Six years ago today President Bush signed into law the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold. Sen. McCain, who has all but captured the Republican nomination for president in 2008, does not note the anniversary on his website. Perhaps, like many others, he has come to see the legislation as a mistake. According [...]
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Over the last few days there’s been a rash of stories about state legislators pushing to get out from under the No Child Left Behind Act. In Arizona, the state’s House of Representatives yesterday approved by a voice vote a measure that would take the state out of NCLB’s standards-and-testing regime. A formal vote is expected [...]
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Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker has posted the second in a series on the REAL ID Act at the DHS Leaderhip blog. I assessed his first try here. This one raises the privacy issues with REAL ID, and it claims that privacy advocates “can’t and won’t tell you precisely how [...]
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Newt Gingrich gave a luncheon talk about education at the American Enterprise Institute today. Among other things, he said he’d “argue with any conservative” about the role of the federal government with respect to education. It’s a matter of national security, he said. He called on the secretary of defense to give a speech every year on the [...]
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The Georgia legislature is currently considering a scholarship donation tax credit program that would allow individuals and businesses to give money to non-profit scholarship granting organizations that make it easier for parents to afford independent schooling for their kids. In arguing against the bill, the head of the state’s public school employee organization, Jeff Hubbard, [...]
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In an interesting side-note to the Medellin decision, the case’s convoluted procedural history made for some rather strange political bed fellows. The Court’s decision, anchored by the “conservative wing” (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito) and joined by the “moderate” Kennedy and (writing separately) the “liberal” Stevens effectively clears the last remaining roadblock to Texas’s imposition of the death [...]
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Apparently, Florida’s Hillsborough County School District has tried to take religion off the calendar, resulting in almost everyone—religious or not—taking Good Friday off. As reported in the St. Petersburg Times on Monday: After most Hillsborough students skipped classes on Good Friday, superintendent MaryEllen Elia initially used religion to explain the huge disparities in absentee rates [...]
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The Case-Shiller index of house prices covers just 20 major metropolitan areas. It shows house prices down by 10.7% between January 2007 and 2008, but that largely reflects the fact that Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco account for 27.4% of the index. In Fortune magazine’s March 17 interview, economist Paul Krugman says “We’re [...]
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Yesterday, in addition to announcing its decision in the Medellin case (which I blogged about here), the Supreme Court heard argument in two cases relating to the War on Terror. First, in Munaf v. Geren, two U.S. citizens (also citizens of Jordan and Iraq, respectively) held captive in Iraq by U.S. forces — as part of [...]
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In a recent op-ed I dub the two kinds of enemies of freedom in America “the Hillarys and the Huckabees.” I think it has a nice ring. Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee are classic examples of two strains of big-government thinking in a country that otherwise prefers small government. Hillary is the quintessential nanny-state liberal [...]
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