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Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul all apparently agree on one thing: if Puerto Rico votes for U.S. statehood, it should become a U.S. state.

Which may be about to happen. In late December of 2011, Puerto Rico’s governor Luis Fortuno signed legislation authorizing a referendum on statehood to be held on November 6, 2012— the same day as the U.S. presidential election—along with the regular Puerto Rican legislative and gubernatorial elections.

That referendum could lead to Puerto Rico’s becoming the 51^st state.

A lot of people think that’s great, or at least they say that. The Democrats stand to get two more congressional representatives and Electoral College votes, so why would they object?

But before making Puerto Rico the 51^st state, shouldn’t we examine the issue and see how sensible it is? If Puerto Rico votes for statehood, are we duty-bound to grant it?

Shouldn’t Americans have a say in whether or not Puerto Rico becomes a state? And would it really be good for Puerto Rico itself, in the long run?

Puerto Rico is an island in the Caribbean, east of the island of Hispaniola. It has a land area of 3,515 square miles, which is bigger than Rhode Island but smaller than Connecticut. Its population is 3.7 million on the island, but there are about 4.6 million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland U.S.A. (Puerto Ricans are technically U.S. citizens and thus immigration laws don’t apply to them).

Puerto Rico is a distinct society. The island has been a U.S. territory since 1898 (!) but it hasn’t been assimilated. Attempts to make it an English-speaking societ

The Democrats, the NAACP, ACLU, the SPLC ($PLC to VDARE.com), and the rest of the usual suspects are trying to get America lathered up about "voter suppression." 

And what a marvelous tool is that phrase: "voter suppression"! It brings to mind all sorts of horrific images: of men in white sheets and hoods with shotguns and on horseback or

For many, Leo Strauss is a man of mystery. Was he, as Myles Burnyeat of Cambridge University suggested many years ago in The New York Review of Books, a “sphinx without a secret”, not a genuine philosopher but rather a proponent of “ruthless anti-idealism” who provided intellectual backing for an aggressive American foreign policy?

Kevin MacDonald takes a different view, holding that “Strauss crafted his vision of an aristocratic elite manipulating the masses as a Jewish survival strategy.”(MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections, Occidental Press 2007, p.163).

In his illuminating book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal, the distinguished intellectual historian Paul Gottfried rejects what these approaches have in common: their picture of Strauss as an enemy of liberal democracy. Though Strauss earned the respect of the rightwing legal theorist Carl Schmitt, he was by no means, Gottfried maintains, a man of the Right. To the contrary, and despite some ambiguous remarks made early in his career, he remained throughout his long sojourn in America a convinced liberal democrat.

Gottfried traces the misapprehension to Strauss’s popular lectures in 1949 for the Walgreen Foundation, published in 1953 as Natural Right and History. Strauss appeared to many as the vindicator of natural law against the relativism and nihilism that threatened to weaken America in its Cold War against communism. Gottfried writes:

“A one-time teacher of mine, Anton Hermann Chroust...used to joke about Strauss’s visit to South Bend: ‘The natural law Catholics came out in force, and as soon as St. Leo started talking, they were like Moses receiving the Law.’”

Gottfried calls attention to the role of Willmoore Kendall of National Review in propagating the myth of Strauss as a high-powered philosopher of conservatism. Kendall, himself an eminent conservative political theorist, was a hero-worshipper, and Eric Voegelin vied with Strauss as the object of his intellectual star-gazing.

But despite the adulation of Kendall and other conservatives, Gottfried notes that Strauss was in politics an “FDR-Truman Democrat---that is, someone who found even the uncertain Republican Dwight Eisenhower to be a bit far to the right for his taste.” Strauss abhorred Joe McCarthy and feared a rightwing populist outbreak.

Still, whatever his personal political opinions, does not Strauss remain useful as a defender of classical philosophy against modern-day relativists and other enemies of the Right?

Gottfried does not think so. Though he recognizes Strauss’s remarkable linguistic and scholarly abilities, he argues

The 2011 National Football League season ends Sunday February 5, when the New England Patriots play the New York Giants for the Lombardi Trophy in Super Bowl XLVI. Last year, the Superbowl game broke television rating records, with more than 111 million people watching the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers on Fox. Football has unmistakably supplanted baseball as America’s new “national pastime”.

The popularity of the NFL is due to various factors. The regular season consists of only 16 games, meaning it’s not impossibly time-consuming to follow your favorite team or player. And the NFL has instituted revenue-sharing from the awe-inspiring television contracts it has signed with networks like Fox, NBC, CBS, and ESPN, imposing a variant of socialism to ensure all teams have the same salary cap—the amount of money available to attract players. This creates a level financial field for every team—and means the NFL is more of a horse race (so to speak).

In contrast, professional baseball doesn’t have a salary cap. That’s why a team like the New York Yankees has a payroll of more than $202 million in 2012, compared to the Kansas City Royals’ $36 million. And when you can buy the best players and sign quality depth, a baseball team can basically mortgage the future of the franchise for a World Series victory. Indeed, the Florida Marlins have done this twice, in 1997 and 2003.

Still, Moneyball (book by Michael Lewis book, movie with Brad Pitt) is the definitive account of how Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s idiosyncratic but imaginative general manager, was able to turn a franchise with one of the smallest payrolls into one of the most competitive teams in baseball by finding what economists would call market inefficiencies in how talent was evaluated by scouts.

Beane’s idea, according to Lewis:

What he believed was what Paul Volcker seemed to suspect, that the market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash.

Beane sought more effective metrics for evaluating talent, assembled a team of supposed nobodies, and turned them into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning games.

It worked. The A’s competed successfully with big-market teams flush with huge piles of cash, like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, repeatedly making it to the playoffs and winning 20 games in a row in 2002, breaking an American League record.

Beane had proved that market inefficiencies existed and revolutionized how baseball players are evaluated.

Of course, the situation is more complex in the NFL. Managers don’t have quite as free a hand, because the concept of a level-playing field is the unofficial mantra of the league—the team that finishes with worst record automatically gets the best positions in the NFL draft that year.

But the amazing success of the New England Patriots under head coach Bill Belichick, now competing in their fifth Super Bowl (they’ve won three), shows that market inefficiencies also exist in NFL scouting.  

And significantly, under Belichick, the Patriots have consistently fielded one of the whitest rosters in the sport. When you consider that the NFL has been 67 -70 percent Black over the past 15 years, it becomes increasingly clear that something strange is happening in New England. Why?

 Texas Governor Rick Perry was speaking to voters in Waverly, Iowa before that state’s caucuses in December when a local man raised his hand. "I don't know how the rest of the conservatives in the room feel, but personally, I'm fed up with seeing the directions on every single product on every single shelf of every single store written in foreign languages,” he announced. “And I'd like to say English should be the official language of government in this country."[English as official US language: Perry says, 'I can agree with that', By Carrie Dann, December 30, 2012]

Rick Perry, who until this moment had no public record of ever voicing support for making English the official language of his state or the U.S

This daily cartoon contributed to VDARE.com by Baloo. His site is HERE

Peter Brimelow writes: I’m going to miss Newt Gingrich. (Assuming, of course, that he can’t re-reincarnate himself). Whatever else you can say about the former Speaker of the House—and we’ve said a lot—he is original and even creative. Thus he has single-handedly raised the issue of legislating judges, the key force behind America’s ongoing cultural Marxist revolution—and an immense problem for patriotic immigration reform legislation (exactly as I predicted in Alien Nation).  

Gingrich wants legislators to counteract judicial imperialism. His idea has caused a lot of harrumphing, even from self-proclaimed conservatives (for example, see A conservative worries: Will Gingrich return America to the days of King George? , by Rodney K. Smith, Christian Science Monitor, February 1, 2012). But of course Gingrich is right.

The traditional remedy to judicial imperialism: appoint judges who actually believe in the law. This was the answer I supported in my October 1981 Harper’s Magazine article, Supreme Irony: The Court Of Last Resort, which we have exhumed from the print tomb and which makes its first public online appearance here tonight.

But that was thirty years, and five Republican Administrations, ago. It just hasn’t worked. Indeed, Republican Senators were wholly unable to mount an effective opposition to Obama Supreme Court selections Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, although both are plainly just liberal political commissars.

On VDARE.com, we have discussed other remedies: jurisdiction-stripping under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, and (my personal favorite!) impeachment.The problem remains as stated. For the solution, we may have to back to the drawing board—along with Newt.

SUPREME IRONY |The court of last resort

[Originally published in Harpers, October 1981]

Within weeks of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, several lawsuits were filed challenging the legality of his retroactive hiring freeze on federal recruiting. A public-interest group called Energy Action announced a suit protesting decontrol of petroleum prices. Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s public-interest lobby, sued Health and Human Services secretary Schweiker over policy toward generic (non-brand-name) drugs. And a number of legal challenges to the proposed freeze on federal regulations were being discussed. All of which was presaged by the Washington Star directly after the election:

“Noting the three recent appointments of well-known liberal activists to the U.S. Court of Appeals

—Abner Mikva, Patricia Wald and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—one public interest lawyer commented:

“The courts now loom as the most congenial branch of the federal government. We may have to return to litigation to take advantage of this asset.”

It is important to realize what is going on here. One faction in American politics—whether or not it represents “the public interest”—has lost an election. Its policies may be reversed. It proposes to prevent that by appealing to the courts. It trusts the courts not because of the law but because of the judges. They are members of the same faction.

In Britain, Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is to be found in the legislature. In Ronald Reagan’s America, opposition is centered on the bench. It will almost certainly be neither loyal to, nor even impressed by, his mandate. And behind this opposition lurks a more ominous possibility: that our political culture is losing sight of the ideal of an impartial law.

THAT THERE has been an extraordinary invasion of every area of American life by the federal judiciary in the past twenty-five years is now undeniable. At one time, it was fashionable for supporters of this judicial activism to argue that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes had been equally unrestrained in 1935-36 when it ruled vital New Deal legislation unconstitutional. But there is a distinction. The Hughes Court was reviewing, perhaps overenthusiastically, the actions of a reforming legislature. Now, however, Supreme Court justices and a host of inferior judges are themselves reforming society, in the most detailed and aggressive way, not merely without the sanction of elected lawmakers, but often in a direction diametrically opposed to that in which they or their constituents might have wished to go.

It is an open secret that most major social reforms of the last generation have been accomplished by the judiciary. In what amounts to a cloverleaf of Damascus Roads, the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional such previously accepted practices as segregation, capital punishment, school prayer and has unilaterally effected one-man, one-vote state legislative apportionment, affirmative action, abortion on demand, and the abolition of residency laws for welfare eligibility.

Each of these ends had devoted advocates who were not inclined to question the means by which they were achieved. But presumably everyone would have preferred to see legislatures rewriting the necessary statutes, or amending the Constitution. As matters stand, it is only a matter of time before someone realizes that the judicial branch in general and the Supreme Court in particular are the modern equivalent of the Wizard of Oz. They have no power other than the awe inspired by the Constitution. But a fundamental organic law capable of such profound reinterpretation at the drop of a Supreme Court justice or two, and their replacement by political opponents, is no sort of law at all.

Perhaps the confusion that exists in the minds of lawyers on the point has helped postpone that awful day. In his autobiography, The Court Years,  William O. Douglas claimed that when he joined the Supreme Court in 1939, Chief Justice Hughes told him that constitutional decisions were 90 percent emotional: “the rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.” Douglas says he took this advice to heart. There is every reason to believe him. He once remarked that he was more interested in creating a precedent than finding one. Nobody did more to convince American lawyers that they should study not the Constitution but the Supreme Court.

Yet there at the end of his book is the poor old U.S. Constitution, reproduced as an appendix, like an Orthodox priest drafted to sprinkle holy water on Red Army tanks.

And there can be no dispute about the degree of judicial ambition displayed in the endlessly proliferating minor cases as well. In Texas last year, U.S. District Court Judge Gabrielle McDonald  ordered a public station to screen “Death of a Princess”—a controversial television film it had canceled after Saudi Arabian protests. In South Dakota, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Porter ruled that ranchers must stop using certain chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency to combat a grasshopper plague.

In Washington, Judge Barrington Parker ordered the army to upgrade less than honorable discharges given to some 10,000 Vietnam-era veterans found to be abusing drugs, following compulsory urinalyses that Parker said were “statements” covered by Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

In Rhode Island, Judge Raymond J. Pettine forced school administrators to allow a homosexual student to take a male date to his senior prom. In Mississippi, Judge Orma Smith ordered the state to supply to high schools a textbook previously rejected because of its controversial stress on black history. The California supreme court recently held intelligence tests to be unconstitutional.

In all of these cases, elected legislators and appointed officials found themselves stymied by arbitrary fiat, any challenge to which must be mounted against the forces of inertia and cost that are invariably decisive in politics. None of the rulings bore any serious relationship to the intentions of the Constitution’s framers, traditionally the standard by which legal problems are judged. Yet they explicitly contradicted political solutions.

This situation is largely the fault of our tremulous legislators. A classic illustration was provided by Washington Monthly when in 1979 it sent purported pro-and anti-abortion letters to every senator, demanding to know his or her position. [Mail Fraud on Capitol Hill, by Mark Feldstein, October 1979] No ancient Greek ever fled in more terror from the Furies than the average political hack from these two ferocious lobbies, and the result was the expected mixture of silence and mealymouthed or contradictory replies. One, however, was particularly significant. Senator Donald W. Riegle (Dem.-Mich.) replied that he preferred “to leave the issue to the courts.”

And this has been the way in which a whole generation of legislators