).” OK, let’s think about that. First, it’s Shultz, not Schultz. And just who is this “GOP apparatchik George Schultz”? Well, Chait probably thinks that seven successful years as Secretary of State doesn’t qualify you as an expert on taxes and international trade. Maybe not. But Shultz also has a Ph.D. from MIT. And he taught economics for 20 years at MIT and the University of Chicago. He then served as director of OMB and Secretary of the Treasury. Qualified to comment on U.S. economic policy? I’d say so.

But if you insist on academic credentials–and 20 years at MIT and Chicago in the past doesn’t count–that still leaves you five Nobel laureates. And lots more economists of substantial accomplishment and reputation, including some who just might get a Nobel Prize one of these days, people like Robert Barro, Mike Jensen, John Taylor, Michael Boskin, Martin Feldstein, Anne Krueger, Glenn Hubbard, Burton Malkiel, Kevin Murphy, and Cato’s own Bill Niskanen. The fact is, I’ve seen a lot of petitions from economists, and this one is more top-heavy with academic credentials than most.

It’s intriguing to note that the statement does not endorse McCain’s economic proposals, it just criticizes Obama’s. Perhaps they couldn’t get five Nobel laureates and the other accomplished economists on the list to do that.

10/10/08, The President, Our Guardian Angel »»

10/10/08, The National Republican Trust PAC Is Wrong »»

I support the right of the National Republican Trust PAC to advocate any issue it wants in any way it wants. It shouldn’t even have to file reports with the government. It’s the job of the public to distinguish messages it should believe and messages it shouldn’t.

So let me help you with that now: An email being circulated by the National Republican Trust PAC is despicable and wrong.

“Obama’s Plan: Mohamed Atta Gets His Driver’s License,” it blares. [I've been able to find no online version to link to.] The email reads:

Did you know that Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ring leader, had a valid Florida driver’s license?

Did you know 13 of the 19 hijackers had obtained valid driver’s licenses? Armed with these licenses, eight of the hijackers even registered to vote!

Here is the shocking fact: Obama strongly supports giving illegal aliens in America driver’s licenses.

He said as much during two Democratic debates earlier this year.

This is terror-pandering of the highest order. While it’s true that several 9/11 hijackers got driver’s licenses and other documents, this has the same relationship to the success of their attacks as the brand of shoes they wore. They could have used their Saudi passports to board flights that day, and the same people in the same circumstances could get on planes today. Even if the REAL ID Act were implemented and we all carried a national ID, terrorists would not be prevented from boarding U.S. flights.

Yet there is no reason to fear. Our protection against a subsequent 9/11-style attack is the direct security of hardened cockpit doors and the awareness and vigilance of airline crews and passengers.

If it’s true that Obama would allow illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses ? by the way, it wouldn’t be his decision because driver’s licenses are issued by states ? it wouldn’t affect our security against terrorism.

By all appearances, this message looks like it is designed as much to raise money for the National Republican Trust PAC as to discredit Obama. Certainly, it doesn’t bring credit to Senator John McCain. In fact, it hurts him. To folks who don’t know campaign finance law, it looks like a desperate and venal grasp by McCain for an issue against Obama.

Hyping terror threats damages our country by provoking overreeactions that can be more damaging than direct attacks themselves. This message from the National Republican Trust PAC is offensive.

10/10/08, The Blame Game »»

In the now-heated effort of D.C. policymakers and pundits to afix blame for the current financial mess, some fingers are being pointed at the Federal Reserve. The criticism: the Fed kept interest rates too low in the early 2000s, resulting in a lot of easy money. That money, in turn, created the housing bubble and subsequent collapse, ushering in the financial crisis.

Is this criticism sound?

Figure 1 shows the three-month Treasury Bill rate and the Federal funds rate over the past several years. It indicates that, yes, money was easy in the early 2000s, but not because of the Fed. The Fed was forced to reduce and maintain a low Fed funds rate in response to the market’s high price (and corresponding low interest rate) for short-maturity securities such as 3-month T-Bills.

So why were market rates so low?

Chairman Bernanke has suggested that foreign capital inflows were the true cause of easy money earlier this decade. Figure 2 shows that net international capital inflows surged beginning in 1998 and remained high thereafter. Superficially, the interest rate vs. international capital inflows correlation is not strong enough to clinch his argument. Critics could ask why interest rates did not fall until January 2001. Perhaps the answer would be that a strong U.S. economy and stock market during the late 1990s held up interest rates for a time. But then why did asset markets tank in January 2000, followed by the economy in January 2001? Some folks might respond that the Fed funds rate was unsustainably high during 2000. But we don’t really know the answer as yet.

Another question is why did market short-term interest rates increase after mid-2004 despite strong capital inflows? I don’t think anyone has a good answer for that, either.

But let’s return to the fact that the Fed had to cut its funds rate earlier this decade in order to keep pace with declining short-term market interest rates. So long as the Fed’s objective is to maintain the amount of bank reserves in circulation at a level that is just enough to achieve its non-inflationary growth objective and to do so through an interest rate targeting operation, it has no choice but to set the Fed funds rate as close as possible to short-term market interest rates. Otherwise, the Fed would risk injecting too much (or too little) liquidity into the economy ? precisely what it’s now being incorrectly blamed for.

This brings us to the question of what, in light of the current crisis, the Fed should do to achieve its sometimes-conflicting objectives of maximizing non-inflationary growth and also ensuring systemic stability ? that is, to avoid widespread failures among large financial institutions of the kind we have witnessed this year. The Fed appears to have no systematic approach or tools to achieve its second objective.

One possible method is stricter imposition of regulatory constraints, to prevent home price inflation from incentivizing excess and risky mortgage lending. But that approach was rejected by Fed and Treasury officials (see yesterday’s NYT). And they did that, possibly, for good short-term reasons: a buoyant asset sector returns political dividends, but the systemic problems happen on someone else’s watch. Or, more charitably, Fed officials may have genuinely believed that financial innovations (such as dynamic hedging) meant that the risks were spread so broadly that they didn’t matter anymore.

Another possibility is for the Fed to incorporate asset prices in its measure(s) of price stability ? that is, include home and stock prices instead of just consumer goods when trying to determine if inflation is occurring. Doing so could lead the Fed to implement pre-emptive monetary strikes against perceived systemic risks in order to avoid an asset inflation party. That would be consistent with the definition of the Fed’s role (take away the punch-bowl just before the party really gets going), but it may not be any less “socialist.” Fed officials have now acknowledged that they are studying this issue and the jury is still out on it.

However, now we are paying the price for the lack of a proper market-oriented governance framework for dealing with systemic instability ? by gravitating toward direct socialist control of the financial sector in an unproductively panicked manner.

10/10/08, The End of American Capitalism? »»

At the top of today’s front page, the Washington Post joins other Big Media in dancing on the grave of capitalism and smaller government. And compared with such past headlines as “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets” or “Crisis Turns Free Marketeers into Regulators,” the Post goes all the way: “The End of American Capitalism?” It does have a question mark.

But what is the Post’s evidence that “American-style capitalism” is a casualty of the financial crisis? Well, for one, “The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks.” I’m not sure that an administration that has given us nationalized schools, expanded entitlements, burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley securities regulations (how’d those work out, by the way?), nation-building around the world, and a trillion-dollar increase in federal spending is exactly an example of free-marketers finally giving in to the lure of big government.

But it’s not just American politicians, the Post tells us, who have lost faith in capitalism. “European leaders . . . are calling for broad new international codes to impose scrutiny on global finance.” So the people who run the U.S. government and the people who run European governments are united in seeking more power for governments.

But wait, there’s more. “To some degree, those calls are even being echoed by the International Monetary Fund.” So even an intergovernmental organization devoted to forced wealth transfers also wants more power for governments.

Also Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz: “We told them if you wanted to be like us, here’s what you have to do ? hand over power to the market. The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis.” So the most left-leaning Nobel laureate thinks our policies should move to the left. But if reporter Anthony Faiola had interviewed such recent laureates as Vernon Smith, Ed Prescott, Robert Mundell, Gary Becker, Myron Scholes, Douglass North, or James Buchanan, he might have gotten a different answer.

There’s no question that the global financial crisis is causing people to question how well capitalism works. But we’re still not in any Great Depression. And the evidence in this article is almost entirely that governments are ? as usual ? taking advantage of a crisis to expand their scope and power.

Of course, if this crisis leads us to question “American-style capitalism” ? the kind in which a central monetary authority manipulates money and credit, the central government taxes and redistributes $3 trillion a year, huge government-sponsored enterprises create a taxpayer-backed duopoly in the mortgage business, tax laws encourage excessive use of debt financing, and government pressures banks to make bad loans ? well, it might be a good thing to reconsider that “American-style capitalism”

10/10/08, More Eavesdropping »»

10/9/08, Litigating the 4th Amendment in the Supreme Court »»

In this first week of the new term, the Supreme Court heard two Fourth Amendment cases. The first, Herring v. United States, asked whether evidence obtained based on an erroneous arrest warrant (called in by a police clerk from a neighboring county) should be suppressed. The second, Arizona v. Gant, looked into whether the long-standing “Belton“ rule that a police officer may search the passenger compartment of an arrested person’s car should be set aside when the the search — typically justified on “officer safety” grounds — occurs after the arrested person is handcuffed and locked in the back of a squad car. The easy legal answers would seem to be yes and yes (though I have qualms about the exclusionary rule — which is fairly unique to America – as a matter of policy), but then it’s hard to craft a readily administrable legal rule that would get you there without creating an equally unjust result in other circumstances. Hard cases, as they say, make bad law.

But my point is not to argue the finer points of Fourth Amendment doctrine. Instead, it is to highlight the difficulty of arguing those points in the rarefied air of the Supreme Court. As the SCOTUSblog analysis of the arguments in the above cases concluded:

The arguments in these cases illustrate the complexity of arguing Fourth Amendment cases before this Court. It is not simply a question of appealing to Justices? support for, or skepticism of, the exclusionary rule or broad discretion for law enforcement officers. Many of the Justices are also concerned about need for clear, administrable rules, while others simultaneously resist the inflexibility and illogical results a bright-line rule inevitably gives rise to. And while some Justices are more than ready to abandon old decisions and doctrines they believe were wrongly adopted or no longer make sense (be it the exclusionary rule or Belton) others feel strongly about the Court?s obligation to adhere to its prior precedent absent strong justification for departure. And to make matters worse, these various considerations often point in different directions and cut across the traditional liberal-conservative lines on the Court: Justices Breyer and Alito worry about stare decisis, while Justice Thomas is much less concerned; Justice Kennedy wants a rule that makes pragmatic sense, while Justice Scalia doesn?t care if the rule is nonsensical if it has a historical pedigree; Scalia worries about a vague standard for applying the exclusionary rule, but the Chief Justice not so much. In the end, the cross-currents can sometimes give advocates more to work with in crafting arguments that can attract five votes. But at the same time, it sometimes makes the task of holding together a coalition quite complicated.

In short, separating out death penalty cases, it is in criminal law where the justices can be the least predictable.

10/9/08, No, It Wasn?t Joe Biden »»

10/9/08, Joe Klein on Obama, McCain & Health Care »»

In a recap of the second McCain-Obama debate, Joe Klein offers his thoughts on the role of government generally and in health care in particular. Excerpts and comments follow:

Obama began his response with a simple declarative sentence: “I believe that health care is a right for every American.”

Health care is a bundle of goods and services. Treat health care like a “right,” and watch it disappear.

The rest of his answer could be used as a template for how to deal with a complex issue in a town-hall debate. He began with a personal story: his mother, dying of cancer at age 53, having to fight her insurance company, trying to prove that her disease had not been a pre-existing condition.

Obama has said his mother ”had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs.” Neither candidate can claim that their health plan would have saved her life. But McCain can claim that the federal government created an employer-based health insurance system that routinely strips people of coverage right before and right after they get sick. In its attacks on McCain’s health-insurance tax credit, I haven’t once heard the Obama campaign acknowledge that McCain’s plan would have spared Obama’s mother that deathbed worry.

He broadened that into a general proposition about the proper role of government: “It is absolutely true that I think it is important for government to crack down on insurance companies that are cheating their customers.”

Government should crack down on cheats. If an insurance company commits fraud or breaches its contracts, let ‘em have it. One senses that Obama means something else, perhaps that insurance companies “cheat” any time they deny coverage for anything? Maybe because he thinks health care is a right?

And finally, he transformed the issue into a metaphor for the entire campaign: “That is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked, and we need fundamental change.”

Regarding Obama’s silly attacks on McCain’s proposal to deregulate health insurance, click here.

Obama’s gamble is that the public ? worried at the beginning of the campaign, terrified now ? is ready for greater government support and regulation of the health-insurance system. That assumption has always been a sure loser in American politics. Republicans have perpetually and successfully waved the bloody flag of “socialized medicine.” But the employer-provided-health-care system is fraying, costs to average families are rising, and almost everyone has a friend with a horror story.

Indeed. If only Klein and the Republicans recognized that socialized medicine is the root cause of those horror stories.

McCain’s plan is a half-baked vestige of Reagan-era ideology: it tilts the incentives away from employer-provided health insurance and assumes that people will act in their enlightened self-interest if they are thrust out into a free market. That’s absolutely true when it comes to buying refrigerators. But health insurance is complicated and scary; most people don’t have the time or expertise necessary to make wise choices.

Health insurance is complicated; illness is scary. It would be nice if health insurers won customers by making health insurance simple and taking away patients’ fears of illness and financial ruin (rather than focusing on employers’ fears of absenteeism and rising labor costs). For that, the individual customer has to control the money.

They rely on their employers to make sure they’re getting a good deal ? and to fight for them if the insurance companies try to cheat them. And with many employers slouching away from that responsibility, the public seems ready to turn to the government for protection. In a collapsing economy, government regulation ? forcing insurers to cover everyone at reasonable rates ? sounds more comforting than stultifying.

Employers are shirking – but the government won’t? Even when Obama gives them a jillion more things to do than enforce contracts and prosecute fraud? And reasonable rates?? Does Klein know nothing about Medicare?

10/9/08, Shed No Tears for State Government Employees »»

The Pew Center on the States maintains an online news service called Stateline.org, which recently ran an article on the burgeoning plight of state government employees in the current economic downturn.

From Stateline:

But with the economy in a doldrums ? only three years after states had emerged from the last recession ? the hiring and salary freezes and benefit cuts that occurred earlier this decade are making a comeback as states struggle to meet their budgets.

The most galling aspect of this statement is the fact that it contradicts the Pew Center on the State’s own recent research.

From the Pew report:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when half the states? pension plans were fully funded, many states reacted by increasing benefits…Legislatures responded in 1999 and 2000 by shortening vesting periods, increasing the multipliers used in determining benefit amounts, decreasing the age at which employees could receive full retirement benefits and shortening the years of service needed to qualify.

According to the same report, “…public sector employees are far more likely to receive retirement benefits?and the gulf between private and public sectors continues to grow.” Pew found that (1) 90% of government employees have a defined benefit compared versus 20% in the private sector; (2) the median pension in 2005 was $17,640 (public) versus $7,692 (private); and (3) 82% of government employees have a retiree health care benefit compared with only 33% in the private sector.

Moreover, future state and local government employee benefit obligations are a ticking time-bomb for taxpayers. See previous Cato work on this topic here, here, and here. The Stateline article also says that state government salaries compare unfavorably with the private sector. Cato has already pointed out that this isn’t necessarily the case either (see here).

My own experience in state government led me to conclude that much of it amounts to one big “jobs program.” The truth is the typical state employee faces a relatively shorter work day, more generous benefits, and absurd job protections. I would contend that one of the most dangerous places on the planet is a state employee parking garage at closing time, which in my state is 4:30 pm following a 7 1/2 hour workday.

10/9/08, Today on Cato.org »»

10/9/08, Why Does the US Government Dictate the Drinking Age? »»

10/9/08, Federal Student Aid: Our Disaster in Microcosm »»

10/9/08, The Freedom to Pay for Only the Features You Need »»

After listening to the second McCain-Obama debate the other night, I saw an ad for Progressive.com that promised to reduce your auto insurance premiums by letting you pay for only the features that you need. It was as though the Invisible Hand had just watched the candidates discussing health care, and quickly whipped off an ad to tell Obama how stupid is his plan to force people to buy insurance coverage that they don’t need.

All of which inspired an oped that appears in today’s New York Post. An excerpt:

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to choose the features of your health policy, just like your auto insurance?

John McCain proposes to let you do just that, simply by letting you choose a plan available in another state. With the power to choose a policy regulated by a state with fewer mandated benefits and no community-rating laws, you could knock $1,000 off the price of a $7,000 plan.

This would boost coverage, too: A recent study by economists at the University of Minnesota suggests that McCain’s proposal could cover an added 12 million Americans.

But Obama sees choice as dangerous. He fears that “where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings,” no insurers would offer such coverage. The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn echoes, “Less cancer screening under McCain’s plan? Actually, yes.”

Nonsense. California doesn’t mandate colon-cancer screening, yet Kaiser Permanente of Northern California is a leader in such research and boasts the most aggressive screening program in the country.

Michigan doesn’t mandate prostate or cervical cancer screening, yet six of the University of Michigan’s seven insurance offerings cover both. That’s where Cohn gets his insurance, so I’ll bet him a fancy dinner that he has coverage for both, even without a mandate.

If anyone from my senior-year calculus class is out there (what were there, six of us?), you may recognize the reference to a horrific chapter from my academic career.

10/8/08, McCain and the Military Budget »»

John McCain likes to hold himself out as a fiscal conservative, and compared to Barack Obama there is no comparison. McCain expresses concern over the mountains of debt that George Bush and his willing accomplices in Congress have left for future generations, and has put forward modest plans for reversing these ominous trends. For example, the Republican pledges to freeze some government spending — with the notable exclusion of the military budget, veterans benefits, and entitlements — and perhaps to eliminate certain federal agencies, although in last night’s debate he didn’t stipulate which ones. Obama will not commit to similar steps to halt the runaway train of federal spending, and his tax increases are unlikely to generate nearly enough revenue to offset his proposed spending increases, and may well make the fiscal imbalance worse by stifling entrepreneurship and job creation.

But McCain’s specific proposals don’t add up to considerable savings. For example, last night he cited his opposition to the Boeing tanker deal, which he claimed saved taxpayers $6.8 billion (back in June, McCain put the figure at $6.2 billion). He has mentioned his opposition to earmarks, which total $18 billion. In the previous debate, he suggested that eliminating cost-plus contracts would save money in the Pentagon, but he didn’t venture a guess as to how much. Such modest proposals invited Obama counterattacks: the Democrat noted that the costs from the Iraq War, which McCain has pledged to continue until we achieve “victory,” would erase McCain’s vaunted earmark savings in less than two months.

Beyond sparring over Iraq War costs, however, the two candidates have not been pressed to justify their plans for military spending.

Personnel costs constitute roughly one third of the total defense budget, and are likely to grow in 2009 regardless of who wins next month’s election. Both McCain and Obama support President Bush’s decision to increase the size of our ground forces by 92,000 men and women over a five-year period. It is curious that Obama, a man who wears his opposition to the war in Iraq like a badge of honor, would support such increases. If Obama gets his wish, and removes most U.S. military personnel from Iraq over a 16-month period, he will presumably have more than enough troops to surge some into Afghanistan, while still reducing the burdens on our men and women in uniform, and their families. So, why the need for still more troops? Where else would a President Obama send them? Darfur? Congo? Burma? Georgia? He hasn’t said.

But leaving that aside, the scheduled increases are not nearly enough for John McCain. Writing in Foreign Affairs late last year, McCain pledged, “As president, I will increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps from the currently planned level of roughly 750,000 troops to 900,000 troops.” If McCain gets his wish, these two branches will be nearly 40 percent larger than they were prior to 9/11.

And how much will these additional troops cost? By my estimates, nearly 10 times what McCain would save if he eliminated every single earmark.

In April 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Bush’s plan to grow the force would cost an additional $108 billion through 2013. Backing out those figures — $108 billion / 92,000 — equates to $1,173,913 per additional man or woman in uniform. Applying that same number to McCain’s additional 150,000 troops comes to $176 billion.

Don’t take my admittedly crude, back-of-the-envelope estimate as gospel. According to earlier Army estimates, every additional 10,000 soldiers cost about $1.2 billion a year, so the costs of McCain’s proposal to grow the force by another 20 percent might ultimately total less than $176 billion. But if CBO pegged the earlier Bush increases at $108 billion over six years, then it seems logical to conclude that McCain’s additional 150,000 will cost still more than that.

And McCain is proposing to increase that portion of the military budget that has already witnessed considerable cost growth in recent years. The military has boosted bonuses to entice new recruits to join, and to keep those already in the service from leaving. Health care costs have also risen for the military, just as they have in the private sector. If anything, the CBO’s projections likely understate the true costs of the additional troops, because they consider only the incremental expenses associated with adding 92,000 new personnel to the system, but do not fully account for the long-term costs of keeping these troops paid, fed and equipped over the course of their military careers. Then there are the additional expenses associated with caring for more military retirees.

In two successive debates, moderators Jim Lehrer and Tom Brokaw have tried to pin the candidates down on what they would do to control spending, and both times the candidates have evaded the question. CBS’s Bob Schieffer gets his shot next week in the third and final debate. Rather than an open ended “What would you cut?” question, he might ask them how much their different plans for increasing the size of the military will cost the taxpayers.

10/8/08, Say It Ain?t So, NCC! »»

Apparently, former President Bill Clinton has been chosen as the next chairman of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. In terms of unintentional irony, that’s right up there with “The Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom.”

In the waning days of his presidency, Clinton said of the impeachment struggle that he was, ?proud of what we did there, because we saved the Constitution of the United States.? Like his successor, he seemed to see the Constitution in highly personal terms–as a document designed to protect his powers and prerogatives. When it came to others’ rights, eh, not so much.

Here are a few Cato publications you can peruse to get a sense of President Clinton’s fidelity to the Constitution: Tim Lynch’s Dereliction of Duty: The Constitutional Record of President Clinton, my paper on Clinton’s Imperial Presidency , and Roger Pilon’s edited volume The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton. Tim Lynch summed it up succinctly:

Although President Clinton has expressed support for an “expansive” view of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he has actually weakened a number of fundamental guarantees, including those of free speech and the right to trial by jury and that against double jeopardy. He has also supported retroactive taxes, gun control, and warrantless searches and seizures. The president’s legal team is constantly pushing for judicial rulings that will sanction expansions of federal power. The Clinton White House has, for example, supported the federalization of health care, crime fighting, environmental protection, and education. Clinton also claims constitutional authority to order military attacks against other countries whenever he deems it appropriate. President Clinton’s record is, in a word, deplorable. If constitutional report cards were handed out to presidents, he would receive an F.

Of course, if we were to grade on a curve, we’d have to bump Bill up a few notches compared to the man who followed him. One of “Lowi’s Laws”–maxims coined by the political scientist Theodore J. Lowi–was “the Law of Succession: Each president contributes to the upgrading of his predecessors.” And George W. Bush’s constitutional record certainly makes Bill Clinton’s look less awful by comparison. Tim and I examined the Bush constitutional record in this 2006 White Paper.

But we shouldn’t grade on a curve. And an institution like the NCC, which otherwise does fantastic work “increasing public understanding of, and appreciation for, the Constitution, its history, and its contemporary relevance,” shouldn’t have a man who repeatedly violated his oath of office as its chairman. In fact, choosing any modern president as NCC chair (Clinton succeeds George H.W. Bush as chairman) is utterly wrongheaded. The modern presidency is an office that has burst its constitutional bonds, so virtually any living ex-president has already violated the document the NCC exists to promote.