Why Newt Gingrich Should Stay In The Race

His latest atrocity:

While campaigning ahead of Saturday's primary in Louisiana, Gingrich spoke with the American Family Association's Sandy Rios about the recent Washington Post story on Rick Santorum's association with Opus Dei, a devout Catholic group. Rios, who disapproved of the Post's story, asked Gingrich if he thought the media would similarly "hold their powder" on Mitt Romney for his Mormonism.

Gingrich said the media, which he believes is "in the tank for Obama," will "do anything that helps re-elect" the president.

"It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are," Gingrich told Rios. "Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama's Muslim friends?..."

Be sure to understand exactly what he said. The media had made an issue of the conservative Roman Catholic associates of Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic. Gingrich's interlocutor asks if he thinks the media will do the same with the Mormon associates of Mitt Romney, a Mormon. In response, Gingrich predicts the media won't investigate the Muslim associates of Barack Obama, who is washed in the One Baptism as is Gingrich himself and is a member of the United Church of Christ but who many GOP voters in Louisiana still believe is Muslim. If you don't think Gingrich is purposely exploiting their confusion, here he is again today, resorting to the slimy ploy of taking Obama "at his word" that he's a Christian.

Yet I'm delighted he's still running. His sneering attacks on the frontrunner, combined with each new demonstration of his toxicity and near-irrelevance, reduce the likelihood that Romney, if elected, would feel any obligation to put him in the government.

Adult Daughters

Few joys exceed meeting one's adult daughters for lunch on a warm spring afternoon. Valerie (right), who's marrying Mark in October, with her father serving as officiant, was back from a three-day parks and recreation conference in Long Beach. She works for the Yorba Linda community center and discloses that Amy Poehler has become living patron saint of an entire generation of municipal employees, or at least those charged with planning nonsectarian Santa breakfasts.

Lindsay will be graduated from Long Beach State in May and is thinking about parlaying her degree in political theory (she has been known to mention Rousseau, Locke, and Mao in polite conversation) into a career serving those at need, which will be easy given her brains and openness of mind and heart. When I asked for a little help for the tip, she said apologetically, "I gave my last dollar to a homeless person."

We lingered happily over lunch and in the sunshine on the sidewalk. Reluctant to leave Fullerton, which everyone in Orange County loves or should, Valerie and Lindsay asked if I wanted to go for some additional refreshment. I declined and asked for another kiss. After Valerie changed out of her parks and rec shirt in the back of her VW, they wandered away together, past the Fullerton museum with its permanent exhibit on local hero Leo Fender. Adult daughters! Life is good.

You Won't Get Action Like This At Starbucks

Tip jar at the Coffee Bean in Yorba Linda, California. I've seen both "Jurassic Park"s and voted for the velociraptor.

Taking T Too Seriously

In the the April 2012 Vanity Fair, an oral history of "The Sopranos," including this from executive producer Terence Winter:

When Uncle Junior was diagnosed with cancer, people were calling me up, saying, "Is he going to be OK?" I said, "We're getting him the best doctors we can. Really, we're on it."

"Cruel To Be Kind," Nick Lowe and Wilco

Cruel to be kind means that I love you. Performing on Feb. 2 on Austin City Limits. Hat tip to No Depression.

B. H. Obama And J. R. Ewing

Environmentalists are rightly concerned, and no doubt the Saudis as well. But he's drilling, baby, and Midland, Texas is booming again, according to the New York Times:

[I]ncreasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

Borders, Not Boycotts

Jeffrey Goldberg says that Israel and the Palestinians must get back to the table and decide on the borders of a new state:

Borders -- those are the issue, in my opinion. I used to think settlements were a main stumbling block. But they can be bypassed. If you can negotiate the borders of Palestine, the settlement problem dissipates. It gets ugly, also -- the extremists will make sure of that -- but it's obvious that settlements are secondary. Settlements that are outside the negotiated border will have to be dismantled (or their residents will have to take Palestinian citizenship) and those settlements inside the border become normal communities within Israel. We just have to get back to negotiations. I'm hoping President Obama, if he's reelected, will be visiting Israel and the West Bank by spring of next year to lay out his vision of how the two sides need to act.

The One And Only Two-State Solution

Scholar and blogger Peter Beinart has ignited a controversy by calling for a boycott of goods produced in West Bank settlements. On his behalf, Andrew Sullivan called on Beinart's critics to say what they'd do instead to promote the peace process. Beinart's proposition:

Today, the Israeli government—with the active consent of the organized American Jewish community—provides myriad subsidies for Jews to leave democratic Israel to settle across the green line. Regardless of your opinion about the Palestinian willingness to make a two state deal today, such policies are deeply self-defeating since they make a two-state solution harder ever. A settlement boycott could help to rebalance the scales. If critics disagree—and yet still profess a belief in the two state solution—then they should offer their own alternatives for how to stop the settlement growth that threatens Israel’s democratic future. I’m all ears.

My reply, e-mailed to Sullivan (I'll only check every five minutes or so to see if he uses it):

No fair. When Beinart writes, "Regardless of your opinion about the Palestinian willingness to make a two state deal today," he takes the solution off the table. Neither the U.S. president nor op-ed writers can stop settlement expansion. Only the Palestinians can, by accepting the best available territorial offer as soon as possible (and, I'm afraid, agree to punt on dividing Jerusalem). While we may be appalled by the settlement movement, it isn't a conspiracy to undermine the peace process. It's a function of Israel's complex social, theological, and political dynamics. That means that each time Palestinians have said no -- 2000, 2008, 2010, and 2012, in Jordan -- the inevitable result was or will be settlement expansion and a smaller, less coherent Palestine. It will keep happening until the PNA figures out that they're the ones, beside Israel, with the power. As a matter of fact, the Beinart initiative just provides more encouragement for the mistaken belief that outside leverage will get Palestinians a better deal. If they're going to have a state, if they really want one, it's time for them to say yes.

War Powers And The Problem With Presidents

Tom Campbell, who served five terms in Congress from a district in northern California, has been dean of the Chapman University law school since February 2011. "It's a pleasure to have another moderate Republican in Orange County," I told him last night at the Pacific Club in Newport Beach, where Kathy and I were guests of our St. John's friends Bob (serving again as a peerless MC) and Ann Mosier. "On behalf of the other four, welcome."

"Richard Nixon?" he said with a bemused look. Dead these 17 years, I replied, as he knew. "Of course," he said with a smile. "Chuck Percy? George Romney?" Alas, also gone are the great Illinois senator and Michigan governor, beacons of the great American center. Campbell was suggesting that pragmatic conservatism had died along with its lions. Then he perked up and said, "Olympia Snowe! Ah, but then she's retiring."

We agreed that Nixon -- promoting detente with communists, the EPA, and near-universal health insurance, not to mention wage and price controls -- wouldn't be welcome in today's GOP. Indeed in most portraits of the modern conservative movement, Nixon's corner of the Etch A Sketch screen has been rendered inoperative. And yet a prominent local jurist standing nearby said that he too would join a party for the socially tolerant and fiscally prudent. One does meet such people in Orange County, even while clinking glasses in its premier social and business club. Perhaps Mitt Romney, if nominated, will be able to erase the hard-right positions he took to get onto the ticket, having spent years trying to do so with his centrist positions as Massachusetts governor. If not, in November we may learn that the lions' passing presaged a diminishment of the GOP's ability to contend for the White House.

During his lecture on war powers and the U.S. Constitution, Campbell demonstrated the capacity for nuance that makes pragmatists so infuriating. Bolstering his analysis with quotations from the Founders, he argued that only Congress may conduct an aggressive war, though the commander-in-chief has broad authority to act defensively. That being said, the War Powers Act (which Congress passed over Nixon's veto in 1973) lets a president wage war without permission from Congress for up to 90 days, meaning that any president can start World War III by himself so long as he sends Congress a memo within 48 hours of firing the first shot and then wins (or loses) inside of three months.

From Nixon on, presidents have resented this limitation on what some construe as their sovereign right to protect and defend the country. During a congressional hearing after Bill Clinton went to war in Yugoslavia in 1999, Campbell pressed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to explain the difference between war or hostilities, which would have triggered the War Powers Act, and her description of the massive bombing campaign, armed conflict. She responded, "You're the law professor. You figure it out."

That's the war-making executive's usual high-handedness toward Congress for you. Then there's the judiciary's timidity. When Campbell and 15 Republican and Democratic colleagues sued Clinton for violating the War Powers Act, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that Congress, though it had refused to declare war, had tacitly authorized it by appropriating funds to pay for it. "But the [current] appropriation isn't for the cruise missiles that are being used in the war," Campbell said. "They've already been paid for. The appropriation is to rebuild the stock that will be needed for the next war." By Campbell's lights, the judge was saying that Congress could only stop an illegal war by reducing the nation's overall preparedness.

Campbell advised judges who may fear being ignored by a willful president to remember July 1974's Nixon vs. United States, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-0 vote, ordered the president to turn over tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon complied and then resigned on Aug. 9 in the firestorm over one transcript's contents.

Since Campbell had mentioned Kathy's and my ex-boss, I asked during the Q&A about Nixon's own constitutional scholarship. Campbell had already argued that that Congress had authorized the Vietnam war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Fast forward to the 1977 Nixon-Frost interviews, when the ex-president was asked about an operative's scheme to expand the president's power to monitor and harass anti-war activists, 1970's Huston Plan. It was never implemented. But when David Frost wondered why he'd even considered such an appalling abuse of power, Nixon replied that if the president does it, it's "not illegal."

My question last night: Since the U.S. was at war, was Nixon's formulation (widely misunderstood as an excuse for Watergate crimes) actually a defensible assertion of a president's sovereign right to protect the country? Campbell replied that Nixon would have been better off saying that Congress, by authorizing the war, had already permitted security measures at home. It was an overreach for Nixon to arrogate the power to the executive, which, as it turns out, seems to be a persistent problem with presidents.

Lent At St. John's: Healing And Freedom

The life of St. Patrick (what we know, and what we don't) provided an opportunity to sum up a month's teachings at St. John's on our Lenten themes of healing and freedom. My sermon for March 18, the fourth Sunday in Lent, including a wee bit of singing, is here.