Cato Daily Dispatch for October 28, 2005
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Choosing a New Judicial NomineeOil-for-Food Scandal: The Plot Thickens
Oil Profiting Is Not a Crime
Choosing a New Judicial Nominee
"As President Bush raced to prepare for his second Supreme Court nomination in less than a month, Republican activists who helped defeat the last pick said they were hopeful the president would choose someone conservative enough to satisfy his base," reports The New York Sun. "The withdrawal late Wednesday of White House counsel Harriet Miers, a former Dallas attorney with no judicial record, is expected to set the stage for a more conservative pick whose nomination will almost certainly prompt a bitter Senate feud."
In a statement released yesterday, Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs and founder of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies, says, "The president needs now to focus on selecting a nominee whose understanding and experience make it clear to all that he or she will uphold the Constitution. That means securing its restraints on expansive government, and protecting the full range of rights the Constitution was meant to protect. This is no time to be looking for a 'diversity' nominee. The president should be looking, this time, for the best nominee."
Last night on PBS's Charlie Rose, Pilon argued: "The reason that there was so much concern about the Harriet Miers nomination is that for 40 years, there have been battles in this country about the meaning of the Constitution and about the role of the court under it. And she was utterly absent from those battles. And so the conservative libertarian movement that is saying, look, how is she going to contribute to this as a Supreme Court justice? She has no track record whatsoever on these issues. And so, it was seen as a betrayal of fundamental principles. That's why the outrage over the Miers nomination was so intense."
Oil-for-Food Scandal: The Plot Thickens
"Fraud in the U.N. oil-for-food scheme for Iraq reached from French politicians to a former Vatican aide and name-brand companies, sending a sobering message about the state of global business," The Associated Press reports. "The former Federal Reserve chairman's team found that more than 2,200 companies and individuals, or about half of all those involved in the humanitarian program, paid kickbacks and illegal surcharges to win lucrative contracts while Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein pocketed $1.8 billion at the expense of his people who were suffering under U.N. sanctions."
In the 1997 Cato book Delusions of Grandeur: The United Nations and Global Intervention, U.N. ambassador John Bolton writes in his chapter, "The Creation, Fall, Rise, and Fall of the United Nations," that "the U.N. was an admirable concept when conceived" and "is worth keeping alive for future service." However, "it is not worth the sacrifice of American troops, American freedom of action, or American national interests. The real question for the future is whether we will know how to keep our priorities straight."
In the Cato Policy Analysis "A Miasma of Corruption: The United Nations at 50," Stefan Halper, a former White House and State Department official, argues that "[a]t the heart of the organization's mounting problems is an almost total lack of accountability, which gives rise to suspicions of wholesale corruption. Existing evidence indicates that corruption and mismanagement go beyond the routine fraud, waste, and abuse of resources that mark all public-sector enterprises."
Oil Profiting Is Not a Crime
"More than a billion dollars a day, $45 million an hour, almost $340 for every living American -- that's what Exxon Mobil Corp. reported in third-quarter revenue Thursday," according to The Los Angeles Times. "The financial results drew outrage from politicians and consumer advocates who see historically high U.S. gasoline prices as evidence of profiteering.
"'This is a staggering profit and proof that we are being gouged by the oil industry,' said Jamie Court of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica. Others, however, said Exxon was simply following the laws of free enterprise and reaping a bounty for high-risk investments in exploration in often politically unstable regions of the world."
In "The Best Energy Policy Is No Energy Policy," Jerry Taylor, Cato's director of natural resource studies, writes: "Political saber rattling about the alleged profiteering of 'big oil' actually makes the crisis worse. That's because the only hedge against supply disruptions in the near term is inventories. But inventories are costly to maintain. If companies can't cash them in at a profit during price run-ups because they fear criminal investigations or the imposition of 'windfall profit' taxes, companies won't bother maintaining inventories in the first place."
Greg Garner, editor, ggarner@cato.org
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