United Liberty

Following up on a move by the Virginia Senate last month, today the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that would make it illegal to force any resident of the Commonwealth to purchase health insurance:

RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia’s General Assembly is the first in the nation to approve legislation that bucks any attempt by President Barack Obama and Congress to implement the national health care overhaul in states like Virginia.

Without debate, the House of Delegates voted 80-17 Wednesday to accept Senate amendments to a bill that supporters say preserves Virginia’s prerogatives as a state.

Thirty-four other legislatures have filed or proposed similar measures rejecting health insurance mandates.

But Virginia’s legislature, scheduled to adjourn Saturday, is the first to finish work on a bill. The measure goes to Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who plans to sign it.

While I still have doubts about the Constitutionality of a law like this given the Supremacy Clause, it is nonetheless a fairly powerful indication of the voter disdain for a plan that, inexplicably, the Democrats continue to try to push through Congress.

Several prominent Republican lawyers are speaking up against the efforts by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol to smear attorneys who previously represented Guantanamo detainees:

A group that includes leading conservative lawyers and policy experts, former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and several senior officials of the last Bush administration is denouncing as “shameful” Republican attacks on lawyers who came to the Obama Justice Department after representing suspected terrorists.

Senate Republicans have demanded details of the lawyers’ past work and Liz Cheney’s group “Keep America Safe” has questioned their “values.” A drumbeat of Republican criticism forced the Justice Department reluctantly to identify seven of them last week. But the harshness of the criticism – Keep America Safe labeled a group of them the “Al Qaeda Seven” — has provoked a backlash from across the legal establishment.

“We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” wrote the 19 lawyers whose names were attached to the statement as of early Monday.

The statement cited John Adams’s defense of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre to argue that “zealous representation of unpopular clients” is an important American tradition.

The attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” they wrote, by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether civilian courts of military tribunals.

The letter’s signers include some of the top officials of a Bush Justice Department that wrestled at length with the legal questions surrounding terrorist detentions.

(…)

Former Comptroller General David Walker lays it on the line:

“Let’s say our government continues to take in about the same level of historical revenues, but we hold discretionary spending to 2008 levels as a percentage of the economy, and we don’t expand health care or other entitlements any further. That sounds pretty benign, but it’s actually a disaster …. Our interest payments would become the largest single expenditure in the federal budget in about 12 years. …

The bigger the bill we pass on to our children, the bleaker the future we will bequeath to them. …

Right now, on average, Americans pay about 21 percent of their income in federal taxes and another 10 percent to state and local governments. By 2030, to pay our rising bills, that amount could be at least 45 percent–higher even than the average 42 percent that most Europeans pay. …

With reductions in disposable income like that, the children born in 2000 will inherit a much different kind of America in 2030. So much of their money will be devoted to keeping the government afloat that they’ll have relatively little for everything else in life. Their homes will be smaller and drabber. There will have less to spend for cars, vacations, dinners out, and big TV sets. …

And America as we know it will cease to exist. There’s no telling what would happen next because the idea of an America where nearly half of a persons income goes to the state is something that we’ve never faced before, and which none of us can contemplate.

I’m not looking forward to it at all.

The Congressional Budget Office is out with it’s latest analysis of President Obama’s budget, and the news isn’t good at all:

President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday, including more than $2 trillion that Obama proposes to devote to extending a variety of tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration.

The 10-year outlook by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama’s policies would add $8.5 trillion to the debt by 2020. While the two agencies are in relative agreement about the short-term budget picture, with both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year and $1.3 trillion in 2011, the CBO is less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits will grow rapidly after 2015

Under these projections, the National Debt would exceed $ 20,000,000,000,000 by 2020.

Here’s a chart to make the matter even more clear:

Former Governor Mike Huckabee explains why he did not attend this years CPAC gathering:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee blasted the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday as outdated, nearly corrupt and unrepresentative of the conservative movement.

Huckabee, a 2008 Republican presidential contender and potential 2012 candidate who had spoken at the conference for years, said the reason he blew it off this year was that the meeting has become dominated by libertarian activists.

“CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years, one of the reasons I didn’t go this year,” Huckabee said in an interview with Fox News, where he is a paid analyst and has his own show.

He was responding to a question about whether he was upset by his single-digit showing in the conference’s straw poll, which was won by libertarian-leaning Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Huckabee has ripped libertarians. Back during the 2008 campaign, he referred to libertarianism as the greatest threat to the Republican Party.

Additionally, as James Joyner notes, Huckabee actually makes a point that he didn’t intend to:

Another prominent Democrat has decided to retire:

Media reports say that Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana has decided to not seek re-election.

The Indianapolis Star reports that Bayh is attributing his decision to excessive partisanship that makes progress on public policy difficult to achieve as the motivation for his decision.

Bayh scheduled a Monday afternoon news conference in Indianapolis.

This is somewhat of a surprise considering that Bayh, who briefly considered a run for the White House in 2008 and was rumored to be among Barack Obama’s top choices for Vice-President, would have likely won re-election easily.

In case currently before the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the Obama Administration is arguing that you have no expectation of privacy in any of your cell phone data:

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department’s request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans’ privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.

“This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century,” says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. “If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.”

According to a new Quinnipac Poll:

Homosexuals should be able to openly serve in the U.S. military, American voters say 57 – 36 percent. Voters also say 66 – 31 percent the current policy of not allowing openly gay men and women to serve is discrimination, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

(…)

On other related questions, American voters say:

* 82 – 10 percent that the military should stop pursuing disciplinary action against gays who are outed against their will;
* 65 – 30 percent, including 57 – 38 percent among voters in military families, that ending “don’t ask; don’t tell” will not be divisive or hurt the ability to fight effectively;

It’s not all entirely good news, though:

Should Congress repeal DADT as President Obama and military leaders have advocated, today’s poll suggests new controversies about gays in the military. A 54-38 majority said homosexual soldiers should face “restrictions on exhibiting their sexual orientation on the job.” A similar 50-43 majority said the government should not provide benefits to the partners of gay members of the military. Americans are split on whether gay and straight soldiers “should be required” to share quarters. Forty-six percent of respondents said that the military should not require combined quarters, while 45% said it should.

Nonetheless, the fact that a majority of Americans support allowing gays to serve openly, and that an even larger majority favors repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, is a good sign.

Hopefully Congress will catch up.