FBI agents reportedly searched the House office of Rep. William Jefferson, D-LA, on Saturday evening and last Sunday in connection with a bribery and corruption investigation.

Prominent Repubican Congressional leaders, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and current Speaker Dennis Hastert, have criticized the FBI’s conduct, and raised Constitutional objections.

Some of the most respected voices on the right side of the Blogosphere, including Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, and Roger L. Simon have objected to the position taken by the Speakers.

Our good friends need to pause for breath, and reflect seriously. The principle of separation of powers matters greatly. Congressional immunity from arrest matters tremendously. These principles of Republican government are infinitely more important than the successful conviction of one more corrupt democrat congressman. History demonstrates abundantly that we can survive the culture of political corruption of the democrat party. But free government could readily be brought to an end by the domination of the several branches of the federal government by a single branch.

In recent history, Congress has been far more guilty than the Executive of arrogating unauthorized powers to itself, and attacking the Executive on the basis of trumped up and exaggerated charges. But, it is certainly possible to imagine an aggressive ultra-liberal president trying to remove Congressional opposition by false allegations of corruption. Some of us believe that the House Majority Leader was successfuly removed by false charges lodged by a partisan county prosecutor in Texas.

It is on rare occasions like this, in which political leaders take principled positions, ignoring their own party’s interests, that our faith in our system of government and its institutions is justified and confirmed.

Read the US Constitution, Article I. Section 6 which states:

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.

I think it is impossible to avoid considering Congressional offices as part of the “going to and returning from the same” aspect of Congressional attendance. And the 18th century concept of a felony would apply to what were then commonly capital crimes of violence, not to ordinary bribery and corruption.

Of course, the determination of all this may, and should be left to the wisdom of Third Branch of the Federal Government, the Supreme Court. But, in the meantime, we should be proud that Republican Legislative leaders will defend the rights of their branch of government, even in the case of its least worthy member.

On Meet the Press, yesterday, Senator Lindsay Graham, R-SC, was asked to follow up a previous comment by Tim Russert

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Graham, you have said this: “This is a defining moment for the Republican Party. … If our answer to the fastest-growing demographic in this country is that ‘We want to make felons of your grandparents, and we want to put people in jail who are helping your neighbors and people related to you,’ then we’re going to suffer mightily.”

SEN. GRAHAM: Well, at the end of the day, as you try to walk me and Charlie (Rep. Charles Norwood R-GA) through what to do with 11 million people, there’s respect for the law and there’s justice. If the law doesn’t create a just result, what good is it? I think it’s not fair for a nonviolent offense to result into upheaval that would be required, a mass deportation, or making people felons.

If you’re going to make 11 people—million people felons, you ought to put them in jail. There are young Marines in Iraq right now of Hispanic origin whose parents, maybe grandparents, are illegal. I think it would be hard for this country—unfairly hard—to say to those young Marines, “Thank you for your sacrifice. While you’re gone, we’ve made your parents and grandparents felons, and we’re going to break your family up.”

We as a nation have sat on the sidelines and watched this happen. Most Americans know for a long time, many years, that Hispanics have been coming across our border, working all throughout our economy, and it’s like “Casablanca.” Now we’re saying, “I can’t believe there’s gambling going on here.”

Respect for the law and a welcoming society, as President Bush says, are not inconsistent. Pay a fine, get punished for breaking our law, let’s don’t break families up, and in an impractical way, a way that would send the wrong signal as who America is in 2006.

MR. RUSSERT: But when you talk about the fastest-growing demographic group, you seem to be fearful of a political backlash to the Republican Party.

SEN. GRAHAM: Everything politicians do has to have a political component. What’s the practical solution to 11 million people here that have come here to work and are working? We’ve got 4.7 percent unemployment. They’re not displacing Americans because it’s the lowest unemployment in history. We’ve got 4.1 percent GDP growth, wages are growing.

My point is that as a party decides what to do with hard problems, the party needs to show its ability to recognize more than one concept. Respect for the law is an essential ingredient of the American culture. But justice also is part of the law. So I agree with the president totally. Let’s secure our borders. I agree with Charlie Norwood, my good friend. Let’s lock the borders down the best we can, but let’s don’t pass on to the next generation of politicians what to do with 11 million people. Why do we want to send every problem down the road? Let’s do it all together, comprehensively, and we’ll be rewarded at the ballot box not just by Hispanic voters. Three-fourths of the American people are ready for a comprehensive solution. Will the Republican Party deliver for three-fourths of Americans?

Lindsay Graham’s answer was perfectly correct.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania supplied a model for the rest of the nation on Tuesday, when a rebellion of state conservatives threw out a dozen deserving long-term GOP incumbents (including my own State Senator back home).

The Wall Street Journal gloats:

It is an understatement to say Pennsylvania conservatives were in a nasty mood. Despite the fact that conservative challengers were outspent on average 8 to 1 in these races, the two top senate leaders were thrown out and 13 incumbent House members bit the dust. (A few of the races are still too close to call.) The two senate leaders had been institutions of power in Harrisburg, with 56 years of incumbency between them. But so displeased were the GOP primary voters that they both could only muster slightly more than one-third of the vote. Senate majority leader Chip Brightbill got knocked out by a tire salesman dubbed “Citizen Mike” Folmer.

In a Mt. Lebanon race, 21-year-old-college student Mark Harris delivered a stunning defeat to long-time big-government incumbent Tom Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson tried to save his job by attacking Mr. Harris as too young and inexperienced to hold office, but Mr. Harris responded by sending the incumbent a copy of “Economics for Dummies.” That tactic evidently sealed Mr. Stevenson’s fate. (We can think of many Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who would benefit from that book.)

“All the incumbent Republicans who lost were complicit in the advancement of [Democratic Governor] Ed Rendell’s borrow, tax and spend agenda” notes Matt Brouillette, the president of the conservative Commonwealth Foundation. Over the past three years the GOP majorities in the House and Senate have expanded the budget by twice the inflation rate and rubber-stamped an unpopular Rendell income tax hike. The final straw for voters in this economically struggling industrial state (it ranks 49th in job creation over the past 20 years) was that, in an act of remarkable arrogance, the Republicans violated the state constitution against a midterm pay raise by voting at 2 a.m. to hike their own salaries as much as 50%. It’s clear now Pennsylvanians don’t think these raises were for a job well done.

“We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania,” conceded a dazed and now deposed Senate President Bob Jubilirer. We hope the tremors are felt by Republicans in Congress and in state capitols around the country. It seems this is a message GOP politicians have to relearn over and over: When they run as Reagan Republicans they win; when they run as big government Democrats they lose.

The New York Times quotes Captain Ed.

A lot of unreliable Congressional Republicans can get ready to start packing their bags this Fall too.

David Frum wonders in this month’s Cato Unbound lead essay, Republicans and the Flight of Opportunity, whether the collapse of the Gingrich Revolution of the 1990s and the emergence of George W. Bush has resulted in the squandering of “The fairest chance to achieve the limited-government agenda.”

Frum observes:

The state is growing again—and it is preprogrammed to carry on growing. Health spending will rise, pension spending will rise, and taxes will rise.

Now I still continue to hope that the Republican party will lean against these trends. But there’s a big difference between being the party of less government and a party of small government. It’s one thing to try to slow down opponents as they try to enact their vision of society into law. It’s a very different thing to have a vision of one’s own.

And the day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.

He notes three reasons:

First, while small-government conservatism remains an important faction within the Republican party, it is only a faction. When Republicans held the minority in Congress, the small-government faction could act as an important blocking group against big-government over-reaching—as happened for example with Hillarycare in 1994 or the Carter energy plan in 1978. But when the Republicans won their majority and the small-government faction tried to enact an affirmative agenda, suddenly we discovered that we were not strong enough to enact a program by ourselves — and had instead rendered ourselves vulnerable to blocking action by others…

..Second, I think it’s been fairly established now that the Republican party responds far more attentively to the practical needs of business constituencies than to the abstract principles of free-marketeers. Tom Delay’s “K Street Project” attempted to harness the might of the business lobbying community to Republican goals. It ended instead by subordinating the Republican party to the wishes of the business lobbying community…

..Third, for the GOP to reinvent itself as a limited-government would require it to repudiate much or maybe close to all of the domestic agenda of the Bush administration.

His ultimate conclusions are gloomy.

Today’s Wall Street Journal notes the disgraceful appropriation of the democrat party’s politics of envy by the current so-called Republican Congressional leadership. I don’t know exactly who was managing the candidate and leadership selection processes over the last several years, but it’s only too clear that the current Republican Congressional majority was built on a foundation of non-conservative opportunist politicos, who would make late unlamented Everett McKinley Dirksen and Charles A. Halleck (me-too Republican minority leaders of the early 1960s) seem like rock-ribbed examples of Conservative Republicanism. We’re facing an electoral disaster in November, and this Congressional leadership will deserve exactly what it gets.

Few things are less becoming in a political party than desperation, as Republicans are now demonstrating as they panic over rising oil and gas prices. If blaming private industry for Congress’s own energy mistakes is the best the GOP can do, no wonder its voters may sit out the November election.

Oil prices hit $75 a barrel last week, while gas has reached a national average of about $2.85 a gallon. The Republican response has been to put on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs and shout about corporate greed and market manipulation. House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fired off a letter to President Bush yesterday demanding the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department investigate “price fixing” and “gouging.” Senator Arlen Specter wants to go further and impose stricter “antitrust” laws for oil companies, as well as a “windfall profits” tax. Mr. Hastert also delighted the class warriors in the press corps by lambasting recently retired Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s pay “unconscionable.”

There’s been unconscionable behavior all right, most of it on Capitol Hill. A decent portion of the latest run-up in gas prices–and the entire cause of recent spot shortages–is the direct result of the energy bill Congress passed last summer. That self-serving legislation handed Congress’s friends in the ethanol lobby a mandate that forces drivers to use 7.5 billion gallons annually of that oxygenate by 2012.

George Will is absolutely right. Rather than have these kinds of legislators disgrace the Republican Party, it would be much better to just surrender the House back to the democrats. If people are going to vote for things like this, let’s make sure they’re wearing the right Party emblem.

If in November Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives, April 5 should be remembered as the day they demonstrated that they earned defeat. Traducing the Constitution and disgracing conservatism, they used their power for their only remaining purpose — to cling to power. Their vote to restrict freedom of speech came just as the GOP’s conservative base is coming to the conclusion that House Republicans are not worth working for in October or venturing out to vote for in November…

..The 211 Republicans who voted for big-government regulation of speech will have no principled objection. How many principled Republicans remain? Only 18. The following, who voted against restricting 527s:

Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland), Chris Chocola (Indiana), Jeff Flake (Arizona), Vito Fossella (New York), Trent Franks (Arizona), Scott Garrett (New Jersey), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Ernest Istook (Oklahoma), Walter Jones (North Carolina), Steve King (Iowa), Connie Mack (Florida), Cathy McMorris (Washington), Randy Neugebauer (Texas), Ron Paul (Texas), Mike Pence (Indiana), John Shadegg (Arizona) and Lynn Westmoreland (Georgia).

On this remnant of libertarian, limited-government conservatism a future House majority can be built. The current majority forfeited its raison d’etre April 5.

It’s very simple. Just look at this chart from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle’s admiring profile of Nancy Pelosi. Tom Delay was the House of Representative’s champion fund-raiser in the 2004 House elections, managing to donate $981,278 to Republican colleagues.

Delay’s K Street Project reversed 40 years of the Washington lobbying establishment overwhelmingly financially favoring Democrat candidates. The turn-around effectuated by Delay moved K Street from contributing 70 percent of its campaign funds to Democrats and 30 percent to Republicans to 60 percent Republican, 40 percent Democrat.

It was all about the money. Delay out fund-raised them, and worse, Delay moved lobbyist campaign contributions in the direction of the GOP. Elimination of Delay is a centerpiece of Democrat strategy for a return to power and long-term Congressional dominance.

Faced with declining poll numbers in his re-election race for the House, Tom Delay chose to step aside in order to keep his seat in Republican hands.

In 2004, we defeated democrat Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle fair and square, campaigning against him on issues and positions. In return, democrats have successfully driven the Republican House Majority Leader out of office, by calculatedly dragging out a partisan prosecution based on trumped up charges. Tom Delay’s career was not brought to an end by wrong-doing. It was brought to an end by ruthless partisanship, the manipulation of the legal system, and by successful use of the MSM propaganda machine.

Today, the left-side of the Blogosphere is celebrating, and the right-side of the blogosphere is blandly reporting Delay’s resignation as a news story, or worse, welcoming it.

Glenn Reynolds shrugs, cites Delay’s unfortunate “no fat left in the budget” line, and says “I was never much of a fan.” Wake up, people, we have suffered a serious defeat.

The left has demonstrated again, as it did with Newt Gingrich, that when a conservative Republican becomes too powerful, too influential, too effective, they can take him out.

First, the media machine goes to work on demonizing him as a personality. An endless series of photos with surly, snarly, or goofy expressions will be published, accompanied by lovingly detailed reporting of every indiscreet expression, gaffe, or unwise remark. After many months, the public naturally develops the sense that there’s this really mean, and strange in a sinister kind of way, guy, who’s somehow suddenly become terribly important in Washington, and who is a threat to everything that’s good.

Then, come the scandals. “We already knew he was nasty and strange, who would have imagined he was also a crook?”

A political career today is like a running a restaurant in the Big City. if they want to close you down, they send in the health and the building inspectors, and there are so many regulations, the building code is so large and so detailed, that is impossible to be in complete compliance, if they need to, they can always find a violation. In Delay’s case, they sent in Ronnie Earle (a leftwing activist who has used the Bolshevik base of a big university to get elected county prosecutor) to cook up a few alleged violations of arcane campaign finance regulations, which charges he had to run repeatedly past rubber-stamp grand juries before he could get one to vote an indictment.

But today, months have dragged by, that bogus Texas prosecution has remained unresolved, a new lobbying scandal has erupted, and the liberal meda has been hammering on him for what seems like forever. NowTom Delay finds himself in the position of some famous outlaw trying to win the votes of a constituency which is wondering why he isn’t already in jail. It’s common knowledge, at this point, that this Delay fellow is some kind of a crook, a nasty customer, and the kind of guy who bullies people and breaks all the rules. Who’s going to vote for Black Bart for Congress?

Delay’s a keen politician. Seeing he was losing, Tom Delay decided he would take a bullet for the Grand Old Party, and resign. The left rejoices, but you cannot find a sympathetic word for poor old Tom Delay on the right this morning. I know a fellow who has been in the Conservative Movement since its early days, who has often remarked that “the Conservative Movement has never learned to care for its wounded, or bury its dead.” Days like today suggest he may be right.

I didn’t like that Congressional budget either, but I know that Tom Delay is one of us: a Republican and a conservative. He has fought with us on the same side for decades, and we owe him something. On mere practical political grounds, we should also not be quite so cooperative, when the left undertakes one of these carefully contrived political assassinations. How many strong and competent Congressional leaders do you think we are ever going to find? If we let our adversaries destroy the reputations of each one of them in turn, and drive all of them from office, the left is certainly going to win.

New Republican ad. video

Gagbad Bob offers a must-read reflection on the feminization (and decadence) of contemporary American society:

As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father–that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they…

The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance–compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general)…

…we are seeing a collapse of the covenant between mother and father as represented in the previous maternal/paternal two-party system. It is as if we are children living in a home where mother and father no longer get along and are bickering constantly. In fact, that is probably putting it too mildly, because the current situation has gone beyond mere arguing, to the point that the masculine and feminine spheres are no longer communicating at all and are going through a very messy and acrimonious divorce. Both sides are “lawyered up” and ready to go for the throat…

..our two-party political system has now come down to is a battle between the “blenders” and the “separators.” Nothing bothers the blenders more than adult males such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or John Roberts–remember Diane Feinstein, who could not vote for Roberts for supreme court justice because she wanted to know how he felt as a man. In short, she wanted him to be more of a male-female hybrid, like herself and her constituents. Simply applying the rule of law is too masculine. We need some female “wiggle room” in the constitution.

The modern conservative movement is not just trying to preserve the traditional male element, but the traditional separation of the various spheres in general–civilized vs. barbaric, animal vs, human, adult vs. child–while the Democratic party is the party of mannish women (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Gloria Allred), feminized men (e.g., Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore), adult children (Howard Dean, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, et al), and even animal humans (PETA members who believe that killing six million chickens is morally indistinguishable from murdering six million Jews, radical environmentalists, etc.). And it is almost impossible to engage in rational debate with the adult child, who has the cynicism of a world-weary grown up but the wisdom of a child, or with the male-female hybrid, who possesses an emotionalized reason that is easily hijacked by the passions. This is not so much a disagreement between the content of thought as its very form.

This divorce and blending of the male and female produces a new kind of child, one that is neither male nor female, adult nor child. A recent case in point was brought to our attention in the pathetic figure of Joel Stein, an L.A. Times columnist who penned a now infamous piece about his moral contempt for our troops fighting in Iraq. As he put it, it is wrong to blame President Bush for their moral turpitude. Rather, “The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they’re following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.” In his magnanimity, Stein is “not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea.”

Vanderleun over at American Digest wrote an outstanding, insightful piece yesterday that absolutely eviscerates the hapless Stein. Entitled The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land, it goes way beyond the vapid and vile (if it’s possible to be both) content of Stein’s essay in order to describe a much wider and more troubling cultural phenomenon. He refers the reader to a radio interview of Stein conducted by Hugh Hewitt. I actually heard the interview in real time, and Vanderleun is exactly right that Stein’s hollow and lilting voice is the voice of the neuter.

Vanderleun describes perfectly the flat, affectless tone of so many of Stein’s generational cohort that “tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences.” Neither identifiably male or female, “there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise.” But “above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a ‘gay’ voice…. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered…. ”

Here, Vanderleun seems to be describing one of the inevitable consequences of the sexual and generational blending I referred to above. This “new voice that we hear throughout the land from so many of the young betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither…. well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness and tone deaf to duty and soul.”

Hat tip to AJStrata.

We Killed the Patriot Act! declares Harry Reid.

Right Wing News emailed more than 230 “right of center” bloggers and asked for a 1 to 5 list of candidates they would most like to see being the Republican nominee for President in 2008 and the list of candidates they’d least like to see nominated.

(Votes were weighted as follows:
1) Worth 2 points
2 or 3) Worth 1.5 points
4 or 5) Worth 1 point)

Results:

Top Most Desired:

1) Condoleeza Rice (65.5)
2) Rudy Giuliani (58.0)
3) George Allen (42.0)
4) Newt Gingrich (32.0)
5) Dick Cheney (26.0)

Top Least Desired:

1) John McCain (74.5)
2) Chuck Hagel (55.5)
3) Bill Frist (43.5)
4) George Pataki (33.0)
5) Jeb Bush (22.0)

—————————————————————-

Frankly, I do not see how anybody who claims to be conservative could consider supporting Guiliani in the remotest of circumstances. My own list would look like:

Most Desired:

1) Dick Cheney
2) Newt Gingrich
3) Is there anybody else genuinely conservative, articulate, and reasonably intelligent?

Least Desired:

1) I wouldn’t have thought of Chuck Hagel as a potential Republican choice, but if he’s on the list, he gets my number 1 vote
2) John McCain
3) Rudy Giuliani
4) George Pataki