June 1, 2007

Crossing the Borders and Dotting the Ayes

By: John Tabin

It’s official — Fred Thompson is planning on entering the presidential race. The USA Today report that broke this news is a bit more entertaining when read out of sequence. Paragraph 25:

Some skeptics question whether Thompson has the drive for a national campaign. “He didn’t have a particularly distinguished Senate career, though that has never been a bar to anybody else being president,” says David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, who isn’t supporting any candidate. “The book on him is he’s lazy. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.”

Thompson bristles at the suggestion that he’s lazy or running on a lark — dismissing those as “shots by concerned future competitors.”

Paragraph 2:

In an interview with USA Today, however, the former Tennessee senator not only makes it clear that he plans to run, he describes how he aims to do it. He’s planning a campaign that will use blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties.

Focusing campaign resources on the Internet — as opposed to, say, stumping in Iowa — is exactly what you’d do if you were lazy, isn’t it?

This week the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.. At issue was whether the petitioner had filed her lawsuit against her employer within 180 days “after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred,” as required in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The allegation was that the petitioner was making less money than male colleagues due to sex discrimination; the case turned on whether the 180-day clock began when the pay decision was made; the petitioner argued that each paycheck counts as a separate incident of possible discrimination. The five-Justice majority disagreed.

In her dissent, Ruth Bader Ginsburg called on Congress to remove this barrier to discrimination lawsuits, writing that “the ball is in Congress’ court… the Legislature may act to correct this Court’s parsimonious reading of Title VII.” Some conservatives have argued that Ginsburg is inappropriately politicking from the bench. But after decades of complaining that liberal activists turn to the courts for help with policy battles they can’t win in the legislature, it’s refreshing that a liberal judge should turn to the legislature for help with a policy battle she can’t win in the courts. This is progress, no?

The immigration debate seems, at first glance, to involve a complicated web of competing and valid interests that touch on economics, culture, and the rule of law. One might think that good arguments from various perspectives deserve to be aired and studied before the country embarks on any large change in immigration policy.

This, apparently, is an illusion. George W. Bush defended the latest immigration compromise to come out of the Senate against its critics:

Those determined to find fault with this bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don’t like. If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people.

It turns out that those who oppose the current bill should be ignored, since, after all, they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” That’s settled, then.

John Tabin is a columnist for Brainwash.