Tea Party

Quote of the Day

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A comment by “Buck O’Fama” in response to this post by Victor Davis Hanson:

Years ago, the kid next door was bouncing his ball against the side of my house, occasionally hitting a storm window in the process. I came out and said to him, “Don’t do that, you’ll break my storm window.” He replied, “No I hit it already and it didn’t break.” It never occured to him that he may have just gotten lucky previously, or perhaps the cumulative micro damage from the previous strikes would soon cause the window to yield, or maybe he just hadn’t hit it hard enough. Regardless, he broke the damn thing within the hour.
 
America is at that point now. All the abuse the nitwits and the idiots have done to the culture and the economy over the past decades have failed to break the country, and they now assume it is unbreakable. This leads me to suspect we are shortly to find out that it is not.

Senator Lugar’s address problems, examination and questionnaire

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Senator Lugar is elected from the state of Indiana. The residence he claims for voting and driving purposes has not been in his possession for many years and several electoral cycles. In fact, he sold it in 1977. The Indiana Secretary of State was just convicted of several class D felonies for fooling around with his legal address during one electoral cycle. If you intentionally misstate your address on a driver’s license it’s actually a worse offense, IC 35-43-5-2(c)(1) makes it a class C felony. That’s 2-8 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Two things possibly protect Sen Lugar in terms of residency. The first is Article 2 section 4 of the Indiana state constitution. The second is implementing legislation, IC 3-5-5-5, both of which say much the same thing, “No person shall be deemed to have lost his residence” in the State and precinct respectively “by reason of his absence, either on business of this State or of the United States.” This leaves the obvious question unanswered, what does it mean, to be on the business of the United States? It could mean that if you’re elected Senator, you can live anywhere until you lose an election or die and you are still an Indiana resident. That seems unlikely. Then again, it could mean that when the Senate is in session or you are on a fact finding trip or other Senate business, those days do not count for residency and where you live the rest of the time is what is judged. In 2011 the Senate was in session 181 days and out 184 days. This would make a great deal more sense and here, Sen. Lugar gets in a bit of trouble.

Sen Lugar sold the Indiana house he actually lived at in 1977 and while he continues to maintain a farm in Indiana, he does not claim residency there. He has a million dollar home in Virginia and stays at hotels when he comes to Indiana. He could pick a hotel room and officially reside from there or he could list his farm address but neither choice is politically convenient for him. The legal requirement is easily satisfied but for 35 years he hasn’t done it.

One thing possibly protects Sen Lugar’s drivers license, that Indiana doesn’t actually comply with the federal Real ID act of 2005 in its requirement that the address on a license is the holder’s principal address. By any reasonable argument, Sen Lugar’s principal address is in Virginia and it would look like Virginia law might also support that.

Sen Lugar is a very popular politician, with cross-party support and a long political career. There is a real reluctance to dig into these matters but here are, perhaps, some questions for those who would like to take the plunge.

In 2011 (and 2010, etc) how many days was Sen. Lugar absent from Indiana on the business of the United States. How many days was Sen. Lugar absent from Indiana on other business?

In 2011 (and 2010, etc) when Sen. Lugar was in Indiana, where did he reside? Why did this address (these addresses) not become his Indiana address? Why does Sen Lugar get to choose his Indiana residence in a way that nobody else can?

The Federal Real ID law requires that a driver license address be the holder’s principal address. Is an address which was sold by the license holder in 1977 consistent with the federal requirement? And if it is not, does Indiana law actually align with Real ID? If they do align, has Sen Lugar violated IC 35-43-5-2(c) by continuing to use his old address for the past 3 years now since the 2009 Indiana driver license reforms were passed? If they do not align is Indiana vulnerable to the penalties of the Real ID act, that its driver licenses will no longer be accepted as ID at federal checkpoints?

Is Sen Lugar in compliance with Virginia law regarding driver licenses? Within 60 days of moving to Virginia, you are required to get a Virginia driver license. Even if you are a full time student, if you are employed, you still need to get a Virginia driver license. Sen. Lugar is certainly employed. He does not claim an address that he actually owns or rents in another state as a residence. According to Virginia law, has he moved? Is Sen Lugar in violation of Virginia driving law?

Ultimately it seems very unlikely that Sen Lugar is going to be called to account for any of this. The point of the exercise is to expose how out of touch he is, not to secure a conviction. Ordinary people have to swap out their license, reregister to vote when they sell their house, actually rent or own a property to qualify for residence, and if the house they usually sleep when not on federal or state business is in Virginia, they accept that they’ve moved. Sen Lugar hasn’t.

“What The Republican ‘Establishment’ Really Means”

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A magisterial post by Baseball Crank (via Rand Simberg):

There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it. Many people who got into politics as good conservatives, and still think themselves good conservatives constrained by the limits of practical possibility, are at a loss when it comes to meaningful ways to tame Leviathan. For reasons, some good (the need to use political power to protect national security, preserve control of the courts and restrain regulatory overreach), some less so, they have thrown in the towel on the central issue of the day. That is who we speak of as the “Establishment.” Others – not always with a sense of proportion or possibility, but driven by the urgency of the cause – seek dramatic confrontations to prevent the menace of excessive spending from passing the tipping point where we can no longer save room for the private sector. They are the Outsiders, the ones challenging the system and its fundamental assumptions. The analogy of a Tea Party is an apt one: the Founding Fathers had much in common with the Tories of their day, but disagreed on a fundamental question, not of principle, but of practical politics: whether revolution was needed to protect their traditional rights as Englishmen from being eradicated by the growing encroachments of the British Crown. As it was then, the gulf between the two is the defining issue of today’s Republican Party and conservative movement.
 
In short, the real “Establishment” and “Outsider,” “anti-Establishment” or “Tea Party” factions are not about who is conservative or moderate, or who is inside or outside the Beltway or public office, or who has fancy degrees or a large readership/listenership or attends the right cocktail parties or churches, or even necessarily who has or has not supported various candidates. The term “Establishment” is used and abused in those contexts, but invariably describes only a division of passing significance. The real battle between the Establishment and the Outsiders is between those who urge significant changes in our spending patterns as a necessity to preserve the America we have known, and those who are unwilling to take that step. It is, in short, between those who are, and those who are not, willing to take action in the belief that the currently established structure of how public money is spent is unsustainable and must be fixed while it still can if we are not to lose by encroachments the all the other things Republicans and conservatives stand for.

Read the whole thing.

Florida Civil Rights Progress and National Political Reform

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(WRT this.)

I noticed a few months ago that a newly installed beach-rules sign in Miami specified no weapons, contrary to state law. I’ve seen signs like this before. Until recently local officials faced no costs for promulgating local rules that violated Florida’s preemption law.

I happened to pass that sign a few days ago and the weapons line had been whited out.

It is progress. It takes a long time, sometimes. Tea Party sympathizers should keep this in mind.

Political Season – 2012 Version

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Curiously for a sometime political animal, I was not all that wrapped up in the Iowa caucus. There are several reasons for that; one of them being that I just think it is a waste of emotional energy picking a favorite too early, another being that in the words of old Bobby Bare song “No matter how good they look at first, There’s flaws in all of them. That’s why on a scale of ten to one, friend – There ain’t no ten!” They’re human, every one of them and every damn one has flaws, which will be put under a magnifying glass. Those who have been under a magnifying glass will have the magnification dialed up by a magnitude of a hundred, though.

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