UK: GOP red meat delivery

The Economist

"But what would America's schools look like under a president contemptuous of science and education? And if America's political system is fractious and prone to gridlock now, what will it look like when the president starts ignoring and undermining the courts?"

The Republican nomination
Red-meat delivery

A MAN with my cholesterol levels has no business being fed as much pure red meat as was offered at last night's campaign event. Devoted to abortion and held by Personhood USA, about whom we've written before, the forum drew Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul to a rather dreary Hilton on the outskirts of Greenville (Mr Paul appeared via satellite from Washington, DC, having briefly stepped off the campaign trail to vote against a debt-ceiling increase) to answer a penetrating set of questions. Is life important? It is. Is there anything more important than life? There is not. Is abortion wrong? It is. When does life begin? At the moment of conception. So far, so unsurprising. The gems were further down in the questioning line.

Rick Perry went first. He was loose, funny and relaxed as only a man about to drop out of the presidential race could be. He genially floundered his way through some substantive questions about constitutional law, and declared his opposition to abortion so strong that he would bring government to a halt rather than sign any bill that included abortion-related funding. He sparked to life only when he started talking about Barack Obama ("this administration is at war with religion") and Mitt Romney. The latter's relatively recent discovery that he was in fact opposed to abortion rights was, Mr Perry charged, "a decision [he] made for political convenience, not an issue of the heart."

Mr Perry's problem has always been the culture-warrior's problem: only opposition moves him. He can rile a crowd as well as—and in the same way as—Pat Buchanan. Let a thousand pitchforks gleam! But then what? Ask Ron Paul why he wants to be president and he’ll bang on about fractional banking and the Fed and sound money and raw milk until he dislocates his shoulders from excessive twitching. Ask Newt the same thing and he’ll tell you why we’re at the most perilous point in human history and we need to fundamentally transform the way we breathe air and eat food and he’s the only American politician to ever truly understand human civilisation and by the way can he tell you about his plan to send poor children to mine tungsten on the moons of Neptune. Ask Mr Perry why he wanted to be president and all he could tell you is how awful the other guys are. That was necessary but insufficient. The crowd knew it, and apparently he does too now.

Still, he set in motion a contest—which candidate is most vehemently opposed to abortion rights, and who will do the most to curtail them—that the next three contestants took up with zeal. Newt Gingrich came out in full snarl, decrying "a secular judiciary that seeks to impose elite values on a country that deeply dislikes it." He offered a novel solution to this problem—one that went beyond his call for "aggressive, articulate leadership", a self-advertisement if ever there was one. If a court makes "a fundamentally wrong decision", the president can ignore it and Congress can abolish it. Mr Gingrich brushed off a panelist's suggestion this simply switched "tyranny by five justices for tyranny from one executive." If Congress sides with the Supreme Court against the president, it can vote to defund the presidency. If Congress supports the president, it can abolish the judiciary. "This is not something you would do capriciously," Mr Gingrich cautioned, in perhaps his first-ever understatement. "But I fully expect that as president there will be several occasions when we would collide." Phew! A Gingrich administration would see frequent rather than perpetual inter-governmental chaos. I'm relieved.

Rick Santorum also promised to "fight the courts". The president and every member of Congress takes an oath to uphold the constitution; "we have just as much say as they do." One wonders what their response would be if Mr Obama decided he was going to unilaterally ignore the Citizens United decision. Or imagine he had a Democratic majority in Congress and they passed legislation outlawing corporate political contributions. That certainly is in line with the Gingrich-Santorum view of a weak and dismissible judiciary. Still, Mr Santorum's main target was not law but science. "Science", he declared in answer to a question about experimental cloning, "is not an ethics- or moral-free zone. It is something society has every right—in fact, an obligation—to curb."

The crowd loved these attacks (though the night's biggest cheers went to Ron Paul's giant televised head), and there's nothing wrong with a little pre-primary pander. But what would America's schools look like under a president contemptuous of science and education? And if America's political system is fractious and prone to gridlock now, what will it look like when the president starts ignoring and undermining the courts? The best one can say about such full-on attacks on law and science is to hope the candidates are making them in bad faith.


http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/01/republican-nomination-6