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Sept. 3, 2010
Rivy Poupko Kletenik: How to beat those down-home High Holiday blues
Caroline B. Glick: The new Netanyahu?
Mona Charen : Why These Talks Are Doomed
Ground Zero Mosque Investor Was Terror Contributor (INVESTIGATIVE VIDEO)
Sept. 2, 2010
John Rosemond: What do today's children seriously lack that children in the 1950s and before enjoyed in abundance?
Evan Gahr: Seems Bloomberg truly CAIRs
Thomas H. Maugh II: Diabetes drug found to reduce cancer risk
Sept. 1, 2010
Michael B. Oren: Reason for optimism in Mideast talks
Nat Hentoff: What hath the Ground Zero imam wrought?
August 31, 2010
Mark Johnson: Scientists unveil new step in less-controversial stem-cell efforts
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Not a Muslim, but there's certainly legitimate room for concern over Obama's recent repeated actions
August 30, 2010
Peter J. Sampson and Jean Rimbach: Tenants don't see imam as 'healer'
Andrew Silow-Carroll: Fly the friendly skies --- or go to Israel
August 27, 2010
David Hazony: The Mystery of Goodness
Caroline B. Glick: Accepting the unacceptable
August 26, 2010
John Rosemond: ‘Fixing’ Son's Shyness
George Will: The Mideast mirage
Paul Greenberg: Rare Sighting: Common Sense from the Bench
August 25, 2010
Ariella Marcus: New prayer book uplifts as it enlightens
Nat Hentoff: Am I also a bigot? Pols clueless on Ground Zero mosque
Sarah Tully: Muslim employee is taken off Disney's schedule after deciding she no longer wants to wear uniform
August 24, 2010
Steven Emerson: A 'moderate Muslim' exposed
Cal Thomas: Pointless Talks
Wesley Pruden: The 'Zionist plot' to build a mosque
August 23, 2010
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Reclaiming what's yours through deception
George Will: The 'two-state' delusion
August 20, 2010
Rabbi Dov Fischer on his divorce and responsibility
Caroline B. Glick: Dusk in Iraq
August 19, 2010
Jeff Jacoby: The 'disengagement' disaster, five years on
George Will: Skip the lectures on Israel's 'risks for peace'
Matt Flegenheimer: Hypercompetitive overachievers bet on their own academic success
August 18, 2010
Suzanne Fields: The New Dance on a Pinhead
Richard Z. Chesnoff: A Film Unfinished: The Warsaw Ghetto As Seen Through Nazi Eyes
Lee Margulies: Dr. Laura to leave radio show amid controversy

(INCLUDES VIDEO)

August 17, 2010
Dennis Prager: Same-Sex Marriage and the Insignificance of Men and Women
Caroline B. Glick: Standing on a landmine
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Obama's 'Teachable' Shariah Moment
August 16, 2010
Arnold Ahlert: You've Lost America, Mr. President
George Will: Israel will not be a 'perfect victim'
August 13, 2010
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: What does 'doing the right thing' entail?
Caroline B. Glick: Guide to the Perplexed
Jon Stewart: Charlie Rangel's War (VIDEO!)
August 12, 2010
George Will: Israel's anti-Obama
Larry Elder: Is Obama Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Arab and Muslim World?
August 11, 2010
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: How to talk to a neo-Nazi (POWERFUL!)
Rene Stutzman: Muslim-turned-'infidel', now 18, is ready to begin life anew
August 10, 2010
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Coming to grips with shariah

Jewish World Review Dec. 29, 2009 / 13 Teves 5770

Memo to the House: Adopt the Filibuster

By John Stossel


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The filibuster is sure taking its lumps these days. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says "the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional". The Democrats won the White House and Congress last year and should have had no trouble passing the health care overhaul, yet "the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill."


Why is this "dysfunctional"? I assume Krugman would praise the filibuster if a President Palin and Republican Congress were ramming bills through. Regardless of what senators in the 19th century had in mind, the filibuster is a wonderful antidote to the tyranny of the majority. It's no argument against it to say that the statists' favorite piece of legislation didn't fly through smoothly enough. They'll have to come up with a better case than that.


There is no greater threat to individual freedom and autonomy than government. The threat from private freelance crime is small potatoes compared to the daily usurpations of the state, with its taxation, regulation, privilege-granting, inflation and war. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's immortal passage has never been topped:


"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place(d) under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored."


That just about covers it. So I favor any procedural methods that can slow down government's legislative juggernaut. During the health care debate, commentators often referred to the lawmaking process as sausage-making, a reference to this quote, usually misattributed to Otto von Bismarck but spoken by poet John Godfrey Saxe: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

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What those commentators overlooked is that it's the taxpayers who get ground up.


Of course, the filibuster and other stalling methods can be used to stop bills that would advance liberty, like tax cuts and the repeal of restrictions. But I'll play the odds. On any given day, what is Congress more likely to do: violate or expand liberty? As 19th-century New York Judge Gideon Tucker put it, "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."


Libertarian science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein had a good idea. One of his novels depicted a bicameral legislature with one chamber needing a supermajority to pass laws and the other needing only a minority of votes to repeal them.


By the standard of protecting freedom and keeping government caged, that's not a bad idea. It should be easier to repeal laws than to pass them.


After all, look at what Congress has been up to lately. Our "leaders" are on the verge of passing a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that would raise insurance prices, compel everyone to buy insurance, increase America's debt, destroy jobs and limit innovation. Low-income people, as usual, will get the worst of it — despite the politicians' boast that they are "covered."


If any piece of legislation is worthy of procedural burial, this is it. One need not be a fan of Republicans to be pleased that they gave the filibuster a try.


So let's not kill the filibuster. In fact, I have a better idea: Let's extend it to the House.

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