Day: September 26, 2011

I know that admitting that Barack Obama is already the candidate of centrists’ dreams would be awkward, would make it hard to adopt the stance that both sides are equally at fault. But that is the truth.

Paul Krugman, commenting on the seemingly eternal font of “what we need is a mystical centrist third party to fix everything” pieces from the MSM.
What we have now is a right wing party, the GOP, and a center-right wing party, The Democrat. Obama ran as and is governing as a center-right technocrat… and still can’t get much done in the face of blanket GOP opposition.
Sadly, admitting to or even obliquely referencing this reality is an unforgivable heresy and likely as not to get you run out of Serious Person circles forever.
Source: The New York Times

Rick Perry: Constitutional Scholar

Q: The Constitution says that ‘the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.’ But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116 [of “Fed Up!”], you left ‘general welfare’ out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that ‘general welfare’ includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does ‘general welfare’ mean to you?

Rick Perry: I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term ‘general welfare’ in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

Q: So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by ‘general welfare’?

Rick Perry: I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

Q: But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

Rick Perry: [Silence.]

Q: OK. Moving on […]