United Liberty

George Will explains the importance of incorporating the Second Amendment in the McDonald v. Chicago case through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

To the drafters of the 14th Amendment, the phrase “privileges or immunities” was synonymous with “basic civil rights.” But in 1873, the court held that only some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights restrict states by being “incorporated” into the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause.

Since 1897, the court has held, with no discernible principle, that some rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are sufficiently fundamental to be “incorporated” but others are not. This doctrine bears the oxymoronic name “substantive due process.” Substance is what process questions are not about.

If the court now “incorporates” the Second Amendment right via the “due process” guarantee, that will be progress because it will enlarge the sphere of protected liberty. And even Justice Antonin Scalia, who recognizes that “substantive due process” is intellectual applesauce, thinks it is too late to repudiate 137 years of the stuff. Still, three points argue for using the “privileges or immunities” scythe against the two gun ordinances.

First, protecting the individual’s right to keep and bear arms for self-defense was frequently mentioned by those who drafted and ratified the 14th Amendment, the purpose of which was to protect former slaves and their advocates from being disarmed by state and local governments determined to assault their security and limit their autonomy.

Though this was written before the Health Care Summit between Democrats and Republicans, George Will defense of the filibuster as a sound constitutional principle needed to be posted:

Some liberals argue that the Constitution is unconstitutional. Their reasoning is a non sequitur: The Constitution empowers each chamber to “determine the rules of its proceedings.” It requires five supermajorities (for ratifying treaties, endorsing constitutional amendments, overriding vetoes, expelling members and impeachment convictions). Therefore it does not permit requiring a sixth, to end filibusters.
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“Great innovations,” said Jefferson, “should not be forced on slender majorities.” Hence Barack Obama recently embraced a supermajority mechanism: The 18-member commission he created to recommend measures to reduce the deficit requires that any recommendation be endorsed by 14 members.

Filibusters are devices for registering intensity rather than mere numbers — government by adding machine. Besides, has a filibuster ever prevented eventual enactment of anything significant that an American majority has desired, strongly and protractedly?

In his latest column at the Washington Post, George Will argues that the individual mandate in ObamaCare is unconstitutional:

Supporters of the mandate say Congress can impose the legislation under the enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. Since the New Deal, courts have made this power capacious enough to include regulating intrastate activity that “substantially affects” interstate commerce. Hence Congress could constitutionally ban racial discrimination in “public accommodations” — restaurants, motels, etc. — as an impediment to interstate commercial activity.

Opponents of the mandate say: Unless the commerce clause is infinitely elastic — in which case, Congress can do anything — it does not authorize Congress to forbid the inactivity of not making a commercial transaction, of not purchasing a product (health insurance) from a private provider.

George Will, the best columnist we will read in our lifetime, sets his sites on congressional involvement in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS):

Rep. Joe Barton, who considers the BCS part of the axis of evil, is incandescent and prepared. In January, this 13-term Republican, whose district includes Cowboys Stadium and nearly nuzzles TCU in Fort Worth, introduced the College Football Playoff Act of 2009, which says: It shall be unlawful to “promote, market, or advertise” a postseason Division I football game as a national championship game unless it is “the final game of a single elimination post-season playoff system” for which all Division I teams are, at the beginning of the season, equally eligible.

Barton believes in limited government, but not so limited that it cannot right outrageous wrongs, such as the absence of a playoff. Bipartisanship lives: Barack Obama, who wants to fix everything — health care, the climate, the pothole on your street, college football — also wants a playoff.
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The BCS has effectively created a two-tier bowl system — the big four bowls plus the national championship game, with their gigantic television contracts, and the 29 much less profitable bowls — which is unfair. It also is none of Congress’s business.

George Will predicts President Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan will fail:

[A]fter 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama’s second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor’s plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq’s security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down.

Having vowed to “finish the job,” Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy.

Obama’s surge will bring to 51,000 his Afghanistan escalation since March. Supposedly this will buy time for Afghan forces to become adequate. But it is not intended to buy much time: Although the war is in its 98th month, Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” banner will be unfurled 19 months from now — when Afghanistan’s security forces supposedly will be self-sufficient. He must know this will not happen.

Forget the “surge,” we lost Afghanistan the moment we made a decision to engage in War in Iraq, and Will has written about the need to leave that country as well.

Obama is asking for more problems with this strategy, but unfortunately, what conservatives don’t realize is that George W. Bush lost this war, not his successor.

Following up his call for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, George Will says it’s time to get out of Iraq:

After almost 6 1/2 years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military — overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation — to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is a worse use of the U.S. military than “nation-building,” it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples’ politicians.

More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of U.S. forces from the cities. All U.S. combat units are to be withdrawn from the country within a year. Up to 50,000 can remain as “advisers” to an Iraqi government that is ostentatious about its belief that the presence of U.S. forces is superfluous and obnoxious.

The advisers are to leave by the end of 2011, by which time the final two years of the U.S. military presence will have achieved … what? Already that presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in: Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank in central Baghdad.

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George Will is calling for a withdrawal of ground troops from Afghanistan, giving an in-passing comparison to Vietnam:

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country — “control” is an elastic concept — and ” ‘our’ Afghans may prove no more viable than were ‘our’ Vietnamese, the Saigon regime.” Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only “police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for ‘vacation.’ ” Afghanistan’s $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise’s. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan’s poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?