John McCain

This is going to more of a link-fest than my own commentary. He's a little bit of my own commentary though: No. Please, please, please, no.



In Favor of McCain

Michael Medved, How to Identify a "Real Conservative". In Summary:

• Don't listen to the "talk radio titans and sharp-tongued pundettes" (except Michael Medved apparently?)


• "But they should listen carefully to heroes like Tom Coburn, the Senator from Oklahoma who's universally esteemed as one of the strongest conservative voices in Washington ... and earlier this week the Oklahoman endorsed his Arizona colleague for President."

Against

The commenters of Michael Medved's How to Identify a "Real Conservative". (Pretty much every single one is against McCain. Ouch.)


In Favor Of

Gerard V. Bradley, Pro-Life, Pro-McCain: A candidate with an unmatchable record on life issues. In Summary:

• If you don't count "embryo-destructive research", "McCain's track record makes him the best of a small number of good choices." (Umm, problem: I do count his miserable and non-pro-life record on "embryo-destructive research", so does National Right to Life.


• "Of the remaining Republican candidates, only McCain (so far as I know) has plainly said that all torture is wrong, and that Americans simply should not do it. I agree with him." (Dear Gerard, all the candidates have denounced torture. The debate is with how to classify water-boarding. Which. Has. Nothing. To. Do. With. Abortion. Or. Destruction. Of. Embryos. Nice try to reach though?)

In Favor Of

Patrick Hynes, A McCain Coalition?. In Summary:

• Well, he coins the phrase "McCain Derangement Syndrome" ... Oh please.


• "McCain won South Carolina by putting together a remarkably broad coalition of mainstream Republicans, evangelicals, seniors, veterans and Independents." (Let me boil this down to 'general election appeal', which is a very valid point.)

Against

George Will, Fact-Checking the Straight-Talk. (Note: Since Will defended McCain in April, I found this column surprising.) In Sumary:

• "In ABC's New Hampshire debate, McCain said: 'Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?' A conservative's answer is: That amounts to importing Canada's price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others ... would be unavailable. Setting drug prices by government fiat rather than market forces results in huge reductions of funding for research and development of new drugs."


• "Because McCain is a 'maverick' -- the media encomium reserved for Republicans who reject important Republican principles."


• "He has indeed worked with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform, with Russ Feingold on restricting political speech (McCain-Feingold) and with Kennedy and John Edwards -- a trial lawyer drawn to an enlargement of opportunities for litigation -- on the 'patients' bill of rights.'"


• "He promiscuously accuses others of 'corruption,' the ubiquity of which he says justifies McCain-Feingold's expansive government regulation of the quantity, timing and content of campaign speech."


• "McCain says he would nominate Supreme Court justices similar to [Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito]. But how likely is he to nominate jurists who resemble those four: They consider his signature achievement [(McCain-Feingold)] constitutionally dubious."


• "McCain asserted that corruption is the reason drugs currently cannot be reimported from Canada. The reason is 'the power of the pharmaceutical companies.' When Mitt Romney interjected, "Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys," McCain replied, 'Well, they are.' There is a place in American politics for moralizers who think in such Manichaean simplicities. That place is in the Democratic Party."


• Concerning the question of whether human activity is causing catastrophic warming, [McCain's joint op-ed with Lieberman] said, 'the debate has ended.' ... People only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues."

Against

Riehl World View, Three Reasons Why McCain Can't Win The General Election. Summary:

• "Once we reach the General, [Clinton] will take away McCain's only real strength with his own words. He conveniently provided a video: 'Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.' They'll weave a narrative between his well-known temper and foreign policy, making him look like a loose cannon a war weary general electorate won't go near."


• "'[McCain] threw [his ex-wife] over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and the rest is history.'"


• "The disaffection with McCain among the most loyal of the GOP base, conservatives, will suppress the vote enough to make winning the presidency an ocean too wide ... McCain will sink as Bob Dole II"

Against

Hugh Hewitt and Mark Levin. See here. At issue: The Gang of 14, "Conservatives ought never to throw fellow conservatives up for confirmation and especially judicial nominees under the left's bus. The Gang of 14 did just that. It's leader was John McCain."


Against

Mark Leven (again), Speak Up!. In Summary:

• "In his campaign to close Guantanamo Bay, McCain has led the effort to confer constitutional and international rights on the enemy."


• "His muddled thinking as applies to interrogations - comparing water-boarding to torture (a rarely used technique that has, in fact, saved American lives according to our nation's top intelligence official) makes it difficult for any interrogator to do his job without concern for his career and financial well-being."


• "McCain-Feingold is without question the greatest assault on free political speech since Buckley v. Valeo, and is far more draconian."


• "McCain filed a brief in the Supreme Court with several Democrats against the Wisconsin Right to Life organization challenging its right to run informative ads prior to an election. Wisconsin Right to Life won. Ironically, as best I can tell, this is the most aggressive action he has taken in all his years in Washington on the right-to-life issue, which probably explains why the vast majority of these groups have endorsed other candidates."


• "The McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill was among the most irresponsible and reckless budgetary and economic legislative efforts of all time."


• "McCain has repeatedly demanded that federal power be used to tame perfectly legitimate private enterprises, from energy and pharmaceutical companies, to media companies and anything else he considers 'corrupt'."


• "Time and again McCain resorted to class warfare propaganda, asserting that he opposed the tax cuts because they 'favored the rich.'"


• "McCain has proposed everything from a massive database of carbon emitters, capping carbon emissions, trading carbon emissions, taxing carbon emissions, and so forth."

Against

Deroy Murdock, Not Right for the Right: McCain won't do. He starts with some positives:

• "His torturous Vietnam experience demands the deepest respect."


• "His eternal vigilance against absurd and costly government boondoggles is unsurpassed."


• "He forcefully backed President Bush's military surge."

Then, the negatives. In Summary:

• "McCain diligently has stymied conservative, free-market policies."


• "While he generally is appropriately hawkish overseas, he is dangerously soft on captured terrorists."


• "It often is anyone's guess whether he will support the Right or sandbag its efforts"


• Rejected Bush's tax cuts


• McCain-Feingold


• McCain-Kennedy


• "As barrels of oil oscillate between $90 and $100, and rising energy prices make driving, flying, and heating costlier, GOP voters should know that McCain rejected drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at least four times."


• "The McCain-Lieberman bill would combat alleged 'global warming' by making power producers pay to exceed government-imposed limits on carbon dioxide emissions."


• "McCain opposed the Death Tax's repeal in 2002.


• "'I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues,' McCain admitted to Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore in November 2005. 'I still need to be educated.'"


• "McCain vocally resists waterboarding, even though that interrogation technique finally elicited intelligence from taciturn al-Qaeda leaders and September 11 conspirators Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Their revelations helped U.S. officials capture and imprison at least 10 hardened Islamo-fascist terrorists - including the architects of the deadly U.S.S. Cole and Bali nightclub bombings - who collectively had murdered 3,216 and wounded 8,795."


• "'I served 12 years with him, six years in the Senate as one of the leaders of the Senate,' former Senator Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) told radio host Mark Levin January 10. 'John McCain was not only against us, but leading the charge on the other side.' Santorum ominously warned: 'There's nothing worse than having a Democratic Congress and a Republican president who would act like a Democrat in matters that are important to conservatives.'"

Against

Bill Hollis, "An Open Letter to the Grand Old Party". Quoting liberally:

Perhaps this letter is presumptuous of me. After all, I'm not a Republican and never have been. But I am in a group of voters the GOP needs to win. I'm in that freedom-oriented, libertarian-leaning, small government, low taxes group that was part of the Reagan coalition. Granted I'm a bit more minimal government than most in that group; I'd like to see the government down to less than a quarter of its current size. Anyway, you guys are going to have a hard time winning without we small-government afficiandos. Very hard.

So let me say this plainly. If you nominate Mike Huckabee or John McCain, you've lost me. I won't vote for your candidate. Period.

...

Let's look at these guys. First, McCain sponsored the worst rollback of free speech in this nation's history. He thereby shows utter contempt for the rights and freedoms of his fellow citizens. He also demonstrated that he will do anything - anything - to bolster his own reputation with people across the political spectrum.

He looks to me as if he has a 'great man' complex and is convinced that he's a world-historical figure. Such men are dangerous. George W. Bush, as mediocre a president as he's been, does not have those problems. Therefore, I must presume that a McCain presidency would be worse by far than the Bush presidency has been in the erosion of freedom and the continued expansion of the size and prerogatives of the federal government. For example, I'm convinced that McCain would 'reach out' to create a form of universal healthcare, giving in to the largest expansion of the federal government since the New Deal.

McCain tried to flex his world-historical muscles last year, by giving us a disastrous immigration bill that would do absolutely nothing to solve the problem, but would (he thought) give him another line in the history books. Having realized the magnitude of his misjudgment, he now utters mealy-mouthed assurances that he's 'learned his lesson' I suppose that's true, if the lesson he's learned is to do a better job of deceiving the citizenry next time he wants to jam something we don't want down our throats in the pursuit of yet more mentions in the history texts. (Oh, I realize he personally doesn't see himself that way. Too bad. That's the way I see him, and I've never seen a single example of behavior that would make me doubt that assessment.)

Immigration and an Entitlement Society

I'd like you to give me $33 per month for the rest of your life, please. Outrageous request? Please read on...


A week and a half ago, had you asked if I was in favor of "comprehensive immigration reform" I would have told you "yes". However, the more I read about the Immigration Bill, the less and less I like it; and the more I consider the non-enforcement parts of "comprehensive immigration reform," the less and less I like them.

To start, I think we can all agree that the current system "is broken." As I consider the current system though, I'm not particularly convinced that it's broken because of lack of legislation. Illegal immigration is, in fact, already illegal today without any new legislation.

What is broken is the enforcement side.

Now, granted, rounding up and mass deporting 12 million individuals would be both drastically expensive and nearly impossible. I'll also grant that deporting about 4% of our workforce (assuming 12 million illegal immigrants and a US population of 300 million, about one in twenty five persons in the United States are illegal immigrants) would be economically catastrophic.

But, I don't accept that allowing those 12 million individuals to stay here indefinitely is a valid solution either. They broke the law, that needs to be accounted for.

The bill now being debated does try to account for that with a $5,000 fine. In that regard, that "penalty" prevents the bill from being "amnesty" (in the strict sense of the word), but it hardly seems like a punishment, and such a measly "punishment" hardly seems like it would deter future illegal immigrants from crossing the border.

One thing that this bill does do is put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. Ironically, this at the same time we are concerned about the growing costs of Social Security and Medicare ... and we want to add 12 million beneficiaries to those programs?

Looking more broadly than just Social Security and Medicare, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation ran some numbers. Using data from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, he figured out that about half of these twelve million lack a high school education. And looking at the typical immigrant high school drop out in the U.S., he found that they generally pay about $10,000 in a taxes per year, but receive $30,000 in government benefits. That's a net loss of $20,000 per year per individual. Ouch.

If you expand that across that apparently 6 million illegal immigrants that lack a high school education, and assume they all became citizens, you arrive at $120,000,000,000.00 a year. Let's spread that over 300 million individuals. We arrive at $400 each. Are you interested in giving the government $400 more per year? Neither am I. I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do for $33/month (including philanthropic things!) other than giving it to the government because we have an influx of individuals taking three times more in government benefits than what they pay in taxes.

The bottom line of immigration, I think, is that we need to change the incentives. Illegal immigrants cross the border illegally because it's worth their while to do so. The economic opportunities outweigh the risks. Since your average American citizen is becoming more and more educated, we have areas in our economy that would (and do) benefit from unskilled laborers. Why not reform (simplify) the immigration process and make our allowance of how many legal immigrants we accept per year large enough to let in a sufficient number that the desire to come illegally is drastically reduced?

At the same time, if you add enforcement at the hiring level, requiring employers to check the status of their workers, and giving them the tools they need to do so, illegal immigrants that come won't be able to find work and will leave.

Paths to citizenship that will cost the American tax payers $120,000,000,000.00 a year are not the way to go though. And, as I whole I think this bill does much more harm than good ... John Boehner was right.

BTW, if you are looking for in depth details and analysis of this bill, allow me to recommend:

• Hugh Hewitt: The Immigration Analysis Consolidated (Bumped and Updated)
  
• The Truth Laid Bear: The "Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007"

Update: I think I got that $5,000 figure wrong... Quoting from a recent Heritage Foundation publication, "Rewarding Illegal Aliens: Senate Bill Undermines The Rule of Law":

The most controversial component of the Senate's Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 is Title VI, euphemistically entitled "Nonimmigrants in the United States Previously in Unlawful Status." It would create a new "Z" visa exclusively for illegal aliens. This title would change the status of those who are here illegally to legal, essentially granting amnesty to those "previously in unlawful status."

...

The price of a Z visa is $3,000 for individuals—only slightly more than the going rate to hire a coyote to smuggle a person across the border. A family of five could purchase visas for the bargain price of $5,000—some $20,000 short of the net cost that household is likely to impose on local, state, and federal government each year

The publication actually goes into detail on ten controversial (outrageous?) provisions of Title VI. It concludes:

What becomes unmistakably clear from the details of the Senate's bill is that it is not a "compromise" in any meaningful sense. Indeed, the sweeping amnesty provisions of Title VI cripple law enforcement and undermine the rule of law.

Well put.