Ramblings

 

Allan C. Brownfeld

      Allan C. Brownfeld covers Washington, D.C.

The Term “Big Government Conservative” May Be an Oxymoron, but It Is a Growing Reality

 

      There was a time, not very long ago, when people who called themselves conservatives said they were in favor of limited government, balanced budgets and the maximum possible amount of individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.

      More recently, we have seen the growing phenomenon of what have been called “big government conservatives.” Those who embody this apparent oxymoron advocate growing government power, are indifferent to deficit spending, and are quite prepared to limit individual freedom for goals they consider more important. Some observers use the term “big government conservative” and “neo-conservative” interchangeably.

      Writing in the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru points to the prevalence of this philosophy in the Bush administration:

President Bush has increased the federal role in education, imposed tariffs on steel and lumber, increased farm subsidies, okayed new federal regulations on campaign finance and corporate accounting, and expanded the national-service program President Clinton began. Since September 11, he has also raised defense spending, given new powers to law enforcement, federalized airport security, and created a new cabinet department for homeland security. No federal programs have been eliminated, nor has Bush sought any such thing. More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than under Clinton. Conservatives are, of course, inclined to tolerate, indeed cheer, most of the government efforts to wage the war on terrorism. But non-defense spending has been increasing almost as much as defense spending.

 

      Increasingly, there has been growing tension between traditional, small-government conservatives and the big-government advocates who now appear to be making policy in Washington. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) laments that,

The so-called conservative revolution of the past two decades has given us massive growth in government size, spending and regulations. Deficits are exploding and the national debt is now rising at greater than a half-trillion dollars per year. . . . Total U.S. government obligations are $43 trillion, while total net worth of U.S. households is just over $40.6 trillion. The country is broke, but no one in Washington seems to notice or care.

      The neo-conservative movement, many forget, emerged from traditional big-government liberalism. Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, notes that the neo-conservatives

. . . were conventional liberals who came to be horrified by the excesses of liberalism. The New Left shocked many with its anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism and embrace of violence to achieve its goals. At the same time, the rise of crime and welfare dependency and the deterioration of the cities forced many liberals to reassess their thinking. It was often said that a neo-conservative was a liberal who was “mugged by reality.”

      Neo-conservatives openly proclaim that they have little interest in small government, balanced budgets, and those other staples of traditional conservative thought. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, a leading neo-conservative advocate, explains what he and his movement are trying to do:

To convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.

This means making peace with the inevitability of big government, but using some conservative ideas and values to improve its operation.

      Another advocate of this approach, journalist Fred Barnes, recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that neo-conservatism is essentially big government conservatism, which means, “using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends.” He notes that neo-conservatives are “willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.” He writes approvingly that President Bush is such a big government conservative.

      Slowly, traditional conservatives are beginning to express their concern and dismay with these trends, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, provides this assessment:

The observation that people prefer strong government, or at least those things that such governments promise to deliver is hardly novel. But most conservative analysts have found this desire something to be feared rather than celebrated. Thus, Benjamin Franklin warned his fellow Founders that people do indeed tend to prefer security over liberty, which led the men who gathered to craft our Constitution to write in checks and balances designed specifically to protect the limited government they all favored. It is axiomatic that as the power of government grows, the liberty of the individual must necessarily recede. One cannot have both big (and growing) government and personal liberty. One grows at the expense of the other.

Contrasting “neo” conservatives with “traditional” conservatives, Keene declares,

. . . today’s big-government neocons . . . seem far more interested in the pursuit, acquisition, and exercise of government power than in the freedom these impulses threaten. But traditional, conservatives have always understood the true nature of government and the will to power that beats at its core. True conservatives always have viewed government with a profound skepticism and sought to limit its reach, whereas the neocon impulse seems to be the same as that which animates liberalism.

      In an interesting development, conservative advocacy groups and their liberal counterparts are finding common ground in defending constitutional rights against what they perceive as the dangers of the USA Patriot Act.

      The American Conservative Union (ACU), for example, has joined with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to protest many provisions of the Patriot Act and a possible follow-up law, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, dubbed Patriot II. Both groups argue that in times of crisis the U.S. government tends to normal lowering constitutional safeguards against intrusions by the government to protect U.S. citizens. Of special concern to both groups the “delayed notice provision” also known as “sneak and peek.” The Patriot Act grants government officials the power to conduct searches of a suspect’s home without prior notice, as would typically be required. This, they declare, puts at risk the constitutional guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizure.

      Rep. C. L. Otter (R-Idaho) is leading an effort in Congress to curtail the Patriot Act. Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) says that Congress may have to consider scaling back parts of the law. When Attorney General John Ashcroft traveled to Idaho as part of his tour to gain support for the Patriot Act, he found widespread opposition in that conservative state. Rep. Charles Eberle, a conservative member of the Idaho State Senate, said:

Ashcroft wants more power. What a lot of us in Idaho are saying is, “Let’s not get rid of the checks and balances.” . . . People out here in the West are used to taking care of themselves. We don’t like the government intruding on our constitutional rights!

      The Founding Fathers would not be surprised to see politicians who call themselves conservatives revert to policies that they opposed once they have achieved power. Thomas Jefferson wrote that,

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. . . . One of the most profound preferences in human nature is for satisfying one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion, for appropriating wealth produced by the labor of others, rather than producing it by one’s own labor . . . the stronger and more centralized the government, the safer would be the guarantee of such monopolies; in other words, the stronger the government, the weaker the producer, the less consideration need be given him and the more might be taken away from him.

      From the beginning of the Republic perceptive men such as John Calhoun predicted that government would inevitably grow, that those in power would always advocate a “broad” use of power and those out of power would always argue for a “narrow” use of power, and that no one would ever turn back governmental authority which has once been assumed.

      Instead of rolling back government, as conservatives urge when out of power, men who call themselves conservatives, once in power, preside over government expansion. Those who believe in the principles the politicians previously espoused find themselves increasingly alienated. Today, political leaders who call themselves conservative openly proclaim that deficit spending is no problem and that the growth of government power is benevolent as long as they are in charge.

      Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute points out that federal spending has increased at 13.5 percent in the first three years of the Bush administration. Federal spending has risen from 18.4 percent of national income in 2000 to 19.9 percent today. Combine these spending increases with huge tax cuts and we can see mounting deficits into the future.

      In his first two years in office, Ronald Reagan cut non-defense spending sharply and vetoed 22 spending bills in his first three years. President Bush has increased non-defense spending—and not yet vetoed a single spending bill.

      Clearly, the era of big government conservatism is now with us. What path will traditional conservatives, who continue to believe in the older ideas of limited government and balanced budgets, now take? That remains to be seen.

The Time Has Come to Secure America’s Weakly Defended and Porous Borders

      Whatever one thinks about immigration and how many men and women should be admitted to the U.S. each year, there should be some agreement with regard to the need for secure borders in this age of terrorism.

      In December, as warnings about terrorism grow, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, America’s first line of defense along the expansive borders with Canada and Mexico, upgraded security.

      The fact is—despite recent efforts to correct past shortcomings—that our borders are largely defenseless. On any given day, 10,000 illegal aliens will cross the U.S.-Mexican border. About one in three will be caught and expelled. Among those who succeed, nearly half will become permanent U.S. residents. In addition to the humans being smuggled across the border, drugs are smuggled as well. An estimated 80 percent of the cocaine and 50 percent of the heroin consumed throughout the U.S. will enter through the U.S.-Mexican border.

      The U.S.-Canadian border is perhaps even more vulnerable. Participants in the World Trade Center bombing nine years ago appeared to have used Canadian immigration papers to gain access to the U.S. Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested by U.S. customs officials in December 1999 with a carload of explosives, and convicted, had tried to enter Washington State by a ferry from Victoria, British Columbia.

      Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) says:

Osama bin Laden could shave off his beard, land in Canada, call himself “Omar the Tentmaker” come in and—without identification—be allowed into Canada.

Once in Canada, crossing the border to the U.S. is no problem.

      More than 45 million trucks and cars will cross this year from Canada into the U.S., any one of which could be carrying terrorists, concealing weapons of mass destruction, or transporting illicit drugs. These vehicles, along with 80 million people, will be greeted by an undermanned force of customs and immigration inspectors at 150 ports of entry along the world’s longest undefended international boundary and a thinly stretched line of Border Patrol Agents. “The people up here were pretty much forgotten over the years, with most of the resources going to the southern border,” said Chief Ronald J. Henley, who heads the Border Patrol’s Blaine, Washington, Sector.

      Controlling the 4,121-mile northern border is particularly difficult because neither the U.S. nor Canada has wanted security enhancements to jeopardize the flow of trade. The result, according to the newly formed Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is that illegal aliens from as many as 60 nations—including China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria and Yemen—are caught every year trying to sneak into the U.S.

      We know that a global network of international terrorists, including members of al Qaeda, has established “sleeper cells” throughout Canada. So little attention has been paid to the U.S.-Canada border, the Washington Times recently found, that

. . . there is no information or even an estimate by U.S. officials on how many illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually from Canada or how frequently the border is breached by drug smugglers. But it happens, the numbers are growing . . .

      Attorney General John Ashcroft has called the U.S.-Canada border “a soft spot” for terrorism, and since the September 11 attacks, there has been an effort to transform the northern border from a vulnerability into a hardened line of defense. It is, however, a complicated task, made increasingly difficult by longstanding lack of manpower and technology along the border and the absence of effective efforts to track down illegal aliens in the U.S. and a lax immigration policy in Canada.

      Border Patrol Senior Agent Larry D. Shields, who works in the Havre, Montana, Sector, said most agents think no one actively is seeking illegal aliens in the country, and the longer they remain—with no concern about being caught—the bolder they will become.

      “Once they got by the nation’s thin green line of Border Patrol Agents or through the country’s ports of entry, they’ve got nothing to worry about,” Shields said. “And we’re talking about intruders who could have come here to find a job, commit a crime, or carry out an act of terrorism.”

      In 2002, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said that an effective interior-enforcement strategy was “an essential complement” to gaining control of the border, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) faced “significant challenges” in properly staffing its enforcement program and in “establishing clear and consistent guidance” to those assigned to do the job.

      The GAO said that the potential pool of removable criminal aliens numbered in the hundreds of thousands and that alien smuggling had become more “sophisticated, complex, organized and flexible.” Critics point out that 300,000 aliens in the U.S.—6,000 from countries that support terrorism—have been ordered deported but have yet to be processed or located.

      Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) testified before Congress that a “glaring failure” leading to September 11 was the lack of an effective interior-enforcement program. He said that because 2,000 agents have been assigned to look for as many as 12 million illegal aliens, there is “virtually no possibility that foreigners residing illegally in this country will be detected, apprehended or removed.”

      The individuals involved in the September 11 attacks and our lax immigration laws and border enforcement are clearly linked. Shortly after the attacks, the New York Times editorially noted that,

The ease with which the hijackers took advantage of this country’s lax enforcement of immigration laws is indeed alarming. At least two of the terrorists were among the estimated four million foreigners who have stayed in the country after their visas expired. A third obtained a student visa to attend a Berlitz language course in California, but never even showed up at the institute. This all sounds distressingly familiar. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Americans were shocked to learn that one Palestinian implicated in the attack had stayed in the country on a student visa long after he dropped out of school. Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted in a subsequent terrorist plot, was able to enter the U.S. in 1990 despite being on a government list of undesirables.

      The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, passed by Congress and signed by the president in 2002, mandated 22 benchmarks to improve the nation’s tracking of aliens. In December, a report by the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA Education and Research Foundation, found that the U.S. Government met nine of the deadlines but 13 were either not met on time or have yet to be implemented.

      The report said:

The government still is not checking the names of all aliens from “visa waiver” countries against terrorist watch lists at ports of entry, though it was required to do so immediately upon enactment of the visa tracking law.

      Checking the names of immigrants coming from the 27 countries with visa waivers against the watch list is a critical aspect of internal homeland security, said Steven A. Camarota of the center,

. . . because two suspected terrorists who have been apprehended—Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid—came by way of France and England, two of the countries on the [visa-waiver] list.

      Mr. Camarota said that many of the failures can be attributed to the Bush administration’s refusal to spend money on new programs. Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) said,

The White House has insisted on implementing a massive government reorganization without providing the resources to finance it. . . . The president made a commitment to the American people when he signed the visa tracking bill into law. He should live up to his commitment by investing the funds necessary to implement it.

      In addition to its criticisms, the report also highlights the Department of Homeland Security’s success in implementing the foreign exchange student visa tracking system. Bill Strassberger, spokesperson for the department, said that,

This was very important because we can now track when students arrive if they showed up and we can send our investigators to pick that person up, and we have done that.

      Our lax border security is a long-standing, bi-partisan failure. Too many pressure groups—those representing ethnic groups who are among the illegal immigrants as well as business organizations that profit from cheap, illegal alien workers—have influenced such laxity. An important byproduct of these efforts has been to make us increasingly vulnerable to terrorists.

      Yet even today, there is pressure to avoid taking the necessary steps to make our borders safe and secure. Rep. Tancredo, who is chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, notes that,

The pressure applied from the Democrats is to ease restrictions on immigration to increase the numbers who eventually become votes for the Democratic Party. On our side, you have that libertarian streak that runs through a lot of people. There’s the issue of labor and whether our business interests are such that the Republican Party would consider reducing the flow of cheap labor. There are the relations with Mexico that the administration so desires to improve—that will help Vicente Fox remain in power. The truth is, there are lots of folks in the administration and here in Congress who see it as just a region, not two nations. They think we will eliminate the border for all intents and purposes.

      If ever there was a time to place partisan considerations of all kinds aside and work to make the nation safe from terrorists, that time is now. Hopefully, it will not take another serious attack before we make sure that our actions equal our rhetoric when it comes to border security.

The Ill-advised Campaign to Release Convicted Spy Jonathan Pollard

      Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life imprisonment for spying for Israel in 1987, appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C. in September as his attorneys sought access to a secret report used in a judge’s decision in sentencing.

      Eliot Lauer, one of Pollard’s attorneys, said that the government denied 20 pages of a memorandum by then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger because, it claimed, unauthorized disclosure of the secrets there might cause grave damage to U.S. national security. Access to the memo was denied on earlier requests in 1990, 2000 and 2001.

      Steven Pelak, an assistant U.S. attorney, said at the hearing that earlier rulings denying Pollard access to the memo should stand: “At this time, the defense has simply not shown the need to know.”

      A number of Jewish groups and leaders, as well as some politicians, have spoken out in behalf of Pollard’s release. Seymour Reich, a former chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations who was in the courtroom representing the conference’s Pollard committee, said, “It’s time for the president to release Pollard on humanitarian grounds. Eighteen years enough time.” Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Weisenthal Center, hailed the hearing as “a major achievement for Pollard’s attorneys.”

      The campaign in Pollard’s behalf has been vocal for some time. In April, 2001 New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Alan Hevesi, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Past President Seymour Reich, and National Council of Young Israel Executive Vice President Pesach Lerner joined together in a letter to the president asking that he free Pollard. The letter said that “compelling reasons exist that warrant Mr. Pollard’s immediate release” and argues that Pollard’s sentence is “grossly disproportionate to the sentences of others charged with similar crimes.”

      It is difficult to understand why so many organizations, particularly religious groups, and individuals have dedicated themselves to support for Jonathan Pollard, who for a year and a half supplied Israel with a steady flow of top-secret U.S. information, one of the greatest breaches of U.S. classified material ever perpetrated. Author Seymour Hersh claimed that Pollard passed on to Israel intelligence about nuclear targeting and that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir personally decided to pass on some of the information to the Soviet Union, at the time our major adversary.

      In 1998, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister, requested clemency for Pollard during U.S.-brokered Middle East peace talks at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland. President Clinton agreed to review the case but after an outcry from leaders of the U.S. intelligence community decided to take no action.

 

      In a letter to Clinton, Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), then chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and 58 of his colleagues opposed clemency for Pollard. Senator Shelby declared:

Mr. Pollard is a convicted spy who put our national security at risk and endangered the lives of our intelligence officers. There are not terms strong enough to express my belief that Mr. Pollard should serve every minute of his sentence, and President Clinton should resist any temptation to cave in to political pressure.

      Even some who urge Pollard’s release, reject the notion that this is, somehow, a “Jewish” issue. Writing in the widely read Jewish weekly, The Forward, Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, states that,

It is clear by now, as it should have been from the beginning, that the Pollard case is not a Jewish communal issue. Protracted efforts to uncover anti-Semitism in the case record have yielded nothing. Pollard was not given a draconian, disproportionate sentence for reasons of ethnic prejudice. He received a life sentence, in violation of a plea agreement in which the government had promised not to seek the maximum, primarily because of his own provocative conduct in the period between arrest and sentencing. That behavior, combined with government discoveries regarding the import of the classified information he compromised, deeply unnerved the judge, prosecutors, and even his own defense lawyers.

      Though Black believes that Pollard should now be released, he argues that,

It would help if Pollard supporters stopped portraying their movement as a Jewish case. It is not. It is a constitutional justice issue. Unfortunately, the “Free Pollard” movement has promoted his case as a Jewish issue, continually pressuring and ridiculing Israeli and American Jewish leaders seeking to define the leaders’ legitimacy by their devotion to the Pollard cause. Those efforts should be ignored . . .

      Declaring that Pollard should never be freed, columnist Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer and the author of Beyond Terrors: Strategy In a Changing World, wrote in The New York Post:

Spying is spying. Treason is treason. Such acts must be punished and deterred, without exception. It doesn’t matter if the recipient of the information is North Korea, Israel, or even Canada. Every American citizen’s first and incontrovertible loyalty must be to the United States. Many of us have loyalties and even family ties abroad. Every country in the world is represented in America. But while we may celebrate our various heritages, no American may ever place the welfare of another state or of a religious group or ethnicity above his or her obligation to our constitution and national security.

      Peters notes that,

Perhaps the saddest—and most dangerous aspect of the Pollard case is that demands for his release are an enormous gift to anti-Semites and Israel-haters. Pollard, who has managed to recast himself as a champion of Israel, was no such thing. He was as willing to sell secrets to China or to various Muslim states as he was to pass information to Israel. His hallmark was greed, not courage. . . . As a determined supporter of Israel, it frustrates me no end to hear Jewish Americans, defend this mercenary creature. I beg you, stop for a moment. Ask yourself how this looks to your fellow countrymen. He betrayed an elementary trust. You appear to condone it, implying that Israel should get a pass when it comes to espionage.

      Pollard, Peters concludes,

. . . did grave damage to American national security. . . . And Israeli intelligence, too clever for its own good, allowed some of the information to end up in Soviet hands. When anyone argues for Pollard’s release, they are saying that the loss of secrets even to the Soviet Union was, ultimately, a pardonable matter. . . . Pollard needs to spend next year in prison, not in Jerusalem.

      Joseph DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Pollard, said that Pollard

. . . got the sentence he deserved. . . . If Pollard wants to be released from prison, he should do what he was entitled to do in 1996, which is apply for parole. That he has never done. Mr. Pollard has purposely never applied for parole because he wants this to remain a political matter.

      During Pollard’s September appearance in court, The Washington Post editorially declared that,

Mr. Pollard’s sentence is not the most severe among people accused of espionage or related crimes. The government sought the death penalty against Brian Regan, for example, despite charging him with only attempting to spy—and eventually netted a life sentence. Therese Marie Squillacote and her husband, Kurt Alan Stand, received 21- and 17-year sentences respectively, though they were never even alleged to have successfully passed classified information to any foreign power. By contrast, Mr. Pollard, over a period of more than a year, compromised highly sensitive information. The government no doubt responded aggressively. But that is the risk you take when you become a spy. As Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court wrote in 1992 for himself and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—then a judge on the court—Mr. Pollard has never denied that he is guilty of the crimes for which he is imprisoned. Nor is there any allegation that his guilty plea was induced by the promise of a specific sentence that he subsequently did not receive. Under such circumstances, it cannot be said that justice completely miscarried.

      What are the motives of those engaged in the continuing campaign in Pollard’s behalf? These same individuals and groups are not known to be crusading against any other alleged miscarriage of justice. This ill-advised effort should come to an end. If Jonathan Pollard has a case to be made for his release, he and his lawyers should be the ones to make it.     Ω