July
15, 2003, 12:45 p.m.
Bush Has Problems
It’s
time he concerned himself with the care and feeding of American
conservatives.
hey
wrestle over a prescription-drug bill but not, really, over whether the
entire approach is defective. We hear the grand figure that under the
Senate bill, we would undertake a trillion-dollar entitlement over ten
years. That translates to: taking a trillion dollars from some people
and giving it — not exactly to a different set of people, but to
people identified by different means.
The emphasis is of
course on help to older people, the principal beneficiaries of whatever
the reduced cost would be in buying drugs. Older people have more to worry
about in looking after their health, but less in looking after school
bills and mortgage payments. It would be very difficult to prove, over
the long run, that older people will, as a class, benefit from the pending
bills. There is no tax bill on the table that exempts older people from
taxation, and it is probable that they will devote the same percentage
of their income as before to medical expenses.
The House bill being
manifestly superior to the Senate bill, one wonders: What happened to
President Bush? He is, incidentally, everywhere criticized abroad, and,
now, by Democratic presidential candidates, as autocratic, domineering.
How to account for his passivity in most matters of legislative, to say
nothing of judicial, consequence? He fought hard for his tax bill and,
of course, for his nominees to the courts of appeal. But on most other
matters, it is as if he did not exist. The Supreme Court has pronounced
itself arbiter of all serious questions having to do with states' rights.
The president was manifestly pleased that the Court took over the whole
affirmative-action problem, and he confessed himself "pleased" that the
Court acknowledged the utility and the pleasures of diversity.
Diversity will,
one supposes, be interpreted by some as license to incestuous love, and
Judge Kennedy can be counted on to look into "spatial" and "more transcendent"
dimensions of the question. We know only this, that laws seeking to regulate
moral questions will govern only if the Supreme Court okays them.
Mr. Bush has to
concern himself with the care and feeding of American conservatives, here
defined as men and women who believe that there are institutional matters
which governments rightly concern themselves with. Most such have for
generations been taken for granted. It was simply inconceivable, up until
a few years ago, that a judge could not display the Ten Commandments in
his courtroom, unthinkable that marriage could take place except between
a man and a woman.
The latter distortion
creeps its way into law, and the Bush administration hasn't evolved a
strategy for coping with it. Senate majority leader Bill Frist has said
that he would approve a constitutional amendment to define marriage in
the traditional way, but Mr. Bush has not endorsed such an amendment.
In the best of worlds he would not need to, confident that the states
would continue to reflect public sentiment on the matter. But of course
state legislatures are only in session as long as state courts permit.
And the Supreme Court is hovering behind its high altar, waiting to pronounce
the word of five justices. It would require argumentation no more devious
than the ruling in the Lawrence case to declare that legal sanctions
on marriage, narrowly specified as between man and woman, are a denial
of equal protection under the law.
The attitude of
Mr. Bush on the matter of the other two branches of government is remarkably
compliant. He has not exercised the veto power once, matching the record
of John Quincy Adams. The judiciary is apparently secure from his criticism.
Supporters can say that he has worked hard for his judicial nominees,
which is true. But what you must not bet the farm on is that nominees
of Republican presidents are going to remain originalists on reaching
the Court. The constitutional massacre of Lawrence and the University
of Michigan rulings would not have prevailed save for the affirmative
votes of justices appointed by Reagan and Bush Sr.
All presidents,
nearing voting time, tend to be dominated by the animal need for reelection.
Mr. Bush has something to worry about here. His popularity rating in the
polls seems to be going down about one half point per U.S. soldier killed.
Eighteen soldiers, nine points down, from 61 percent approval to 52 on
his handling of the Iraq question. He will very much need the enthusiastic
endorsement of conservatives who believe that a chief executive should
be more assertive against lobbyist-dominated congressmen, and more alert
to the co-optation of moral authority by the courts. There are plenty
of reasons for conservatives to vote hopefully for Bush, but he has to
remind them what those reasons are.
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hey
wrestle over a prescription-drug bill but not, really, over whether the
entire approach is defective. We hear the grand figure that under the
Senate bill, we would undertake a trillion-dollar entitlement over ten
years. That translates to: taking a trillion dollars from some people
and giving it — not exactly to a different set of people, but to
people identified by different means.
