BLOGS FROM US

In the past ten days or so, President Obama sucked up a lot of airtime droning on about constitutional rights and the mosque near Ground Zero. But, his lectures amount to a zero because whether constitutional rights apply depends, not on Obama’s view, but on judicial review. He knows as well as anyone in America that freedom of religion, like other constitutional rights, is not absolute. If competing interests are strong enough, they can prevail.

So why is he making premature constitutional pronouncements? Evidently, trying to bluster an end to the debate about the mosque in a show of support for the Muslim community. What he should have done was encourage a frank discussion of the bottom line issues between the opposing sides. But, he punted and a whirlwind of political damage has been cutting a wide swath ever since.

One of Obama’s big agenda items is improving relations between the U.S. and the Muslim World. From his inaugural address, to his speech in Cairo, to his political appointments and beyond, he’s been a prodigious promoter of Islam. And, that’s not necessarily bad. Other things being equal, getting along is obviously a lot better than not. But, Obama’s single-minded purpose blinds him to virtually everything else, causing him to miss the mark too often. In this case, pulling a false trigger to force people to cozy up was bound to blow up instead. Right now, we’re suffering the fallout that political leadership may have prevented.

According to Daisy Khan, one of the two main initiators of the Islam Center project, its purpose is to celebrate diversity and detente. Since 2005, she’s spoken of it as a place of community fellowship for Muslims, and, as importantly, an overture to American-Muslim harmony. Through interfaith programs and other outreach efforts, she believed the Center would help repair the breach created by the 911 attacks. Driving a constitutional stake in the ground was not one of her talking points.

It’s not surprising. Two Mosques have existed in lower Manhattan for decades, located four and twelve blocks, respectively, from Ground Zero. Non-muslims do not protest the presence of these houses of worship. True, they are low-key, but the Islam Center won’t look like a mosque either. A thirteen-story glass and chrome structure, it will house a large auditorium, theater, performing arts center, sports center, bookstore, culinary school, art studio, food court, 911 memorial and the mosque.

How did a brawl of disagreement breakout over this idyllic purpose? In an article published before Obama opened his mouth, the New York Times listed several bridge-building missteps taken by the Center’s backers. They boil down to one thing: a failure to recognize the possibility that the Center could be viewed as a monument to the ideology that felled the twin towers.

There are several major dividing points that the article failed to discuss. Although now called Park51, the original name for the Center was Cordoba House. The effort to build it is called the Cordoba Initiative. For Muslims, Cordoba refers to Cordoba, Spain, the Muslim capital during centuries of political and military domination over that part of Western Europe. Then there’s the backers’ refusal to rule out terrorist sources of funding for the Center. Chief among them is the Iranian government, which, according to our State Department, is the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism.

Lastly, Daisy’s husband and the Center’s co-founder, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has an unfortunate habit of making very explosive, anti-American allegations. Take his September 2001 60 minutes interview and his 2005 Australian interview. He accused the U.S. of being an accessory to the 911 crimes, directly responsible for bin Laden and worse than Al Qaeda. Now days, Feisal says his 60 Minutes statements were “edited out of context”. But, for the past nine years, he’s gotten a lot of favorable mileage out of them in the Muslim World.

How this will ultimately play out is anyone’s guess. Following Obama’s initial religious freedom speech, the mosque builders dug in their heels and refuse to budge. Talk of rapprochement has been replaced by a mute determination to claim constitutional rights that were never the issue. Obama botched an opportunity to engage both sides in a dialog that may have resulted in an amicable resolution. Instead, he poured gasoline on a smoldering flame, exploding it into a white-hot election year issue. Where is the cool head of effective leadership?

See you in the mirror.

In 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act. All 31 pages of it. Signed into law by Woodrow Wilson, it created the Federal banking structure, including the national bank and the entire Federal Reserve System. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law both the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. They total a combined 107 pages. The Civil Rights Act, inked 29 years later by Lyndon Johnson, came in at 74 pages.

These pieces of legislation represent sweeping changes in their respective areas. Arguably, they are the most important Acts of the 20^th Century. Together, they add up to 212 pages.

Fast forward to 2010 and its comprehensive reforms. Our brand spanking new Obamacare bill is 2,074 pages, or 28 times longer than the Civil Rights Act. The new Finance Reform law breaks the scale at 2,319 pages. It’s 75 times longer than the Federal Reserve Act. And more than 10 times longer than the four seminal pieces of legislation from the past century combined.

This year’s explosion in size of our Federal laws speaks volumes about what’s wrong with our current pack of “leaders”. But, the implications of size alone pale in comparison to the yawning chasm of undefined processes and regulations cutting deep within the voluminous pages. Into this void of uncertainty rides the future of health care and finance in our Country.

How uncertain is it? In creating each law, it’s as if Congress and the President gambled our fate on a single spin of a giant roulette wheel. A straight up bet that the marble will stop in the desired slot. Trouble is, instead of having less than 40 slots, each wheel has thousands of them. We have virtually no chance that the marble will drop in the one labeled, “rational implementation”.

Take Obamacare. Wait. You can’t because you don’t know what it is yet. When Nancy Pelosi crowed that Congress would have to pass it so we could know what was in it, she was being overly optimistic. For example, while the law requires insurance companies to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on “benefits”, it does not define the term. So, a few heavily lobbied regulators are plugging that hole by picking and choosing from a list of tens of thousands of medical services.

There’s more. Way too much more as it turns out. The Congressional Research Service, Capitol Hill’s independent policy arm, issued a report this month excoriating the unknowable extent of Obamacare’s convoluted bureaucracy. The number of agencies, boards, commissions and panels is impossible to estimate. Attempts to tally them stop at 159, but there’s no certainty in that small of a number. And, the scope of their responsibilities is ill defined and appears to overlap in certain areas.

Even worse, some agencies are empowered to spawn more agencies at their discretion. Raise your hand if you think spontaneous generation of expanding bureaucracy is a good thing. Whether and how many of these entities will be funded is not known. But what is known is that Obamacare is a bungled bureaucratic mess of the highest order. And its mangled mug is the face of our new health care reality. A great big Bronx cheer to the hundreds of politicians who had a hand in spinning that wheel.

And then there’s Finance Reform. Or, as it’s come to be known, the Lobbyist Full Employment Act. In its 2,319 pages, the Act affects every facet of the financial services industry. Yet, it leaves most of the truly difficult decisions to agencies, empowering them to regulate on a scale never before seen. Like Obamacare, the industry will be defined by nameless, faceless bureaucrats unrestrained by public accountability.

The Act leaves to regulators alone the job of formulating 243 new rules of finance conduct. Well, not exactly alone. Since last year, nearly 150 lobbyists registered to work at financial agencies in the executive branch. Many of them are former government employees who will now be lobbying their old colleagues regarding the new rules. So much for Obama’s campaign promise to shut that revolving door.

In science and economics, new theories are tested with vigorous verification and validation methods. Wide ranges of sample inputs churn through simulated models to determine the worth of new ideas. But, when this Congress creates comprehensive reforms, it runs no simulations. It tests none of its assumptions. It just spins a giant wheel. It makes you shutter to think about what’s coming next.

See you on the left-side.