To see why unions are going extinct, check out the SEIU’s latest alert. Union president Mary Kay Henry warns that “collective bargaining rights are under attack — again.” The threat comes from a bill . . . that would let employers pay higher wages. Yes, the union considers higher pay “a federal attack on your rights at work.” Currently, union rates are both minimum and maximum wages. Unionized businesses may not pay any more or less without the union’s permission. Senator Rubio’s RAISE Act turns union rates into minimum wages only: Employers could always pay more.

They often want to. Individual performance-pay can motivate employees to work harder. This increases both wages and profits. Unfortunately, most unions dislike performance pay. As Henry put it, unions want to “negotiate contracts that create a uniform, fair process for granting wage increases.” So everyone gets the same amount — no matter how hard they work.

The RAISE Act allows employers to reward individual achievement with higher pay. The SEIU considers this intolerable, and thinks “it undermines the fairness collective bargaining contracts bring to the workplace.” Worse, “employers would be allowed to ignore what they agreed to in collective bargaining agreements — and that’s not fair.” No wonder so few workers want to unionize.

— James Sherk is senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation. 

As a humble toiler in the opinion mines, cursed to work the same tapped out seams day in and day out, I confess to a certain admiration for those imams who never run out of new things to rail against. Moulana Abdul Hamid Ishaq, who spoke in Toronto on Sunday, is “one of the most active and learned scholars in South Africa”, and he doesn’t care for the “evils” of “Happy Birthday To You“:

It is not necessary that everything the West does is according to logic. The biggest proof that it is the invention of the west are the song words without which this function is not complete viz. ‘Happy birthday to you.’ No one says, ‘Happy birthday celebration’ or ‘Happy Blessed birthday’ or any other words of this kind. This disease of celebrating birthdays was never prevalent among Muslims before, but since Muslims started living alongside the non-Muslims, they have been influenced by them.

Birthdays are celebrated usually at the end of a year and not at the beginning of the year. For example, if one’s birth date is on the 1st of January, then the birthday will be celebrated on the 1st of January and not the 2nd of January. Now just ponder, what intelligence is there in celebrating and showing happiness when a year has decreased in one’s life. During a birthday celebration, candles are lit on a cake, amounting to the years of the one’s life… Here a person is extinguishing the rays of the years of his life by blowing them out himself.

I like to think the imam would find this cake especially objectionable.

Fast and Furious could hurt Republicans, Krauthammer warns.

I have previously had occasion in this space to express my admiration for the musical talent of Lady Gaga, and for the theological and artistic achievements of Dominican friars. I can’t honestly say I ever expected those two cultural forces to be explicitly combined, but, in the Age of the Internet, anything can and does happen. In this video — to see it, scroll down that webpage to “Novus Ordo Dominicans Unleashed” — a group of Dominican friars perform their version of the tune “Bad Romance,” with new, religious lyrics. The website that contains the video expresses disapproval of the song; I think it’s fun, and appropriates a memorable pop melody to convey a positive message. (N.B. The little shape the friars make with their hands when singing the word “Dominicanes” is meant to suggest a dog’s head, because in Latin Domini canes means “the Lord’s dogs.”)

I’ve heard a few people say that Romney was wise not to take a hard line against President Obama’s executive order on immigration because he should not take the campaign’s focus off the economy. (Others have argued that his soft response makes sense because of the Hispanic vote, but that’s not my focus here.)

I think this way of thinking about the campaign is mistaken. Yes, the economy is the top concern of voters and should be the main focus of the campaign. But I think voters expect presidents to be able to deal with a wide range of issues. Romney could talk about the executive order, or about Fast and Furious, without coming across as someone who obsesses about these issues to the exclusion of the economy. And he should.

As you would expect, my buddy Shannen provides an excellent outline of the law of executive privilege. I do not take issue with what he explains, because it very accurately conveys the privilege as it has evolved over time. My dispute is with the underlying assumptions about the privilege, particularly with respect to the “deliberative process” aspect of it, which, as Shannen observes, rests on less solid footing than the “presidential communications” aspect.

Just as there are two species of executive privilege, so there are two species of governance within the executive branch. The first involves the president’s constitutional duties. These are broadly laid out in Article II. They involve powers of the presidency that derive directly from the Constitution. Congress may not repeal, reduce, or subject them to regulation or “oversight” that thwarts the president’s ability to carry them out.

That is why I agree the “presidential communications” aspect of executive privilege is the stronger one — and why, for example, I argued that Congress had no power to compel Karl Rove to testify during the controversy over fired U.S. attorneys. Karl was a senior advisor to President Bush, a member of the White House staff whose position was not subject to Senate confirmation or otherwise dependent on Congress. He served at the pleasure of the president to facilitate the performance of the president’s constitutional duties. In this sense, he was an appendage of Pres. Bush, and Congress could no more compel him to testify than compel the president. The president is a peer, not a subordinate, of Congress; Congress does not have the power to demand testimony from the president or his confidants — at least not on matters that involve presidential communications in the execution of the president’s constitutional duties. 

The second species of executive governance, however, is saliently different. It involves executive departments and agencies that are not required by the Constitution but are, instead, creatures of congressional statute. A textbook example of this is the Department of Justice. As I have argued before (here) when a related issue arose about Congress’s power to bar the Obama administration from prosecuting terrorists in civilian court, the Constitution calls for neither a Justice Department nor an Attorney General of the United States. They owe their existence to Congress alone.

Keep reading this post . . .

Senator Chuck Schumer took a break from his busy schedule of fighting yogurt regulations to endorse Charles Barron’s opponent, Hakeem Jeffries, in the race for New York’s Eighth Congressional District:

I know the streets of this district like the back of my hand from when I represented many of its neighborhoods, and I know that Hakeem Jeffries is the man who will get the job done for all the people in Brooklyn and Queens. Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries is the perfect combination of smart, hard-working and caring — and, from creating jobs to protecting affordable housing to educating our kids to delivering services for our seniors, he has a record of accomplishment to prove it. He is a true blue friend of Israel and has a sophisticated sense of America’s unique role in a complex, interconnected world. He is full of energy and promise and talent, and I am proud to endorse him to be the next congressman from the Eighth district.

Notice that the senator didn’t mention Charles Barron. Would it have been too much for Schumer to openly take a stand against Charles Barron, the radical anti-Semite?

As Robert noted, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to disclose subpoenaed related to Fast and Furious. Unless Holder provides said documents, the whole House will vote on the contempt charges next week. Here is the video:

If there’s one thing that makes a pollster very, very nervous, it’s seeing a survey come back with results that dramatically challenge the conventional wisdom. Releasing survey results that match what everyone else is saying is easy. Being the outlier is not.

Normally, upon seeing a survey like today’s Bloomberg poll that shows Obama with a significant advantage over Romney, I’d dismiss it as an unusual outlier, likely the product of a skewed sample or odd methodology. However, Bloomberg’s pollster, Ann Selzer, has a strong reputation in the polling industry. The poll’s partisan makeup also appears reasonable, lining up slightly more Republican than the 2008 election. So what happened?

There are a few things that caught my eye as potential reasons the poll is so favorable to Obama. The survey is of adults, which results in a more Democratic-leaning sample than registered or likely voters, though the ballot numbers that are grabbing the headlines are among likely voters. However, the results only show the demographic breakdown of the full adults sample, leaving us to guess about the makeup of the likely voter subgroup. Looking at the adults sample, there are a few groups that are significantly over-represented compared to who actually turns out in elections.

For instance, the Bloomberg survey has 22 percent of respondents under the age of thirty. Much to my chagrin, this group is a more Democratic-leaning age group. Even in the 2008 election, only 18 percent of voters were under thirty. The likelihood that the proportion would increase in this election is slim. Furthermore, even with energized turnout among black and Latino voters, some 74 percent of voters were white in 2008, only down three points from 77 percent in 2004. In the Bloomberg poll, white voters fall to only 67 percent of the sample. Even with America’s changing racial makeup, I am skeptical that white voters will fall so significantly as a proportion of all voters.

The truth is that there’s no sure way to know why this survey is so much more favorable to Obama without seeing the makeup of the underlying likely-voter sub-sample.

The committee’s vote was 23–17. The next step is a vote of the entire House.

Larry Summers, the former Clinton treasury secretary and more recently a top economic adviser to President Obama, has demonstrated two exceptional abilities. The first is an insightful review of conditions in the European crisis and why political solutions are so hard to come by. The second is he managed to get the same column into two of the world’s leading newspapers simultaneously. It was printed in the Financial Times (“Listen to the private sector and plan for the worst”) and the Washington Post on the same day. To quote Darth Vader: “impressive.”

However, the greater story is that after discussing conditions and issues, Summers observes darkly, “Not all problems can be solved.” And then to underscore that critical observation, he concludes with a wispy triplet of minimalist proposals, none of which bear any resemblance to the empty bailout proposals announced at the G20 summit. The real conclusion from Dr. Summers, the proverbial bottom line, is that Europe is about out of options for avoiding the wretched harvest planted a decade ago with an ill-conceived monetary union. Not all problems will be solved? Very few, if any, problems will be solved by Europe’s leaders to their or the market’s satisfaction for they have no solutions.

Summers’s penultimate sentence containing his recommendations reads, “Now is the time for radical cuts in the rates charged by official creditors to European sovereigns; for a willingness to subordinate official debts; and for expansionary monetary policies in Europe that prevent deflation and encourage the growth that can create jobs and reduce debts.”

Keep reading this post . . .

The latest round of negotiations to end Iran’s illicit nuclear activities have, not surprisingly, come and gone without an agreement.

“It remains clear that there are significant gaps” between the Iranians and the so-called P5+1, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, top European Union diplomat Lady Catherine Ashton said after Tuesday’s session in Moscow, adding that “the choice is Iran’s.”

Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili promptly insisted that his country will defy the international community, declaring that “enrichment of uranium is the inalienable right of the Iranian people.”

The world has now been chasing a deal with the Iranians for nearly a decade, and their clerical rulers have shown little movement. It would be generous to call the latest conclusion an impasse, as the Obama administration and its allies have largely been negotiating with themselves.

Keep reading this post . . .

Eighteen social scientists have responded to the attempt to discredit Prof. Mark Regnerus:

Although Regnerus’s article in Social Science Research is not without its limitations, as social scientists, we think much of the public criticism Regnerus has received is unwarranted for three reasons.

First, there are limitations with prior research on this subject that have seldom been discussed by the media. The vast majority of studies published before 2012 on this subject have relied upon small, nonrepresentative samples that do not represent children in typical gay and lesbian families in the United States. By contrast, Regnerus relies on a large, random, and representative sample of more than 200 children raised by parents who have had same-sex relationships, comparing them to a random sample of more than 2,000 children raised in heterosexual families, to reach his conclusions. This is why sociology professor Paul Amato, chair of the Family section of the American Sociological Association and president of the National Council on Family Relations, wrote that the Regnerus study was “better situated than virtually all previous studies to detect differences between these [different family] groups in the population.” We are disappointed that many media outlets have not done their due diligence in investigating the scientific validity of prior studies, and acknowledging the superiority of Regnerus’s sample to most previous research.

This morning, President Obama invoked executive privilege to withhold documents requested as evidence by the House Oversight Committee as part of its ongoing investigation into the administration’s Fast and Furious program. The move was intended to relieve Attorney General Eric Holder just moments before the committee was to vote on holding Holder in contempt for failing to turn the documents over.

Of course, in the past Obama has taken a firm stance against the use of executive privilege:

2007, from an interview with CNN’s Larry King:

KING: “Do you favor executive privilege or should Karl Rove and others in that position be forced to testify before the House or Senate? (On Bush’s administration and executive privilege)

OBAMA: “Well, you know, I think we’ll — we’ll determine over the next several weeks how this administration responds to the very appropriate call by Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to have these individuals come in and testify. You know, there’s been a tendency on the part of this administration to — to try to hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place. And I think, you know, the administration would be best served by coming clean on this. There doesn’t seem to be any national security issues involved with the U.S. attorney question. There doesn’t seem to be any justification for not offering up some clear, plausible rationale for why these — these U.S. attorneys were targeted when, by all assessments, they were doing an outstanding job. I think the American people deserve to know what was going on there.”

On taking office in 2009, President Obama called attention to the issue again, issuing a transparency memo that ordered executive agencies to operate with a strong “presumption in favor of disclosure” and called for a “national commitment” to open government. He also repealed a Bush administration executive order that expanded the practice of executive privilege, and made a show of reversing a Bush administration policy on answering Freedom of Information Act requests he said was too restrictive.

“For a long time now there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” Mr. Obama said at a swearing-in ceremony for senior officials at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. He added, “Transparency and rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

So why has President Obama chosen to utilize executive privilege now? Does the move imply, as House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) speculated, that “White House officials were either involved in the Fast and Furious operation or the cover-up that followed”? Is there, in the words of then-senator Obama, “something a little shaky that’s taking place”?

From HuffPo:

WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is playing politics with its vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, an action she said that even she didn’t seek as House Speaker when she thought someone was legitimately deserving of it.

“I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day,” Pelosi said to laughter, during a sit-down with reporters. “I’m not kidding. There’s a prison here in the Capitol … If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.”

Rove was senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2007.

Asked on what grounds she could have arrested Rove, Pelosi replied, “Oh, any number. But there were some specific ones for his being in contempt of Congress. But we didn’t.”

[. . .]

The Democratic leader also took a shot at Issa for abusing the process of holding an official in contempt.

“‘Loose cannon’ would sort of be like such a compliment to Darrell Issa. ‘Loose cannon’ would be a moderate phrase. This is an explosive device,” she said. “It doesn’t serve our country, and it undermines the true purpose of contempt of Congress.”

“That’s why I didn’t arrest Karl Rove when I had the chance.”

What’s hilarious here is — well, everything. But what’s specifically hilarious is that, in the course of criticizing a potential vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, Nancy Pelosi brags that she could have had Rove arrested — something precisely no one in Congress is calling for in Holder’s case. And for what? You guessed it, for being in contempt of Congress! That’s because, in 2008 the House Judiciary Committee held Rove in contempt, on a party-line vote, for failing to answer a subpoena!

“Why are a group of celibate white men trying to make reproductive decisions for the world”? This is what is being said about the Holy See at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which is occurring in Rio de Janeiro from June 13 to June 22. The goal of the conference is to determine the future of the sustainable-development agenda by addressing its social, economic, and environmental dimensions, with equal attention to each in order to ensure a comprehensive discourse on sustainable development. Reproductive rights-activists launched an extensive campaign against the Holy See, arguing that its fixation on combating references to reproductive rights threatened the success of the Rio+20 outcome document.

The Holy See has taken a strong stance against reproductive-rights language at Rio+20. This is nothing new and not unexpected — it is widely recognized that this terminology implies abortion, and the Catholic Church has a firm position against the termination of the unborn life. Just like the member states at the U.N., the Holy See is defending its positions. Under Article 7 of the Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations, the Holy See as a Permanent Observer Mission is specifically granted this prerogative. So why is everyone talking about the Holy See?

Keep reading this post . . .

Put aside the obvious charge that President Obama is now embracing the powers of the presidency that he once railed against, and let’s look at the actual invocation of executive privilege in the Fast and Furious matter. Executive privilege comes in at least two forms — the first, and strongest, form of privilege is the “presidential communications” privilege, which, as its name suggests, deals with direct communications with the president (or his closest advisers who are communicating on his behalf, such as gathering information to convey advice to the president). Here, there is no claim that any of the communications at issue involved or even related to the president, so the president does not invoke the presidential communications privilege.

Instead, the president invokes the second, more common, form of “executive privilege,” the so-called “deliberative process” privilege. This is a qualified privilege and protects pre-decisional communications within the executive branch. The theory behind the privilege is that government decision-makers should not live in a fishbowl, and that candid, and sometimes unpopular, advice may be needed to make the best decisions. Exposing those decisions to the scrutiny that public document dumps entails (think how much you’d enjoy your entire e-mail outbox on the front page of the New York Times) would necessarily chill internal deliberations and result in less effective government decision-making. 

Here, the president (on the request and advice of the attorney general) concluded that the deliberative process privilege applied to purely internal Department of Justice deliberations regarding how the department should respond to both congressional inquiries and media inquiries. None of those deliberations were proximate to the White House or the president — but entailed only DOJ employees in the ordinary course of their jobs (and we don’t know how high up in DOJ those deliberations went, so we don’t know if the attorney general himself was involved).

Notwithstanding the lack of proximity to the president, there is a reasonable basis for invoking the privilege with respect to pre-decisional communications involving how the Justice Department should respond to congressional inquiries. There would be separation-of-powers problems if Congress could readily peel back the curtain from any executive-branch agency to see which agency employee said what to whom about any question that a congressional committee might pose to the agency. But media inquiries? The Department’s Office of Public affairs plays an important function, but is it so important that the process by which it decides to answer a blogger’s question should be the matter of a presidential invocation of privilege? Holder provides no real support for that proposition in his letter to the president, and it seems unlikely that a court would find a significant executive interest in such everyday and relatively mundane decisions.

Keep reading this post . . .

Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics pours some cold water on the conventional wisdom that Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty decree is a political winner. Sure, you can get positive results when you ask people whether sympathetic young illegal immigrants should be spared deportation, as yesterday’s Bloomberg poll did — but not necessarily if you ask whether respondents approve of the president bypassing Congress to do so unilaterally, and not necessarily if you mention that it would mean 1 million extra job seekers at a time of high unemployment. Trende concludes thusly:

In short, it’s not really clear what Obama’s tack on immigration really accomplishes, politically speaking. It probably will result in minimal gains among Latino voters, in states with only a few electoral votes. But what it costs him could easily offset those gains, and then some.

I’d only add that the Republican leadership needs to articulate a critique of the president’s decree — one that acknowledges the sympathetic nature of the illegal immigrants in question while decrying the nature and effects of the decree — for the president’s move to exact the political price that Trende points to.

Would that the Obama administration had cared as much about protecting the security secrets involving the Predator drone program, the bin Laden raid, the operations on the Afghan border and in Yemen, and the cyberwar against Iran as it is does about protecting the unknowns of Fast and Furious. A cynic might suggest the leaked release of national-security secrets were thought to have enhanced presidential stature, while those of gunrunning might diminish it; so we are left with vital national-security operations now known to all, and peripheral operations along the border known not even to Congress.

From Special Report with Bret Baier | Tuesday, June 19, 2012

On President Obama’s meeting yesterday with Russian President Vladimir Putin:

So much for the great “reset.” From reports that we are hearing, Putin lectured Obama on Russia’s interest in Syria, which is sort of reminiscent of the Khrushchev-Kennedy summit early in the Kennedy term when Kennedy was completely humiliated, lectured by Khrushchev, left [demoralized], which encouraged Khrushchev to put missiles in Cuba.

This is Putin, who thinks in strategic terms, speaking to somebody he considers an adolescent. Imagine — Russia right now is preparing to send three warships to a port in Syria, which is its facility. Each of the ships is capable of carrying 300 marines. We are doing nothing except complaining and issuing statements. The Russians are asserting themselves on the ground, preventing any [arms] embargo, and asserting a strategic interest.

What is Obama doing in what was for 30 years an American preserve in the Middle East? Nothing.