February 8, 2012
Mr. Chairman:
This bill presents us with a simple question: “It is possible – just possible – that from time to time Congress has passed a spending bill or two that ought to have had greater scrutiny?” The answer to this question might elude some members of the House, but I assure them it is self-evident to everybody else.
A country whose finances are as far out of control as ours suffers not from too many checks and balances on spending, but from too few.
Opponents discuss this bill as if it were a new and radical idea. The fact is, many states operate with a genuine line item veto and have for generations.
For those states, it has been an important tool to control their spending, and those provisions are far more stringent than what is proposed here.
In conformance with our Constitution, this bill simply invites the President to call to Congress’s attention those spending items he recommends that we give additional thought to and to put a six-week hold on those funds while we do so.
In fact, from 1801 until 1974, the President had the recognized authority to impound excess spending indefinitely – a legitimate executive function first asserted by President Thomas Jefferson. The Budget Act of 1974 stripped the executive of this vital check on Congressional excess.
I would prefer to see us restore that fiscal safeguard, or better still, amend the Constitution to provide the President an actual line item veto.
But let’s at least set up a process so the President can warn us when he believes we have appropriated more money than he needs to execute the laws that we pass.
This bill is frankly a mouse when we need a lion. The fact that it has produced shrieks of horror from some quarters of the House is an exact measure of the extent and nature of our problem.
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House floor remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock
February 8, 2012
A family that excludes from its budget the mortgage payments it knows it must make is deluding itself and sabotaging its own finances. That’s precisely what the federal government is doing right now with respect to billions of dollars of liabilities because of its ill-fated sponsorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This bill takes a small step toward restoring honest and accurate accounting to our government’s finances by requiring that the enormous liabilities incurred by Fannie and Freddie be accounted for in the federal budget process using the same accounting standards for loans that we already impose on mortgage lenders.
I wish this bill abolished Fannie and Freddie outright. I wish it restored the days when banks or borrowers who made bad decisions took responsibility for them, and didn’t demand that their neighbors pay for their mistakes.
But can’t we at least agree that the public has a right to expect that the costs of this folly are honestly accounted for in the nation’s budget?
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Opening Statement by Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock
Water and Power Subcommittee Hearing: "Water for Our Future and Job Creation: Examining Regulatory and Bureaucratic Barriers to New Surface Storage Infrastructure"
February 7, 2012
The subcommittee on Water and Power meets today to consider what steps need to be taken to remove government-imposed impediments to the construction of new dams and reservoirs.
The need for action can be summarized quite succinctly: The Bureau of Reclamation has built over 600 dams and reservoirs in the last century, but two-thirds of them were built in the first 60 years of its existence – more than 50 years ago. With one exception, Reclamation has not built any major dams or reservoirs in the last generation.
And now, under this administration, the Bureau of Reclamation is actually moving to tear down perfectly good dams to placate the most extreme elements of the environmental left.
This shift of purpose is fast becoming a direct and imminent threat not only to the prosperity of the west, but to our very ability to support our population. For example, California’s 37 million people now rely on a water system built to support a population of just 22 million.
Last year, this subcommittee focused on the release or diversion of billions of gallons of desperately needed water to meet absurd environmental regulations.
But that’s just part of the man-made drought that is gripping the west. The other part is the panoply of federal regulations that makes the construction of new storage cost prohibitive.
Last year, California had one of the wettest winters on record. So far this year, it has had one of the driest. Last year, billions of gallons of water had to be released simply because we had no place to store that surplus water. If the drought continues for another year, we will rue the decisions that denied us the additional storage capacity that would have saved that water.
As we will hear, major projects have been hamstrung because of litigation and regulatory excesses stemming from 1970’s era legislation. Three years ago, this subcommittee travelled to Colorado which was in the grips of a chronic water shortage. There, we learned that if the Two-Forks project had not been blocked in this manner, they would have had no water shortage.
Apologists for the status quo tell us that dams are too expensive. They blissfully ignore the fact that it is precisely these excessive regulations – having nothing to do with dam safety – that have needlessly and artificially driven up the cost.
It is true that dams impede the migration of certain species of fish – a problem that is easily and economically addressed through down-stream fish hatcheries. Yet hatchery fish are often not included in ESA population counts despite the fact there is no more genetic difference between hatchery fish and fish born in the wild than there is between a baby born at the hospital and a baby born at home.
Indeed, it was the construction of dams that made possible the year-round cold-water flows so conducive to thriving fish populations. The dams tamed the environmentally devastating cycle of floods and droughts that once plagued these habitats.
Nor will conservation measures such as recycling and rationing address our needs. As we will hear, there are limits to what conservation alone can do to address this shortage, and handing out taxpayer grants for toilet exchanges and rock gardens isn’t going meet the next generation’s needs. Title 16 recycling legislation in the last Congress cost twice as much as imported water to the same regions.
Conservation is what you do to manage a shortage. It is the government’s responsibility to alleviate that shortage. And that means that this generation must summon the common sense and resolve that the greatest generation used to build the infrastructure that we still rely upon today.
That means returning to the sound principles of finance that produced this infrastructure: hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis and restoring the beneficiary pays principle that the actual users of these projects pay for them in proportion to their use.
We have squandered enormous amounts of money and precious time proving that the policies of the 1970’s do not work, and we now face devastating water shortages as the cost of that lesson. It was a generation whose folly resembles Edward Gibbon’s description of “Decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder.” Those days need to end now.
It is time to open a new chapter in the history of the West: that a new generation recovered and restored the vision of abundance of its forbearers and finished the job described by the founder of the Bureau of Reclamation as “making the desert bloom.”
The simple question now before us is whether it is better for Congress to have more information or less information when it is deliberating on matters that directly affect the economy of this nation.
The answer should be self-evident, but apparently, some members of this house prefer blissful ignorance than having to go to the fuss and bother of actually assessing the full ramifications of the policies they are enacting. (That explains a lot about some of the decisions they’ve made in recent years).
The economy is a dynamic and fast-changing thing, responding rapidly to every tax and regulation imposed by government and every dollar that changes hands in markets.
Yet, the rules under which the Congressional Budget Office operates severely constrain its ability to take this obvious reality into account in the information that it provides us.
This measure doesn’t presume to tell the CBO how to do its job or what formulae to use in its analysis. It doesn’t even change the outmoded static modeling it uses to score the fiscal impact of measures before us.
All that it says is, “give us the complete picture.” If a proposal is going to affect the economy significantly – for good or ill – tell us. Tell us what you think and show us why you think so.
Patrick Henry summed up this bill perfectly when he said, “For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.”
M. Speaker:
Today I have introduced a bill to name the United States Post Office in Granite Bay, California in honor of United States Marine Corps Private First Class Victor Dew. This young man was only 20 years old when he left his family and friends in late September of 2010 for Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Just three weeks later, on October 13th, Private Dew was killed in action when his convoy was ambushed.
Victor grew up dreaming of becoming a Marine. He loved military history and was fully aware of the mortal dangers he would face. Yet, when he was offered a posting to a ceremonial position stateside, he turned it down. He believed his duty and destiny was to keep the fight away from our shores; away from his family and his country; and so he chose combat even when he had been offered safe and honorable service at home.
What did he sacrifice to give our country a little more security and to give another country a fleeting chance of redemption? He had everything in the world to live for. He was engaged to be married to a devoted young lady named Courtney Gold. Courtney said, “We had life in the grasp of our hands and we were ready to take on the world.” They would have.
She had already picked out her wedding dress. There’s a picture of her wearing that dress. It is in Victor’s casket.
Victor was one of those sunny personalities who lifted the spirits of everyone around him. That’s the recurring theme in the recollections of everyone who knew him – they’d be feeling down and Victor would lift them up. I didn’t know him, but I think I caught a glimpse of him in his little brother, Kyle. At the funeral reception last year, I found Kyle sitting at a table with his friends. When I offered him my condolences, one of his friends said, “We came to cheer him up and instead he’s been cheering us up.”
Victor lives on in the lives of those he touched – and he touched quite a few. He is remembered in his community as a faithful friend and an inspiring teacher – before he enlisted he had already become a popular martial arts instructor at a local dojo. Some of his students – some of them a lot older than he – came to his service.
It has now been over a year since he returned to Granite Bay. In that year, he would have celebrated his 21st birthday; he would have returned safely home with his unit; he would have been married. And as Courtney said, he would have taken on the world.
Instead he rests in an honored grave. His family does what every Gold Star family does – they cope with their grief through a mixture of fond memories, faith, and most of all, of pride for the life of their son.
There are many graves in that cemetery, etched with lifetimes much longer than the 20 years recorded on Victor’s. But none of them comes close to his in this most important respect: what they did with those years.
The most iconic work of art on the Titanic was a great carving that depicted “honor” and “glory” crowning time. Victor Dew’s time may have been short in this world but he crowned that time with honor and glory that the rest of us can only marvel at.
Every morning since he was 12 years old, Victor Dew awoke under a Marine Corps Banner over his bed emblazoned with the words, “Semper Fidelis.” In his life, we can see the full measure of those words.
Every day in this majestic Capitol, we walk in the footsteps of the giants of our nation’s history. The oratory of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster still echoes through these halls. At arm’s reach of where I stand at this moment once spoke Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, Douglas MacArthur and Winston Churchill. And yet in their long and illustrious lives, not one could claim to have sacrificed more for his country than these young men like Victor Dew.
Lincoln was right, that no meager words of ours can add or detract from their deeds. But Shakespeare was also right, that their story should the good man teach his son.
For that reason, I am proud to join a unanimous delegation from California in proposing that the Post Office in the town where Victor Dew lived, and loved and returned as a fallen hero, be named in his honor.
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One did this past week with the announcement that supporters of the so-called “Stop On-Line Piracy Act” and the “Protect Intellectual Property Act” have indefinitely postponed their measures after an unprecedented protest across the Internet.
SOPA and PIPA pose a crippling danger to the Internet because they use the legitimate concern over copy-right infringement as an excuse for government to intrude upon and regulate the very essence of the Internet – the unrestricted and absolutely free association that links site to site, providing infinite pathways for commerce, discourse and learning.
It is not the Internet per se that has set the stage for the next quantum leap in human knowledge and advancement – but rather the free association at the core of the Internet. And this is precisely what SOPA and PIPA directly threaten.
But as dangerous as this concept is to the Internet, it pales in comparison to the danger it poses to our fundamental freedoms as Americans.
It is true that rogue web sites operating from off-shore havens, are stealing intellectual property and then selling it.
We already have very good laws against that, as evidenced by the arrest yesterday of Mr. Kim Schmitz and his associates in New Zealand, who now stand accused of operating one of the biggest of these rogue sites.
Theft of intellectual property is fundamentally no different than the theft of any other kind of property. It should be taken no less seriously than the thefts perpetrated by the likes of Bernie Madoff, John Dellinger or Willie Sutton.
It is no different and it should be treated no differently. In every such case, it is the individual who commits the theft and the individual who is culpable and accountable to the law. And it is the individual who is accorded the right of due process, including the presumption of innocence, while he stands accused.
This is what SOPA and PIPA destroy. Upon mere accusation, these measures would allow the government to shut down web sites, ruin honest businesses, impound property, disrupt legitimate speech and dragoon innocent third parties into enforcing laws that may or may not have been broken.
When property is stolen, we hold accountable the individuals who knowingly commit the act, and place the burden of proof on the accuser. The accuser must demonstrate to the satisfaction of a jury that the defendant stole property or that he received property that he knew was stolen.
Yes, it is a ponderous system. Yes, it means you actually have to provide evidence. Yes, it means you have to convince a jury. Yes, it means we can’t catch and successfully prosecute every criminal. But the experience of mankind over the centuries has proven that this is the best possible way to protect the innocent and to protect our freedom while also punishing the guilty. In part, we punish the guilty to discourage others we might not be able to punish.
And as the arrests yesterday in New Zealand prove, it works. Let Mr. Schmitz and his confederates be extradited and let them have their day in court. Let evidence be presented. Let a jury be convinced of that evidence. And if convicted of one of the greatest thefts in human history, let us mete out the full measure of punishment provided by the law to stand as a fearsome example to others.
That doesn’t and won’t stop all theft and it isn’t perfect. But to replace it with one where mere accusation can bring punishment or inflict ruinous costs upon innocent third parties, would introduce a despotic and destructive concept that is antithetical to the ancient rights that our government was formed to protect.
The developments of the last few weeks have saved the Internet and saved these fundamental principles – at least for now. But Jefferson was right that the natural order is for government to grow at the expense of liberty. That is why we have our Constitution.
And to the protection of that Constitution, the Internet has now empowered its rightful owners, “We, the People,” to defend it more effectively than ever before.
Which leads me, Madam Speaker, to conclude that because of the events of this past week, we will see many more victories for freedom in the days and years ahead.
"Freedom and the Internet, Victorious"
House Chamber remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock
January 23, 2012
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Both versions of this bill impose a permanent new tax on every mortgage backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
To pay for an additional two months of tax relief under the Senate version or 12 months under the House version, more than $3,000 of new taxes will be imposed on every $150,000 mortgage backed by Fannie or Freddie.
A family taking out a $250,000 mortgage will pay $5,000 more in taxes – directly and solely because of this bill – hidden in their future mortgage payments.
This is atrocious public policy. It shifts the burden for this bill to future homebuyers, kicks the housing market when it’s already down, makes it that much more expensive for home buyers to re-enter that market, and adds to the pressures that have chronically depressed everyone’s home values.
That’s the reason that both the Senate and the House versions need to go back for major revision.
House Chamber remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock, Washington, D.C. December 20, 2011.
It’s an infra-marginal tax cut, meaning that it doesn’t change economic incentives and therefore it doesn’t produce lasting economic growth. But it does provide great relief to working families, allowing them to keep more of their earnings at a time of declining incomes, shriveling assets and rising prices, and it should be extended.
But it must be extended responsibly to avoid doing further damage either to the economy or to the Social Security system.
That means we have to make up the lost revenue.
The Democrats have said, “No problem, tax the rich.” They say that a lot. The problem is that the tax increases they propose are marginal tax increases – precisely the kind of tax increase that does enormous damage to the overall economy. Remember, more than half of net small business income would be subject to their latest proposal – at precisely the moment when we’re depending on those same small businesses to create 2/3 of the new jobs that our people desperately need.
The measure that passed out of this House this week also does far more harm than good.
The House added $167 billion more to this year’s already crushing deficit, mostly to pay for the payroll tax cut, purporting to repay one year’s tax relief over the next ten years.
How does it do that? In part, it tacks on additional fees to mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This shifts the burden to home buyers, who will end up paying far more in new taxes (that will now be hidden in their mortgages) than they will get back from the tax cut.
True, under the House version, the average family will save $1,000 in payroll taxes, but if that family takes out a $150,000 mortgage in the next ten years backed by Fannie or Freddie, they’ll end up paying an extra $3,000 as a result of the House bill. That’s a $1,000 tax cut this year for $3,000 in additional mortgage payments.
The House version kicks the housing market when it’s already down, making it that much more expensive for home buyers to re-enter that market, and adding to the pressures that have chronically depressed home values.
At the same time, the House would turn Fannie and Freddie into tax collectors for the general fund. If this version is enacted, we will have constructed a cash machine for government with an adjustable knob. Given the insatiable appetite of this government, the odds are far greater that that knob will be turned up and not down in coming years.
Ironically, one of the reasons to continue the payroll tax cut is because of shrinking family assets – mainly the value of their homes. The House version adds to the downward pressure on their home values while telling them we’re doing them a favor. Some favor.
Fortunately, there is a way to extend the payroll tax cut, protect the Social Security system AND avoid doing further damage to the economy, and that is the measure offered by Mr. Landry of Louisiana, H.R. 3551. That bill was given short shrift in the House last week, and that’s a shame.
Mr. Landry’s bill would give all Americans the choice to receive the year of tax relief in exchange for delaying their retirement by a month. According to the Social Security Chief Actuary, this would pay for itself.
It would give every family in America the choice of deciding for itself whether the benefits of the tax cut are worth the cost of working a month longer. It would have provided tax relief for those families that need it without doing harm to the Social Security system that the tax supports --- without shifting the burden to pay for it to homebuyers, as the House version does, or to job creators as the Senate plan would have done.
It is not too late to fix this problem the right way, and I would strongly urge the House to take this measure more seriously in the closing days of this session.
House Chamber, remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock. Washington, D.C. December 15, 2011.
This section specifically affirms that the President has the authority to deny due process to any American it charges with “substantially supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban or any ‘associated forces’” – whatever that means.
Would “substantial support” of an “associated force,” mean linking a web-site to a web-site that links to a web-site affiliated with al-Qaeda? We don’t know. The question is, “do we really want to find out?”
We’re told not to worry – that the bill explicitly states that nothing in it shall alter existing law.
But wait. There is no existing law that gives the President the power to ignore the Bill of Rights and detain Americans without due process. There is only an assertion by the last two presidents that this power is inherent in an open-ended and ill-defined war on terrorism. But it is a power not granted by any act of Congress. At least, not until now.
What this bill says is, “What Presidents have only asserted, Congress now affirms in statute.”
We’re told that this merely pushes the question to the Supreme Court to decide if indefinite detainment is compatible with any remaining vestige of the Bill of Rights.
That’s a good point, IF the Court were the sole guardian of the Constitution. But it is not. If it were, there would be no reason to require every member of Congress to swear to preserve, protect, and defend that Constitution.
We are also its guardians.
And today, we who have sworn fealty to that Constitution sit to consider a bill that affirms a power contained in no law and that has the full potential to crack the very foundation of American liberty.
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House Floor Remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock
Last year, Congress voted for a payroll tax cut that averages roughly $1,000 for every working family in America.
As warned, it failed to stimulate economic growth and it accelerated the collapse of the Social Security system. But as promised, it threw every working family a vital lifeline in tough economic times.
We need to meet three conflicting objectives: we need to continue the payroll tax cut; we need to stimulate real economic growth and we need to avoid doing further damage to the Social Security system.
But first, we need to understand that not all tax cuts stimulate lasting economic growth. Cutting marginal tax rates does so because this changes the incentives that individuals respond to. Cutting infra-marginal tax rates – such as the payroll tax – does not.
But cutting the payroll tax did make a huge difference in the ability of working families to make ends meet in a time of declining family incomes and inexorably rising prices. To restore that tax today, given the economic pressures on working families, is simply unthinkable.
Yet at the same time, the payroll tax is what supports the Social Security system. Last year, that system entered a state of permanent deficit – and this condition will worsen until the Social Security system bankrupts in 2036. At that moment, every retiree will suffer a sudden and permanent drop in benefits of roughly 25 percent.
Further reducing revenues into the system will hasten that day of reckoning. Just as bad, in the intervening time the expanding Social Security deficit will heap growing burdens on the nation’s already staggering public debt.
Some have proposed paying for the infra-marginal payroll tax cut that doesn’t help the economy, with a marginal tax hike that actually harms the economy. Surely we can do better than that.
Actually, Congressman Landry of Louisiana has done better, and I commend his proposal to the attention of the House. It avoids damaging the Social Security fund while at the same time offers families continued relief from crushing payroll taxes.
His measure, HR 3551, the Social Security Preservation through Individual Choice Enhancement (or SSPICE) Act, constitutes the most realistic and innovative approach to these twin and related crises that has yet been placed before Congress, by linking the cost of Social Security to the benefits that it provides.
HR 3551 would give every American the choice of paying a lower payroll tax each year in exchange for working a month longer. That’s all it would take to pay for itself: a month’s delay in retirement for a year’s worth of tax relief.
For the first time, individuals can make this choice to pay a lower tax based on their own circumstances, without further undermining the fiscal integrity of the Social Security system or the financial security of those relying on that system.
For the first time, costs and benefits would be linked in a manner that all consumers can understand and judge for themselves based upon their own circumstances.
In a difficult year like this, I think most families would opt to save the extra tax and work the extra month. In better times ahead, they may chose to pay the extra tax to maintain their retirement schedule. But it will be their choice, based on their needs, their plans, and their best judgment – and not the government’s.
And by linking costs with benefits, it will protect the long-term actuarial soundness of the Social Security system, a fact that Social Security’s Chief Actuary has confirmed.
I’m excited to co-sponsor Mr. Landry’s bill and strongly and enthusiastically recommend it to the membership of the House and to its leadership. Mr. Landry has done an enormous service to every retiree who depends on the Social Security system, as well as to every working family struggling in America, by preserving the fiscal integrity of the system while at the same time giving every American a choice that links the tax they pay to the benefits they receive.
And it is an option they can exercise every single year without fear that a future Congressional Act – or failure to act -- might sock them with a tax increase they can’t afford or hasten the collapse of a retirement system that many depend upon for their economic survival.
House Chamber remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock, December 6, 2011.
Over the past several years, this little town has been utterly plundered by regulatory and litigatory excesses that have pushed the town to the edge of bankruptcy and ravaged families already struggling to make ends meet.
Colfax operates a small wastewater treatment plant for its residents that discharges into the Smuthers Ravine. Because it does so, it operates within the provisions of the Clean Water Act, a measure adopted in 1972 and rooted in legitimate concerns to protect our vital water resources.
The problem is that predatory environmental law firms have discovered how to take unconscionable advantage of that law to reap windfall profits at the expense of working-class families like the townspeople of Colfax.
In the case of Colfax, an environmental law firm demanded every document pertaining to the water treatment plant from the date of its inception. It then poured over those documents looking for any possible violation – including mere paperwork errors. By law, those documents include self-monitoring reports by the water agency itself, and any violation, no matter how minor, establishes a cause of action for which the law provides for no affirmative defense – even if the violation is due to factors completely outside of the local community’s control, including acts of God or acts by unrelated and uncontrollable third parties.
Prove one such violation – and remember, the law allows for no affirmative defense – and you have just guaranteed the attorneys all of their fees, which in this case were billed at $550 per hour.
As a result of this predatory activity, the town of Colfax is facing legal fees alone that exceed the town’s entire annual budget. Families that are struggling just to keep afloat are fleeced by attorneys charging $550 per hour.
But that’s just part of the problem.
The law requires constant upgrading of the facilities to meet ever-changing state-of-the-art regulations that have nothing to do with health and safety and with absolutely no concern for their prohibitive costs. In fact, Colfax is now required to discharge water certifiably cleaner than the natural stream water into which it is discharged. In Colfax’s case, this required a $15 million expenditure divided among 1,800 working-class residents who are now paying $2,500 per year just for their water connections.
And once the town has met this standard, there’s no guarantee that in five years it won’t be told, “Sorry, the rules have changed and you’ll need to start over.”
It is time to restore some form of rationality back to this law, and to stop the plunder of small towns like Colfax. And Colfax isn’t alone – any community that operates a wastewater treatment plant is in the same jeopardy.
No one disputes that we need to maintain and enforce sensible and cost-effective protections of our precious water resources. But legitimate environmental protections must no longer be used as an excuse for regulatory extremism and litigatory plundering of our local communities.
Today, I am introducing legislation to offer six reforms to protect other communities from going through the same nightmare as the people of Colfax:
First, to limit private-party lawsuits to issues of significant non-compliance rather than harmless paperwork errors;
Second, to shield local agencies from liability for acts beyond their control;
Third, to give local agencies 60 days to cure a violation before legal action can be initiated;
Fourth, to allow communities to amortize the cost of new facilities over a period of 15 years before new requirements can be heaped on them;
Fifth, to require a cost-benefit analysis before new regulations can be imposed;
And sixth, to limit attorney fees to the prevailing fees in the community.
Like many movements, the impetus for stronger environmental protection of our air and water was firmly rooted in legitimate concerns to protect these vital resources. But like many movements, as it succeeded in its legitimate ends, it also attracted a self-interested constituency that has driven far past the borders of commonsense and into the realms of political extremism and outright plunder and I am hopeful that we are now entering an era when common sense can be restored to the Clean Water Act in this session of the Congress.
Congressman Tom McClintock, House Chamber Remarks, Washington, D.C.
December 1, 2011.
This very simple measure has unleashed a firestorm of protests from the political left. I noted one polemicist, who obviously has not read the Constitution, fumed that this is a Constitutional violation of states’ rights enshrined in the tenth amendment.
What nonsense. Article IV of the Constitution could not possibly be more clear: “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records, and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.”
It is precisely this article that requires one state to recognize driver’s licenses, birth certificates or arrest warrants issued by another state. Without it we are not a union but a loose confederation.
We are told it is “dangerous” and “risky” to allow honest and law-abiding citizens to exercise their lawfully issued permits in other states.
Upon what basis do they make this claim? Certainly not upon any empirical data.
The impact of right to carry laws – that is, laws that require the issuance of a concealed carry permit to any law-abiding citizen – has been studied extensively, with the vast preponderance finding that crime rates have fallen in those states after they have adopted such laws. No credible study has ever found that the enactment of such laws has produced an increase in crimes, suicides or accidental deaths.
Overall, states with right-to-carry laws have 22 percent lower violent crime rates, 30 percent lower murder rates, 46 percent lower robbery rates and 12 percent lower aggravated assault rates as compared to the rest of the country. Indeed, right-to-carry laws have been so successful than no state has ever rescinded one.
So if the left cannot make a rational case on constitutional grounds or empirical grounds, what is the problem?
I suspect it comes down to what Ronald Reagan once called “This irreconcilable conflict…between those who believe in the sanctity of individual freedom and those who believe in the supremacy of the state.”
Years ago, I had the honor to work for the legendary Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Ed Davis. During his 8 ½ years as Chief of the LAPD, crime dropped in Los Angeles while in the same period, across the rest of the nation, it ballooned more than 50 percent. Chief Davis invented “Neighborhood Watch” and “community based policing” and was an ardent opponent of laws restricting ownership of firearms by honest citizens.
His successful philosophy was predicated on the principle that, as he put it, “It is not the responsibility of the Police Department to enforce the law. That is the job of every citizen. The police department,” he said, “is there to help.”
As citizens we are an integral part of the laws we enact. That does not mean we act as vigilantes – but it does mean that each of us has an inalienable right to defend ourselves and our families from violent predators with whatever force is necessary. If we see a child being molested or a woman being robbed or an old man being beaten, we have a moral responsibility to intervene to the extent that we can.
A concealed weapon in the hands of honest and law-abiding citizens makes us all safer. Simply knowing that there are responsible citizens among us capable of responding with force is itself a powerful deterrent to crime.
That is the well-documented experience of every state with a right-to-carry law. But a society in which honest and law-abiding citizens are disarmed by their government is a society in which the gunman is king.
This is a truth that should be self-evident, but it is lost at the altar of the authoritarian left, which seeks to concentrate all power in government at the expense of the people.
Perhaps the best test of the self-evident nature of this truth is illustrated in a full-page newspaper ad I once saw that offered a cut-out sign, which in 150-point type read: “There are no guns in this house.” The caption under it asked, “Would you post this sign in your front window?”
House Chamber Remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock, November 16, 2011
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