The first skirmish of 2016 might be over: Rand Paul wants to cool things down in his spat with Chris Christie over a couple of cold ones.

“It’s gotten a little too personal, so we’re ready to kiss and make up,” Paul said on Fox News this afternoon.

Despite their disagreements on foreign policy and national security, Paul assured Neil Cavuto that he would still support Christie if he were the presidential nominee in 2016, because he “will support whoever the Republican nominee is.”

But would he join the New Jersey governor’s ticket as a veep? “We’re going to have to patch things up,” Paul chuckled, expressing some optimism on the grounds that Christie has been said to have some libertarian leanings. 

He invited Christie out to the pub around the corner from the Senate to “have a beer and mend things.”

More than 20 Arkansas school employees will return to school armed this fall, the Washington Times reports.

They’ll be carrying 9mm handguns, and they know how to use them – each received 53 hours of intensive gun training required for certification as an armed security guard. They won’t be identified, but they’ll be prepared to defend themselves and their students from an attacker.

I wrote about this smart idea a few months ago, but I think the Clarksville High School superintendent, David Hopkins, raises a good point. By training teachers to carry weapons, school districts may save not only lives but also taxpayer money. ”We’re not tying our money up in a guard 24/7 that we won’t have to have unless something happens,” Hopkins said. “We’ve got these people who are already hired and using them in other areas. Hopefully, we’ll never have to use them as a security guard.”

 

Over the weekend, George Zimmerman was stopped for speeding in Forney, Texas, and was reportedly armed.

After being pulled over, Zimmerman told police, according to TMZ, that he had a firearm in the glove compartment. Having been acquitted, he’s once again legally allowed to carry a gun, and one of his lawyers, Mark O’Mara, said he expected Zimmerman to carry a gun after the verdict because of the numerous death threats he’s received. The actual gun Zimmerman used the night he killed Trayvon Martin, though, has been retained as evidence in case of a federal civil-rights case, though O’Mara also said the man never plans to use it again.

Law enforcement noted that Zimmerman was not wearing a disguise when they stopped him. They ultimately let him off with a warning after police determined there were no warrants for his arrest.

This is the second time Zimmerman has popped up since going into hiding following his acquittal earlier this month. Two weeks ago, Zimmerman emerged from hiding to help save a family of four from an overturned truck on a Florida highway.

That is the important question asked today by Steve Coll:

Will Egypt’s counter-revolution inspire Turkey’s fragmented, avowedly secular military—which once dominated the country’s politics, via coup-making—to reorganize and reassert itself? Could the military do so if it tried? … recent events in Egypt will surely stir and tempt Atatürk’s heirs in the opposition.

My take: It is hard to imagine, given how the top Turkish brass submitted so meekly to AKP control and permitted the imprisonment of so many of its members that, at this late date, it will find the gumption to challenge Erdogan & Co.

If there were to be a revolt, therefore, it would more likely come not from the ranks of the generals – who carried out all of Turkey’s prior coups d’état – but from some disgruntled colonel fed up with his superiors’ supine responses to Islamist domination and inspired by Sisi’s bold action in Egypt.

In all, my guess is no, Turkish officers will likely not rebel because of developments in Egypt. But the country’s Islamist politicians, who cannot take this outcome for granted, will likely tread more cautiously. 

The New York Times thinks it’s all the rage with young ladies. My wife demurs.

The Senate voted 86–13 today to reject a measure proposed by Senator Rand Paul to halt the U.S. government’s aid to the Egyptian military and redirect that money to building and fixing bridges in the United States. Paul’s proposal, an amendment to the transportation-funding bill currently before the Senate, was the first attempt by Congress to adjust the U.S.’s aid to the Egyptian government after the military essentially removed the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in early July — an event the State Department has not determined to be a military seizure of power, in which case an annually approved congressional policy requires an immediate halt in almost all foreign aid to the country.

Senator Paul argues that the funding is currently being disbursed “illegally”; while the spirit of the anti-coup statute has clearly been violated, there is actually a solid argument to be made that the funding provision, which dates back to the 1980s, is an intrusion into the proper constitutional powers of the executive branch to conduct foreign policy.

The Obama administration has taken its time in making such a determination (a delay recommended by NR’s editors, incidentally), so the aid has kept flowing, though the Pentagon has, for now, halted the delivery of new F-16 fighter jets to the country. The debate over whether to keep funding and cooperating with the Egyptian military (as the U.S. has done since the Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel) will likely heat up again when Congress debates a new government-funding bill this fall. Until then, it seems, the Obama administration would do well to use the valuable support it gives the military to push them in the direction of sensible economic policies and the development of a constitution that protects minority rights and free expression, instead of forcing them onto an arbitrary schedule for elections (after which aid, by congressional policy, can resume). The quasi-military government’s behavior has not exactly been perfect so far. They halfway incited huge demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood last Friday and violently repressed a number of Islamist demonstrations; at the same time, however, the Brotherhood is clearly spoiling for a fight and has sparked plenty of violence on its own. Time will tell. (Andy McCarthy laid out his thoughts on the process in the August 5 issue of NR.)

Paul’s proposal attracted no Democratic votes, and few Republican ones — but he did get a yea from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose coming 2014 election battle has pushed him to reinforce his conservative bona fides and strengthen his relationship with Rand Paul’s tea-party apparatus in Kentucky. (And on a related note, despite the clear political appeal of diverting funds from buying Egypt armored bridgelayers to the patriotic act of putting up ponts at home, America’s bridge infrastructure is actually doing just fine – it’s in better shape than it was 25 years ago.) 

After much speculation, according to reports today, Tom Cotton will announce his candidacy for Arkansas’s Senate seat in 2014, challenging incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor. As National Review Online reported earlier this week, Cotton has been clearly poised to run for months: He’s been fundraising and connecting with key Republican donors in Arkansas and across the country, efforts that prompted state Democrats to attack Cotton in super-PAC ads even before he’d announced a run. A Cotton candidacy puts Pryor, his already-vulnerable seat, and Senate Democrats in a tough spot.

In an e-mail, Cotton’s campaign announced that the congressman, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, will hold a barbecue at the community center in his hometown of Dardanelle, Ark., next week, where he “looks forward to sharing his plans to continue [fighting for Arkansas's value] in the coming year.”

Cotton, a Harvard Law School graduate, has already made a name for himself in his first seven months in Congress with his strong stances on national defense and foreign policy. He has also been a vocal opponent in the House of the Gang of Eight’s immigration-reform bill, for which Pryor voted earlier this month.

Pryor’s campaign has already launched a series of attacks on the congressman, saying the decision shows “he has put his own political career ahead of the people of Arkansas.”

Our own Jay Nordlinger wrote a comprehensive treatment of Cotton leading up to his election last year (see parts I, II, III, and IV).

NPR’s politics blog has published a chart — compiled from a House Ways and Means staff analysis — of the different levels of IRS targeting between conservative and progressive groups. Bottom line? Far more conservative groups faced IRS scrutiny, they faced more questions, and were approved at a much lower rate than progressives. The chart is based on the IRS’s now-discredited “BOLO” (be on the lookout) lists.

Looking at the numbers, the chart answers a question I’ve asked myself ever since the Left claimed that it had been targeted as well: If progressives experienced similar targeting, why didn’t they make any notable contemporaneous complaints? After all, conservatives raised the issue well over a year ago, members of Congress asked the IRS commissioner about it directly, and the New York Times was even moved by the complaints to write its now-clownish March 7, 2012, editorial claiming the IRS was merely “do[ing] its job.”

Perhaps progressives didn’t complain because their targeting experience involved seven groups that were asked an average of just five additional questions (rounded up to be generous) and were approved at a 100 percent rate.

By contrast, 104 ”phony scandal” conservative groups experienced an average of 15 additional questions (14.9 to be exact), only 46 percent were approved, and 56 groups are either waiting for a determination or have withdrawn in frustration. There is simply no comparison.

I’ve pasted the chart below. (Full disclosure: I’m a senior attorney on the ACLJ’s lawsuit against the United States and key IRS defendants on behalf of 41 conservative groups in 22 states)

 

In a recent interview in The New Republic, Senator John McCain joked that he would have a hard time choosing between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Republican senator Rand Paul in a hypothetical 2016 general election.

“It’s gonna be a tough choice,” the senior senator from the Grand Canyon State said, laughing.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that the nation’s gross domestic product increased at an annualized rate of 1.7 percent in the second quarter of 2013. That’s an improvement over last quarter’s growth and considerably higher than analysts’ projection of 0.9 percent; however, it’s hardly a sign of a strong recovery, especially since the BEA also revised last quarter’s growth rate down to 1.1 percent. As PNC Financial Services economist Gus Faucher told the Wall Street Journal, “the story remains the same. The economy is expanding but growth remains disappointing.”

According to the Bureau, this quarter’s growth was primarily driven by consumer spending, exports, inventory investment, housing, and investment in fixed capital (i.e., physical assets such as machinery); the growth rate took a hit from a net decrease in federal spending, although state- and local-government spending rose. Housing investment posted a particularly impressive gain of 13.4 percent, signaling that the sector continues to recover from the crisis that helped trigger the recession — and fueling fears of yet another housing bubble.

Interestingly, the BEA’s estimate of inflation from 2009 to 2012 was revised downward, from an already-low 1.8 percent to 1.6 percent. While a small change, this would appear to further bolster inflation “doves,” including Federal Reserve vice chairman and possible Bernanke successor Janet Yellen, who argue that the Fed should be doing more to hit its 2 percent inflation target.

As always, today’s initial release comprises preliminary estimates, which will be revised to reflect more complete data on August 29.

Under his other shingle, Andy McCarthy has a thoughtful piece on why the national-security Right is losing the NSA debate. He writes:

Most of the national-security right’s case has been devoted to the legal propriety of the program. After all, that is the part we know best, the ground on which we are most solid. A person has no Fourth Amendment protection regarding communications records that are the property of phone companies and other service providers. A non-American outside the U.S. has no constitutional protections at all. Therefore, the argument goes, what we’re doing is legal, so don’t worry about why (since why is too hard to discuss – see above).

This is very unsatisfying. First, the state of the law is widely unpopular, so being on the right side of it doesn’t help much.

That’s true. Many people understand that, these days more than ever, just because something is legal doesn’t make it right — and that a “warrant” for over 300 million people is not a warrant in any meaningful sense. Andy also makes the point that the NSA “metadata” is more stringently guarded than, say, your health records:

Another good and truly alarming comparison is the Federal Data Hub, revealingly reported on by John Fund at National Review. Unlike the NSA program, whose extensive safeguards are designed to make data more difficult for the government to peruse, the FDH is an Obamacare enterprise in which reams of personal information about Americans, far more extensive than communications data, is amassed for the precise purpose of making it easy for government bureaucrats to access under the guise of improving health care. And, putting aside that national security is the ultimate federal responsibility while health care is something the federal government should have no part in, the FDH data will be handled not by technically proficient intelligence professionals, as in the NSA program, but by “patient navigators” who will require neither high school diplomas nor criminal background checks.

That’s also true, but again what the suspicious get is not the distinctions between surveillance programs but the sheer accumulation of them: The NSA, IRS, and FDH all blur together as “the government.” The government is in your bookkeeping, in your e-mails, in your prostate. Had George III been that omnipresent, there would be no United States.

But the real reason why there are fewer defenders of their programs than Andy would like is the subject he tackles in his excellent books: the ideological faintheartedness of the United States. In this struggle, our enemies hide in plain sight, but Western governments will not confront them in plain sight. As I wrote here last month:

Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public.

And, in a broader sense, the national-security Right is a shrinking club because America has proven an ineffectual intervener. In Afghanistan, the Taliban support a bigoted, misogynist sharia state run by theocrats with ties to global terrorism, whereas America and its allies support a bigoted, misogynist sharia state run by duplicitous kleptocrats with ties to druglords and pederasts. That’s not a distinction worth twelve years of blood and treasure, and it has discredited the broader cause and its impositions on the home front. The Taliban will soon enough be back in Kabul, but Americans will be shuffling shoeless through the airports of Cleveland and Des Moines unto the end of time.

As their public squabble over national security, the future of the GOP, and pork products/spending nears almost a full week, Rand Paul appears ready to call a truce with Chris Christie.

“I didn’t pick this recent fight with the governor down in New Jersey,” Paul said on a New Hampshire radio show this morning, “but I think the party does better if we have less infighting, so I would suggest if he wants to ratchet it down, I’m more than happy to.”

The tiff between two likely 2016 presidential candidates began last week when Christie warned that the libertarian approach to foreign policy working its way into the GOP was “very dangerous.” The two then traded barbs back and forth, with Paul claiming Christie uses the “cloak of 9/11 victims” for in national-security debates and calling the New Jersey governor “the king of bacon.” Christie, meanwhile, had taken a swipe at Paul over the fact that Kentucky receives much more in federal spending than it pays in taxes, boasting that New Jersey gets much less back from Washington than it puts in.

Even as he tried to quell the tension with Christie this morning, Paul still made sure to differentiate himself. When asked about his presidential aspirations, Paul said, “I’m the kind of candidate, if I were to be a national candidate, who says, ‘Young people, Republicans, we will protect your privacy, we do care about the Internet, we do want to promote a strong national defense but a less aggressive foreign policy.’ I think if you see that, I think that will grow our party.”

Senator John McCain said yesterday that the pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants is a “fundamental element” of the Senate immigration bill, but other portions of the bill “could be adjusted,” emphasizing that the bill’s border-enforcement provisions are malleable.

At an immigration forum hosted by the AFL-CIO, the senator argued that the United States doesn’t “need 20,000 additional Border Patrol agents” and should instead focus on technology that would allow the nation to “survey the border more effectively.” Indeed, McCain said that he voted for the Corker-Hoeven amendment, which will significantly increase border-enforcement resources, “so friends of mine would be comfortable that we are securing the border.”

Senator McCain previously said that the amendment would give the United States “the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” and argued that it “removes any validity to the argument that border security is not sufficient.”

The enforcement portion of the Gang of Eight immigration bill, named for Republican senators Bob Corker (Tenn.) and John Hoeven (N.D.), conditioned the granting of green cards to newly amnestied immigrants ten years from now on the hiring of 20,000 new Border Patrol agents, the completion of a 700-mile border fence, the creation of an entry/exit system to track visa overstays, and universal implementation of E-Verify. The amendment was added to the Gang of Eight’s bill in late June, and the bill passed a few days later on a 68–32 vote.

Critics of the amendment (which have included National Review) warned at the time that the amendment was not nearly all it was cracked up to be, and argued the provision does little to avoid repeating the “legalization now, enforcement later” bait-and-switch of the 1986 amnesty. 

When Republicans voted for the farm bill two weeks ago, they not only voted to continue the unjustifiable payment of subsidies to private interests, they also voted to continue supporting many agencies within the Department of Agriculture that over the last four years have paid millions of dollars to dead people. The Government Accountability Office issued a report last week with the somewhat funny title “Farm Programs: The USDA needs to do more to prevent improper payments to deceased individuals.” The New York Times reports:

The Natural Resources Conservation Service, which oversees the Agriculture Department’s conservation programs, sent out $10.6 million in payments between 2008 and 2012 to more than 1,000 people who had been dead for more than a year, according to the report.

The Risk Management Agency, which administers the crop insurance program, paid $22 million to more than 3,400 policyholders who had been dead for at least two years. The G.A.O. said that some of those payments might have been made while the farmer was still alive, but that there was no way to know for sure.

Sadly, I am not surprised, and I don’t expect it to end. There will be a lot hand-waving and talking about better oversight, but in the end things will continue their merry way and money will continue to flow to agencies that are terrible stewards of our tax dollars.

Think about how many GAO reports come out every year identifying some sort of waste, fraud, and abuse. Think about the number of reports put out by Senator Coburn’s office each year about the many programs and spending items that clearly should be terminated. Think about the number of hearings where witnesses, government watchdogs, and IGs identify overpayments, duplicative programs, and more.

I have participated myself in many such hearings (here, for instance), and I can tell you that nothing ever comes out of them. One reason is that such reform-minded reports don’t bind appropriators, so they ignore them. There is a long track record of congressmen appropriating funds for a program whether we need it or not, whether the money goes to dead farmers or not, whether the program benefits one firm at the expense of the others, whether it benefits an industry at the expense of its consumers, or whether there are 54 other programs doing the exact same thing. Lawmakers in Congress have been captured by private interests and will continue to support programs even in the face of clear evidence that they shouldn’t (the latest Republican vote on the farm bill is a good example of that.)

At the end of the day, I have very little faith in the ability of lawmakers to police themselves. In fact, in most cases the best way to avoid wasting taxpayers’ money isn’t to improve oversight, but instead to shrink the size of government and eliminate whole programs. Many of them shouldn’t exist at the federal level anyway and should fall under the purview of the state and local governments or the private sector. While there will still be waste, fraud, and abuse in a smaller goverment (especially if the decision-making process and the incentives for politicians to be captured by special interests remain the same), it is easier to effectively oversee fewer programs. That’s the case I made here several years ago.

Until then, our money will continue to go to specal interests — dead or alive.

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp has met with Mitch McConnell as he weighs a potential run for Michigan’s open Senate seat in 2014.

“I’m looking at it,” he told Politico. “It’s a big decision, and I’m going to look at it very carefully and thoughtfully.”

Camp would be the presumptive favorite for the Republican nominee to replace the retiring Carl Levin — only one other Republican, former Michigan secretary of state Terri Lynn Land, has jumped into the race — but he would still face an uphill battle in a Democrat-leaning state. Fellow congressman Gary Peters is the likely Democratic nominee and has the early lead in general-election polls.

Because of Republican House rules, Camp’s six-year term as committee chairman would end at the end of the current Congress, forcing him to step down from the post, which he’s currently using to push a tax-reform plan with his counterpart in the Senate, Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus.

Spencer Abraham, who lost reelection in 2000 after one term, is the last Republican to represent Michigan in the Senate.

Senator Saxby Chambliss says NSA leaker Edward Snowden has severely compromised American intelligence operations — more than all the other acts of espionage in the nation’s history.

“This guy has done more damage to the intelligence community of the United States than all other spy cases combined, in my opinion,” the Georgia Republican said on MSNBC this morning. “It has been extremely detrimental.”

Chambliss also suggested Snowden has provided significant momentum for opponents of certain intelligence-gathering programs. He seemed to take issue with House Republicans’ bringing Justin Amash’s amendment to the defense-appropriations bill, which would have limited the NSA’s domestic spying powers, to the floor for a vote last week. The amendment garnered broad bipartisan support, but failed 205 to 217.

“The vote in the House is kind of hard to predict in a way just because, right now, the House operates in ways that sometimes we’re not sure exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing,” he said. Chambliss again blamed Snowden for giving “folks who are just deadset against programs like this more ammunition to come against the intelligence world.”

Speaker John Boehner gave House Republicans a presentation on Obamacare strategy at a closed-door meeting this morning that, while not ruling out the calls for the GOP to insist on defunding the health-care law when a government spending bill expires October 1, strongly suggested the House will be charting a different course.

“We’ve got a strategy,” Boehner told colleagues, according to a source in the room, adding:

This month has arguably been the most important moment in the three years since the law was signed. We passed bills to delay the employer mandate, and the individual mandate, the core of the law. Thirty-five Democrats defied the president and voted with us on Tim Griffin’s bill to authorize the delay of the employer mandate. Twenty-two Democrats defied the president and voted with us on Todd Young’s bill to delay the individual mandate. Former speaker Newt Gingrich called these votes “the beginning of the end” for Obamacare. We should view the delay votes this month as the opening salvo in a series of well-placed, targeted strikes that will ultimately dissolve the Obamacare coalition and topple this trainwreck of a law.

In the meeting, Boehner didn’t reject the possibility of making the next appropriations bill an all-or-nothing fight over Obamacare funding, and in a press conference afterwards he insisted “no decisions have been made.”

But the defunding strategy, championed by Senator Mike Lee and quickly embraced by many in the conservative movement, has received a fairly tepid response among House Republicans, even those on the right flank of the conference.

A good example is Representative Phil Roe of Tennessee. Roe is a doctor and chairman of the health care working group of the Republican Study Committee, the conservative caucus of the House Republicans. But he told me he wasn’t ready to sign on Lee’s CR strategy.

“I’m not there yet. I think that has a lot of ramifications . . . and I’d have to look at that with a jaundiced eye,” Roe said.

Others are more enthusiastic, and over 60 members have signed a letter from freshman representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina calling on House leadership to defund Obamacare through the appropriations process.

Looking ahead, Boehner told colleagues to expect a series of targeted votes that go after parts of the health care law that are particularly unpopular, such as the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). He also said the GOP will keep up the heat in terms of investigations about how the law is being implemented.

In a letter to 25 House Republicans yesterday, the president of the union that represents 12,000 immigration agents warned Republican lawmakers that a DREAM Act–style bill from their chamber could set a problematic precedent of naturalizing illegal immigrants.

Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, said the House Republicans’ version of the DREAM Act “could establish a precedent that would expand birthright citizenship in the future to apply to any new arrivals (and, by extension, their relatives) who claim they came here at a certain age,” which would be “an extraordinary magnet for unlawful entry and overstays” and “a massive hole in future enforcement.”

“Put bluntly: what does your legislation proscribe [sic] will happen to DREAM Act-eligible individuals, and their relatives, who inevitably arrive in future months and years?” Palinkas asked.

“If it is the position of the Judiciary Committee that immigration law should be applied differently, or not at all, to people who simply claim to have entered at a certain age, will this then become the permanent immigration policy of the USA?”

Palinkas’s letter extensively documents the group’s concerns about the Obama administration’s past infidelities to immigration law, and asks how Republicans planned to stop the administration from issuing non-enforcement orders in the future or exempting future illegal immigrants from enforcement. They have “not heard any solutions proposed to any of these concerns,” Palinkas writes.

Palinkas cited a report from his group arguing that President Obama’s unilateral implementation of elements of the DREAM Act is not being applied to “children in schools, but instead to adult inmates in jails,” who “take advantage of the Administration’s DREAM Act orders to evade arrest and deportation.”

“The current culture of the Obama Administration and the agency USCIS [sic] perceives illegal aliens as ‘customers’ while the agency seeks high approval rates as its ultimate goal,” Palinkas wrote, complaining that the agency has “been turned into an approval machine.”

This is not the first time that the Council has opposed immigration legislation: The group opposed the Corker-Hoeven amendment to the comprehensive Senate bill back in June on the basis that it would reward illegal immigrants, “more so than the [previous version of the] bill proposed by the Gang of Eight.”  

Jesse Benton is now Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager in the Kentucky Senate race. Benton’s preceding campaign experience? Serving as a top aide in both of Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns and as campaign manager for Rand Paul’s 2010 Senate bid. He also is a member of the Paul family: Benton married Ron Paul’s granddaughter, Valori, in 2008. The news last fall that Benton was going to work for McConnell surprised many politicos. But it was something Benton says he chose to do with the approval of both Rand and Ron Paul. From my piece today:

When Benton told Rand Paul he was considering taking the job, Paul barely hesitated. “Oh, you got to take it,” Paul told Benton in a phone call, according to Benton. “If they’re interested in you and you think it’s the right fit for you, you got to take it . . . It’s good for you and it’s good for me.’”

The elder Paul, too, was “totally fine” with him becoming McConnell’s campaign manager. “He wants me to be able to provide for his granddaughter and his great-granddaughter,” Benton explains

Benton also hinted that McConnell and his team could prove to be crucial in a Rand presidential bid in 2016:

Benton acknowledges he has talked to the McConnell team about [Rand 2016]. When I ask whether McConnell’s camp would support Paul in a presidential bid, Benton chooses his words carefully.

“Once we win this campaign, there’s going to be a substantial portion of Team Mitch that’s going to fuse with Team Rand,” he remarks, “and I think it’s going to make a really dynamite team.” 

Read the full piece here.