Jim Huffman

Flip-flopping has long been perceived to be a negative in American politics. Mitt Romney was for abortion rights before he was against them. He was for Romneycare, but is against Obamacare. For these changes of heart (or shifts with the political winds) he has been labeled a flip-flopper. (more)

About a week ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pronounced April “the month the confidence fairy died.” The confidence fairy is the idea that economic revival will come when people have confidence that regulations will be predictable, taxes low and stable, and government budgets balanced. “The good news,” wrote Krugman, “is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth.” (more)

In his coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing on the validity of Arizona’s immigration law (S.B. 1070), ABC News reporter Terry Moran stated that the issue before the court is: “Does Arizona have the constitutional right to make its own immigration law?” This followed anchor Diane Sawyer’s statement in the same news segment that the issue before the justices is “whether people in this country can be stopped by the police [and] asked to prove they are here legally if the police have other reasons to be suspicious of them.” (more)

If Senator William Proxmire were alive and still representing Wisconsin in the United States Senate, there is little doubt the General Services Administration’s $823,000 Las Vegas spending spree would make the GSA a leading candidate for a 2012 Golden Fleece Award. Alas, the awards were discontinued in 1987 shortly before Proxmire left the Senate. Though the awards were revived in 2000 by Taxpayers for Common Sense, they have not had the same cachet that came with sponsorship by a member of the United States Senate. (more)

Speaking in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Tuesday, President Obama said “this election will probably have the biggest contrast that we’ve seen since the Johnson-Goldwater election --- maybe before that.” The president may well be correct, but the extremist this time around is not the challenger. (more)

President Obama says that the Supreme Court would be taking an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” by overturning the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), since the act was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Although the president’s statement confirms his membership in the fraternity of left-wing constitutional law professors (over 100 of whom signed a statement defending the constitutionality of the act), he is wrong on both the history and the math. (more)

Today the United States Supreme Court began three days of hearings on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Challengers claim the law’s mandate that individuals purchase insurance or pay a fine is unprecedented. They are right. Despite government arguments to the contrary, requiring the purchase of a product or service is not the same as regulating how many acres of wheat a farmer can plant. A farmer can choose to plant no wheat without penalty. Those who choose not to purchase health insurance will pay a penalty. (more)

During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised hope and change. Based on his speech Thursday in Cushing, Oklahoma, it seems that he’s hoping voters won’t notice as he changes his positions with the political winds. A few months ago, in the face of environmentalist opposition, the president refused to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canada to refineries in Texas and Oklahoma. In Oklahoma on Thursday, he said that our problem is not oil and gas supplies, but a shortage of the pipeline capacity necessary to move these supplies to where we need them. He claimed to have approved new pipelines all over the country and announced that building the southern portion of the Keystone pipeline is now a priority for the administration. (more)

With the biggest federalism case in decades about to be argued before the Supreme Court, the political left and right are clearly divided. Conservatives are hopeful that at least five justices will find the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. If that happens, liberals will condemn whichever justices constitute the majority as judicial activists of the worst sort. Is there any hope of ever overcoming this sharp political division on the nature of American federalism? (more)

Recent votes in the United States Senate demonstrate that bipartisanship is not dead. Given the votes in question, we might well wish that it were. And who would have guessed that the Senate’s filibuster rule, which now allows 41 senators to block almost any piece of legislation, would save us from bipartisan action? (more)

Writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Bryce described the toll that the nation’s burgeoning wind farms have taken on endangered birds. At one site alone --- Altamont in Alameda County, California --- 2,400 raptors, including 70 golden eagles, have been killed by the giant whirling blades. In 2009 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the national death toll from wind turbines at 440,000 birds that year alone. (more)

During last week’s Republican presidential debate in Arizona, Mitt Romney said: “I will repeal Obamacare.” In a February 4 tweet, Newt Gingrich said: “On day one I will repeal Obamacare.” In a campaign ad released on December 9, Rick Perry said: “I’m an outsider who will repeal Obamacare.” Last June 14 on “Good Morning America,” Michele Bachmann said: “I will repeal Obamacare.” The Obama/Biden 2012 campaign website states: “President Obama passed the Affordable Care Act.” (more)

President Obama put forward his FY 2013 budget yesterday. Meanwhile, there was rioting in Greece. If you think these events are unrelated, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you. (more)

There was a time when children celebrated the birthday of our nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. I recall, as a young Cub Scout, our den mother, who happened to be my mother, fashioning from clay and scraps of fabric the spitting image of Lincoln to be the centerpiece of our pack’s Lincoln Day diorama. And we committed to memory Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a masterpiece in communication I think of every time I hear our modern presidents drone on about the many things they will do to make our lives better. (more)

An editorial in Sunday’s New York Times reminded me of an important issue not much discussed among the dwindling number of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination: the future of the federal courts and particularly of the United States Supreme Court. Newt Gingrich has put out a proposal for how Congress and the president could control what he sees as an out-of-control court system, but none of the candidates has emphasized that the future makeup of the Supreme Court will very likely turn on the outcome of the presidential election. (more)

A recent Washington Times story carried this headline: “Congress logs most futile legislative year on record.” The subhead forecast “scant accomplishment for ’12 session.” (more)

President Obama’s “recess” appointments of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and three individuals to the National Labor Relations Board have outraged Senate Republicans and generated much commentary on the constitutionality of the president’s actions. Not surprisingly, the commentary is dominated by the arcane legalese of attorney general and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, along with a handful of judicial opinions, though none from the Supreme Court. Before we get lost in the legal weeds, we should take a look from 30,000 feet and consider the basic constitutional rule on judicial and executive appointments, and why the Constitution provides for recess appointments. (more)

A few weeks ago, my seventh-grade daughter’s school put regular classes on hold for a “sustainability day.” One of the things they did during this reprieve from the rigors of math, history and English was watch a video titled “The Story of Stuff,” starring Annie Leonard and lots of animated illustrations. The video has been around since 2007. It has had about 2 million YouTube and goodness knows how many voluntary and involuntary classroom viewers. Leonard even bagged an interview on “The Colbert Report,” though she was so humorless that Colbert appears to have cut the interview short. (more)

There can be no disputing that Rick Santorum is the big winner in Iowa, even though he came up eight votes short of Mitt Romney. Only time will tell if Santorum is a real challenger to Romney, or just the latest in a long line of conservative pretenders that now includes Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. Each has risen and fallen in the polls while Romney has held steady at about 25%. Unless Jon Huntsman catches fire in New Hampshire, there is really no one to follow Santorum as the anti-Romney. And Huntsman, who is more moderate than Romney, does not qualify as a conservative alternative. (more)

Among the thousands gathered in Durban, South Africa, for the just-concluded climate confab were dozens of law students and law professors from the United States. At the risk of offending fellow environmentalist law professors, Professor Karl Coplan questioned, on Pace University’s GreenLaw, the logic of working to reduce carbon emissions by incurring the very large carbon footprint associated with dozens of round-trip flights by students and professors from the United States to Durban. (more)