Rice County Republicans

It has just been announced (about 1PM CDT, 30 June 2009) that Al Franken, comedian, has been declared the winner in Minnesota’s 2008 Senatorial election over Norm Coleman (R). With the Minnesota Supreme Court having played kingmaker we are reminded of the 2000 presidential election. Shortly after that contest was decided (also by a court), the bumper stickers appeared … “He’s not MY president“. Do we need “He’s not MY Senator” stickers?

We in Minnesota are confronted with being represented by two (D)emocratic Senators. With such a tight margin in this election,  it is probably fair to say that 49% of the people in this state now have no voice in the Federal Senate. But, as has been argued before in similar circumstances, the Republicans are all about following the rules and living by them, and we expect that we will be mindful of our role in letting this happen. What lessons have we learned? I suspect there are three key lessons:

1. Third parties hurt. We must pay more attention to the large core of voters who now make up the Liberty coalition. These fiscal conservatives often have either a laissez faire view of social issues, or they point to the 10th Amendment to the US Consitution to deflect social issues from the national level. They (well, a couple of thousand at least) may have defected, leaving the social conservatives to fend for themselves.
   [after one of our readers commented that this was confusing, I add the following clarification, sorry for the confusion.]
   We cannot and should not alienate fiscal conservatives in this way. When we say the party needs to get back to its roots, I believe it is the fiscal conservatives who will lead us there.
2. Absentee ballots are not as good a deal as they seem. I personally will never count on an absentee ballot again, since apparently (according to this ruling) the rules are different for absentee ballots over in-person ballots.
3. Counting and recounting are statistical exercises, not actuarial events. Election laws that pretend otherwise may not be in the best interests of the voters. But recognizing and reacting to this distinction may be beyond the ability of the press to explain, let alone the legislature to implement.

In the meantime, we can only hope that the headlong rush to bankruptcy that we are engaged in at the national level will not be made worse by this ruling.  Al Franken is a smart man, maybe he will see past the hog-fest and will actually act to protect the children by not mortgaging their lives to pay for today’s largesse.

———-

Footnote: In his speech, Sen. Coleman made exactly the point made above (Republicans are all about following the rules and living by them), which is that it is the rule of law that must be our touchstone.

And another country heard from …  from the Wall Street Journal, “The ‘Absentee’ Senator” writes:

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

(and then, later)

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

See also “Mischief in Minnesota” (same WSJ)

The following guest editorial was recently sent to us.  It is an important summary of a troublesome bandwagon.  After you read this, I also recommend another interesting writing (Deming) that talks directly to the problem with “True Believers” (see Eric Hoffer) when they are in charge.

Waxman-Marcky Passage: Final Result of Lack of Leadership of Prominent Scientists and Politicians
by Doug Ferguson

The debate on C-Span(or lack thereof) this past Friday of the narrowly passed climate bill, including House Minority Leader John Boehner’s angry denunciation and reading of sections of the new 300 plus page draconian amendment(dropped in the House’s lap at 3:00am by Waxman’s committee on the same day of the ram-rod vote called for by the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi), crystallized the basic underlying problem that has existed ever since the global warming specter was raised years ago at the infamous “Kyoto” conference.

Energy policy, environmental policy, cap and trade and other dominant debates in this country and the rest of the Western world have reached the ridiculous level they now share because there has been little or no leadership to attack the underlying premises that (1) the planet is rapidly warming to a critical state from which there is no return and that (2) man caused it and, therefore, can reverse it. This despite growing scientific evidence that neither of these premises is true.

First it is high time for responsible and prominent scientists and politicians to step up to the plate and refute these two erroneous premises in the best and most effective way they can. Failure to do so will surely cause us to ruin our economy, our democratic republic and our leadership to much of the free world. Our children and grandchildren will be the bearers of this burden if the draconian measures so far proposed by the current administration are enacted. In that respect we are truly in a “global warming” crises.

Second it is incumbent on our journalists to not rollover and accept global warming dogma, but to question and challenge scientists and politicians who make doomsday statements as a justification for their agendas. Such a course of action will require personal risk, courage and statesmanship by all involved. Nothing is more critical to the future of our country.

Background:

When Al Gore was Vice President and first brought the whole issue to national and international prominence at the time of the Kyoto conference years ago, there were scientists who raised sincere doubts about the conclusions reached by global warming advocates at the time. However Gore, using his “bully pulpit” power as VP, totally squelched these inputs to his VP energy task group, and, in fact, ridiculed them. This, by the way, has become the standard for dealing with anyone who questions global warming.

In a way, the lack of a vigorous retort by anyone to Gore’s program was understandable. At the time the actual data for either side of the issue was inconclusive and understood only by a few specialists in the field. All the dire predictions were based on complicated and complex computer models which got their input from a discontinuous world-wide surface station temperature measuring network which was in place originally to help forecast weather and was never intended to accurately measure long range trends. Ocean temperatures came from the random routes of commercial ships or the occasional research vessel voyage. Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Virginia’s “Hockey Stick” graph used by the Canadian government at Kyoto and widely publicized by Gore showing global temperatures going up dramatically in the previous 25 years really looked convincing. Man’s role in all this was based on an arcane (and still unproved) theory that carbon dioxide emission from burning fossil fuels was the cause due to it’s “greenhouse gas” characteristic. Certainly now one in public office or in the public employ wanted to risk their position or job on something which was so little understood. Besides, many politicians in the public arena thought, “well, if this gets us to conserve energy and get off mid-east oil, that’s a good thing.”

Consequently no one in significant positions of power rose to challenge the basics assumptions of global warming and the subsequent gobs of government money thrown at the “problem” only have served to convince everyone that the “problem” was real.

Fast forward to today’s world of climate knowledge. Things have changed significantly. Irony that it is, this the result of the billions of dollars that have been spent by government in this country and others in the Western world because of the fear of global warming. This money has resulted in much new technology being deployed, which is now starting for the first time to give mankind a systematic way of measuring what really is happening to our planet’s climate. Satellites recording systematic planet-wide surface temperature, magnetic fields and other global parameters are in place. After a multi-year international project, 3000 high-tech buoys are spread out through the earth’s oceans measuring ocean temperatures, currents and salinity (The ARGO Project). A new satellite to measure solar radiation accurately outside the earth’s environment for the first time is about to be launched. Temperature studies of Mars and other parts of our solar system are being seriously studied for correlation with our earth’s trends. Many other initiatives too numerous to mention here ranging from glacier studies to polar ice measurements have greatly added to our knowledge in the years since Kyoto.

An interesting footnote to show how hard it is to get at the truth:

After rigorous analysis by Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick and other researchers with math and science backgrounds, the famous “Hockey Stick” graph used at the original Kyoto conference mentioned above to dramatize global warming was shown to be erroneous, having been created by “cherry picking” newer data, ignoring some significant historical data (the medieval “warm” period), using data from only a selected number of tree rings as a proxy for ancient temperature and using biased weighting and filtering systems for all the data to achieve the “hockey stick” profile. While McIntyre and McKitrick independently showed it on there own using some of Mann’s data they accidentally found on one of his web sites, the final verification almost didn’t happen. Mann refused to give up his computer code and data sets showing how he arrived at the graph when McIntyre, McKitrick and others requested it. It wasn’t until Congressman Joe Barton, R-Texas, then chairman of the of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce at the time, sent him a letter asking that he provide the code and data (since Mann’s project had been federally funded) that he finally provided the information while at the same time claiming that the congressman was “intimidating” him. This in spite of the fact that he had previously testified to congress on the results of his study. Significantly the official UN body (the IPCC) “researching” global warming no longer uses Mann’s results.

One prominent journalist who has stepped up to the plate is the Wall Street Journal’s regular columnist Kimberley Strassel. Her recent editorial (below) sums this up this trend nicely. All leaders in the free world should read it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Bottom line: There is plenty of good scientific information available today to dispute the hysterical global warming claims. Leaders and journalists need only the courage to draw upon it.

Doug Ferguson is a retired engineer living in Mankato, Mn who has had a life-long interest in science, math, earth sciences and astronomy and, of course, politics.

The Importance of Constitutional Law

Bill Paulsen

Critical to individual liberty is the rule of law.  The rule of law ensures that people can live free from the fear of the arbitrary taking of their life or property.  It is the cornerstone of a republican form of government, where people elect their representatives without the fear that those elected will abuse the power entrusted to them.  The rule of law requires that citizens of a nation obey the law but more importantly that the established government obey the law.  In a free society, the law that governments must obey, the law that restricts what laws elected officials can impose, is the constitution of the state.

In Minnesota, elected representatives swear to uphold the Constitution of the State of Minnesota and the Constitution of the United States. The Republican Party of Minnesota has recognized the importance of constitutional law by stating that the purpose of the party is

“the maintenance of government by and for the people according to the Constitution and the laws of the United States and the State of Minnesota, and the implementation of such principles as may from time to time be adopted by party conventions.“

In line with that statement, on Saturday, June 13th, a resolution was presented to the Central Committee of the Republican Party of Minnesota affirming the importance of constitutional law.  The resolution affirmed that elected representatives should understand the state and federal constitutions, be able to give constitutional rationales for their votes and that the Republican Party platform should be analyzed in light of the constitution.

When we advocate a change in policy we should understand if the current policy is constitutional and what is the constitutional basis for our proposed policy.  If there is no constitutional basis for our proposal we should be forthright and propose a constitutional amendment.  Otherwise, there would be no limit to the abuses governments could impose in the name of people who elected the sitting representatives.  Elected representatives must use their own independent judgment when deciding if a proposal is constitutional.  If they are incapable of interpreting the constitution for themselves, an oath they take to uphold it will have little significance.

Some of the most hotly disputed issues in our country involve fundamental constitutional questions. At the state central meeting some delegates seemed to be under the impression that a plank to protect the lives of unborn children was unconstitutional because of Roe v. Wade.  If sitting Supreme Court justices have a right to believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, then certainly the representatives of Republican voters writing the state party platform would also have the right to believe Roe was wrongly decided but should be able to explain constitutionally why that is so.  If Republicans believe that Roe v. Wade is a correct interpretation of the constitution, then they should admit this and propose a constitutional amendment to let states decide how they will treat the unborn or to protect the unborn nationwide.  To simply ignore the constitution would leave no protection for the unborn, once born, from the overreach of the government.

Interestingly, members of State Central voted down the resolution affirming constitutional supremacy because of concerns over how it would impact the party’s pro-life plank. Rather than amend the resolution to unambiguously state a constitutional amendment is appropriate to advance Republican principles when needed, the committee decided to ignore constitutional law.  This points all the more to the need for us return to constitutional, limited government and reapply the lessons of history learned from when a government has powers unchecked by any authority.

Bill Paulsen is a candidate seeking the endorsement of the Republican Party for Senate District 25. The opinions expressed are his own and do not necessary reflect the opinion of the Rice County Republicans or the Republican Party of Minnesota.