On energy policy and open primaries
House Speaker John Boehner blasted President Barack Obama last week for the nation's jump in gasoline prices, to an average of $3.71 per gallon.
Mr. Boehner and other members of the House leadership said approval of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, which has been delayed by the White House, could help ease the concerns that are driving gas prices up.
Mr. Obama, looking at his election calendar and realizing he had to promptly zip up his lamb suit and be in favor of energy development and against bankrupting every business in America for precisely the next eight months and seven days, promptly arranged for TransCanada to announce that it's going to go ahead and build the southern leg of that pipeline, from Port Arthur, Texas, to beautiful downtown Cushing, Okla., population 8,371.
The town's biggest employer? Wal-Mart. Its ninth-largest employer is the Steer Inn Restaurant, with a cheerful work force of 96.
"It's just about damn time that we actually have a national energy policy enough of this," Mr. Boehner told reporters Tuesday, remembering to wave his arm.
The Constitution grants the central government no power whatsoever to devise or enforce anything remotely resembling a "federal energy policy," which is the kind of thing that leads to Washington bureaucrats ordering us to use hazardous, doubly expensive, flickering Communist Chinese light bulbs, a step aimed at creating 100 percent unemployment in the American light-bulb industry.
In a free country under the U.S. Constitution, no Washington bureaucrat should or would have the power to block development of any oil well, coal mine or refinery by issuing or refusing to issue any "permit" within any of the 50 states -- let alone to loot my paycheck and yours to shower hundreds of millions in subsidies over some crony to fund a Potemkin Village scheme called Solyndra, a ridge full of marginal windmills, a scheme to make gasoline out of algae or a really big treadmill full of gerbils.
What America needs is a lot more extraction of stuff we already know will burn real good by private, profit-seeking entrepreneurs; a lot fewer taxes and crippling "permit" regulations, and no perceptible federal energy policy at all, other than to "Let it happen."
When 'openness' is bad
Did anyone notice the passing references, Tuesday night, to the fact that Michigan's presidential preference polling -- in which Mitt Romney, for good or ill, cemented his hold on the 2012 GOP nomination -- was an "open primary"?
This is the road which the two branches of the Incumbent Republicrat Party started down when they allowed the government to start funding their primaries.
Every year, brain-damaged escapees from the mandatory youth propaganda camps whine that they're not allowed to vote in the party primaries because they're registered nonpartisan, or they're in the "wrong party."
"Why don't we get a say?" they bleat and simper. "After all, we help fund these primaries!"
Politicians, always aiming to please, proceed to open the previously partisan primaries to participation, first by non-affiliated, independent voters, and then to those registered in the party diametrically opposed to the aims of the party whose candidate is being chosen.
About 9 percent of the participants in Michigan's Feb. 28 primary were Democrats. And it's no secret some of those Democrats cast votes for Rick Santorum precisely because they figured some snake-handling Bible-thumper is the guy least likely to give their guy any problems at the polls come November -- helping explain why Romney's victory was so slim in his father's home state.
(As a side note, isn't it interesting that a self-declared atheist could never get elected president today, but that someone who claims to be a Christian and really is a practicing, Scripture-quoting Christian, is equally anathema to the urban elite and their captive, statist media? Today, the candidate is required to pretend to adhere to some mainstream religion, while making it obvious in every other way that he doesn't actually take such stuff seriously. And then we complain when we end up with a bunch of dissembling hypocrites.)
We'd be far more likely to see the parties field candidates who could be relied upon to promulgate and govern based on their "hidebound, doctrinaire," philosophically consistent and written-down platforms if said candidates were chosen by small groups of self-selected party activists meeting in smoke-filled convention halls, which is why I favor a return to just that tradition.
Allow this cross-party voting to continue much longer, and cross-voting Democrats will soon see to it the next GOP presidential slate consists of Yosemite Sam and Sylvester the Cat, leading Republicans to return the favor by swarming the polls of the next Democratic primary to make sure the official jackass ticket, come November 2016, consists of Dennis Kucinich and Rosie O'Donnell. (OK, maybe today's Democrats wouldn't really need much help to find their way there.)
My brethren of the left -- and let's include departing "Republican" U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, who wisely limped home to Maine upon learning she might finally face a real primary challenge from one or more actual conservatives -- whine that "doctrinaire idealogues" of the Tea Party sort are refusing to compromise, creating an atmosphere of polarization and thus causing gridlock in Washington, resulting in nothing getting done.
Federal spending has grown 80 percent, from $2.5 trillion to almost $4.5 trillion, since 2005. The tax code now takes up at least 17,000 pages -- some say more. The Federal Register now contains 75,000 pages of regulations. The Office of Management and Budget (under)estimates it costs American businesses $500 billion to $600 billion per year -- capital they could use to create jobs and produce and market products -- to comply with those regulations.
If this is the result of a form of "gridlock" that prevents Washington from getting anything done, I'll tell you what we need -- we need a whole lot better form of gridlock.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and "Send in the Waco Killers." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.
