The constant droning noise emanating from President Obama sounds
more and more like the kazoo-like tone drowning out World Cup
Soccer games. His vacuous Oval Office oil speech last week was
redundant proof that he’s succeeded in turning the bully pulpit
into just bull.
More importantly, his administration’s concerted efforts to
thwart the will of the voters should add up to the last straw for
our nation’s governors and make July 29 the launching date for a
renewed summer of townhalls to unify conservatives with the Tea
Partyers this fall.
When we think of the Coast Guard, we think of skilled
rescuers braving the worst the seas can offer to pluck
unfortunate boaters out of some watery disaster. But last week —
for reasons understood only by their commanders — they managed
to abandon that for the role of the heavy-handed government
preventing local action to ameliorate the damage that the BP oil
spill is inflicting on Louisiana.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal — entirely frustrated by
the Feds’ failure to employ all available resources to stop the
oil from drifting into his state’s coastline waters — hired
sixteen barges which were busy vacuuming the oil out of the water
until the Coast Guard showed up and stopped their operations
because — says the Coast Guard — they didn’t have enough safety
equipment aboard.
Is the lack of a few fire extinguishers and life vests
enough to order that stoppage? Apparently. But instead of
offering help — even to sell the required equipment to the barge
operators — the Coast Guard shut them down. This is the heavy
hand of government falling on those who were trying to do what
the Feds wouldn’t do.
From an Ecuadorean reporter’s interview with Hillary
Clinton we
learned that the same heavy hand is about to fall on Arizona.
The new Arizona law aimed at illegal immigration — which mirrors
Federal law in requiring people stopped by police for other
infractions to prove their legal presence in America — will go
into effect on July 29. And — according to Hillary — the
president has directed the Justice Department to bring suit to
overturn the law. (The Justice Department later said it was still
“reviewing the law,” i.e., apparently trying to concoct a basis
for attacking it in federal court. The ACLU has, as we’d expect,
already filed a lawsuit against it.)
It’s as hard to believe that Hillary would be speaking the
truth as it is to believe she’d get something as important as
Obama’s direction to Holder wrong. For once, Hillary is probably
telling the truth.
Again, the heavy hand of the Obama administration isn’t
like the open hand offering help or even the unconditional
negotiation offered Iran. Bobby Jindal’s oil sweepers and
Arizona’s law are apparently more dangerous to Obama’s agenda
than the Iranians’ nuclear program. Jindal stood his ground and
— after making his strenuous arguments to the White House — the
Coast Guard eventually let the most of the barges go back to
work.
Other Gulf Coast governors seemed equally upset. Alabama
Gov. Bob Riley said he’d had problems with the Coast Guard as
well. He’d asked them to find floating booms to protect Alabama’s
coast and — having brought them all the way from Bahrain — the
Coast Guard deployed them off Louisiana.
The missed lesson here is that the Gulf Coast governors
should have worked together to organize pressure on the White
House. Will Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer do better?
She may. Brewer met with Obama on June 3 and the subject of
the coming Justice lawsuit never came up. Hearing of Hillary
Clinton’s statement she said,
“To learn of this lawsuit through an Ecuadorean interview with
the secretary of state is just outrageous.… If our own government
intends to sue our state to prevent illegal immigration
enforcement, the least it can do is inform us before it informs
the citizens of another nation.”
Brewer has an advantage that Jindal and Riley didn’t: time.
In the five weeks before July 29, she could — and should — be
calling and organizing other conservative governors to join in
opposition to both the ACLU suit and the possible Department of
Justice case.
Even if the courts rule that the other states can’t defend
Arizona’s law as parties to the cases, the governors can and
should file amicus curiae briefs in support of the
Arizona law. They also can — and should — energize their
congressional delegations to support their position forcefully.
On television, radio and in print the governors and members of
Congress can make themselves heard above Obama’s drone. Perhaps
sufficiently to convince the Justice Department to back down
before it files the lawsuit.
Conservative leaders should be thinking long and hard about
the underlying theme. Americans are very angry at their
government and (as the Rasmussen poll last week showed) at the
Obama cheerleaders in the media. The Tea Party movement embodied
that anger, reflecting peoples’ frustration at the passage of
Obamacare despite the majority opposition to it. Another
Rasmussen poll — released on Friday —
shows that 56% of U.S. voters believe the Justice Department
shouldn’t challenge the Arizona law and only 26% think it
should.
In those polls — and in the Coast Guard action against
Jindal’s oil sweepers — are the ingredients some conservative
leader could stir together into a potent townhall potion for this
summer. It’s a commonplace for Republicans and conservatives to
bemoan the Tea Partyers’ reluctance to be organized (hypnotized?)
into sure Republican votes in November. It’s time to quit
bemoaning that fact and do something about it.
July 29 should be a very good day for conservatives. Not
only will the Arizona law be going into effect, but it will mark
a milestone: the 100th day since the Deepwater Horizon oil
drilling rig exploded and sank, resulting in the worst oil spill
in our history. The coincidence of time should make it a day of
townhalls and rallies across the nation.
The point is not to celebrate a disaster but to praise
Arizona’s action in doing what the federal government has failed
to do, and to condemn the government’s failure to protect the
shores from the tide of oil washing ashore and into the coastal
wetlands.
BP may have stopped the leak by July 29, but the oil will
still be washing ashore. In the five weeks between now and then,
Bobby Jindal should invite Jan Brewer to a townhall on a
Louisiana beach to announce Louisiana’s joining in the defense of
the Arizona law. Brewer should join him in speaking against the
Obama administration’s consistent failure to do its duty to
protect our shores.
Tea Partyers would heed this call, and erupt into another
summer-long series of townhall meetings to defend the governors
and oppose the Obama administration’s serial actions to thwart
the will of the voters. It’ll be an unruly, messy summer. Just as
our Founding Fathers would have prescribed.
