Last night (July 1) another American Enterprise Institute spokesman, Norman Ornstein, was on the Fox News Channel advocating an even more drastic effort to eliminate American civil liberties. Ornstein is on one of those Richard Perle-type “advisory committees” that produces “reports” that serve as intellectual cover for the administration’s big government schemes. He was advocating that we at least double, if not quadruple, the budget for the Homeland Security Bureaucracy.
AEI has been at the forefront of the administration’s attack on civil liberties from the beginning: Soon after 9/11 they trotted out AEI scholar and “Civil War” historian Jay Winik to write in the War Street Journal that Americans should simply ignore the demolition of civil liberties that was already underway because, after all, the sainted Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and arrested tens of thousands of political dissenters, deported the leader of the Democratic opposition, censored all telegraph communication, and shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers while imprisoning their editors and owners. There were no long-lasting consequences of this, argued Winik, who apparently believes the total destruction of the system of federalism and states’ rights established by the founders and the creation of the centralized state does not fall into the long-term effect category.
With the exception of John Lott, it seems as though every “AEI scholar” who appears on television is an obnoxious, totalitarian-minded menace. (Need I even bother to describe them with the “N” word?)
To his great credit, the classical liberal Nobel Laureate economist James M. Buchanan resigned from AEI’s academic advisory board several years ago in protest of Ornstein’s televised defense of Clinton. Ornstein wasn’t defending Clinton’s soiling of the blue dress, or his purjury, or even his bombing of innocent people in Sudan and Afghanistan. He said he was defending the power of the presidency, and that all this carping about Clinton should stop. After all, it takes a “strong president” who can thumb his nose at the public and ignore the law and the Constitution if you are to become the world’s hegemon.
6:47 pm on July 2, 2003
