The Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska is the second tea party win in two weeks.  First, Senator Richard Lugar lost to tea party-backed Richard Mourdock in Indiana. On Tuesday, tea party favorite, Deb Fischer defeated establishment candidate Jim Bruning in a shocking late surge.

Fischer’s defeat of Bruning is remarkable.  She was heavily outspent and as of two weeks ago was a distant third in the polls.

Then Sarah Palin endorsed her, and she got the “big mo’.”  Palin still has star power.

Senator Jim DeMint was “all in” for Don Stenberg, but he couldn’t make it happen.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell favored Bruning.

While Lugar’s defeat made national headlines last week, Fischer’s win is a much bigger story.

The bottom line: Palin is more important than two of the most important Republican Senators in the nation.

Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives voted  330-93 to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank.  While it may have been well intentioned originally, EX-IM has become a piggy bank for corporate welfare.  One of the worst examples comes from right here in Arizona.

First Solar received a $455 million loan guarantee from Ex-Im to sell solar panels to a company in Canada.  The hook?  That company was a wholly-owned subsidiary of First Solar.  So First Solar fleeces taxpayers to sell solar panels… to itself.

Thankfully, every Republican in the Arizona delegation voted no on reauthorization.  When only 93 Republicans vote against ending corporate welfare, it demonstrates the problem in Washington.

This video from Heritage Action sums it up well.

Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock defeated 36-year Senator Richard Lugar by more than 20 points.  This is not a surprise; Lugar ignored the real angst that Hoosiers felt about his lack of attention to conservative principles.

Despite the narrative that Democrats and the media are trying to push, Mourdock will win the general and add a conservative voice to the U.S. Senate.

In 2010, one of the first casualties among moderate Republicans was Utah Senator Bob Bennett, who could not muster enough support among GOP State Convention delegates to even give him an opportunity to be on the primary ballot.  It was a stunning blow to the establishment and there was immediate speculation that Utah’s other Senator – Orrin Hatch – was next.

However, Hatch saw the hand writing on the wall and has been, as they say, “workin’ it hard” for the last 18 months to ensure he doesn’t suffer the same fate as Bennett.

It worked.   In Saturday’s Utah State GOP Convention, Hatch not only received enough votes to get into the primary, but came within a hairs-breadth of winning the nomination outright (60% of the vote is needed to win outright, Hatch reportedly received just over 59%).

Here’s the headline of the AP story: Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch forced into primary fight

And here is the lede of the story:

U.S. Sen. Sen. Orrin Hatch has been forced into a primary fight for his seventh term.

Hatch failed to get the needed 60 percent of delegate votes during Saturday’s Utah Republican convention that would have made him the outright GOP nominee.

A more accurate headline might have been: Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch Happily Gets into primary fight

Say what you will about Sen. Hatch – he recognized what he was facing and has done a pretty remarkable job of turning his fortunes around in a pretty short amount of time.

The bad news for those who opposed Hatch in the convention is that if they couldn’t beat him there, they aren’t going to beat him anywhere.

Candidate Obama campaigned as Mr. Everyman – the down-to-earth affable guy who could relate to real people.

President Obama is an arrogant elitist who believes – really believes – that he is a force of nature to which everyone must respond.  Take his remarks regarding the Supreme Court’s oral arguments of the health care law.

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Seriously?  This from a man who was a constitutional law professor?  There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of laws passed by Congress and state legislatures that have been overturned by the Supreme Court and even lower courts.  This is a doctrine of legislative review established more than 200 years ago in a case called Marbury v. Madison.

Obama’s assertion that the law “was passed by a strong majority” is revisionist history.  It ultimately passed the U.S. House on a 219-212 vote – in which all Republicans and 39 Democrats voted no.

Let’s review how it got to that point, because it’s a story that belies this notion that it was “passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

The first real floor action on health care reform happened in November of 2009 when the Democrats in the House passed their version that included a “public option” which was essentially a full government takeover of health care.  That vote was 220-215 with one Republican (Joseph Cao of New Orleans, who won the seat of Democrat William Jefferson after Jefferson was caught stuffing his freezer with cash from bribes) voting yes and 39 Democrats voting no.

Because at least eight Senate Democrats were on record opposing a public option, the Senate drafted it’s own bill and used the Christmas holiday as the leverage point to get it passed.

It passed the Senate with the 60 votes (the minimum required to end debate on legislation) on Christmas Eve 2009 after some rather outrageous giveaways were promised to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska – “Cornhusker Kickback” – and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol – so to speak.  Outrage at how the Senate had managed the passage of the health care bill manifested itself in the special election in Massachusetts to fill the Senate seat left vacant as a result of the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy. In what must be one of the most shocking political upsets of all time, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley, thus becoming “41” – that is, the 41^st Republican in the Senate, and breaking the 60-vote supermajority of the Democrats.

At that point, passage of Obama’s health care bill looked doomed.  But then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided that they would force the House to vote on the Senate-passed bill by a legislative trick called “reconciliation.”

I won’t bore you with the reconciliation process, but suffice it to say, the House took what was essentially a draft bill (remember, the Senate pushed through their bill on Christmas Eve with deals being cut hours before, and what officially passed the Senate was language that included handwritten edits, notations and references) and passed it into law, because under reconciliation no language could be changed.

This is why Nancy Pelosi was being honest when she said, “We have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it.”  The Senate version (which was never intended to become the final law) left huge swaths of decisions to the Secretary of Health and Human Services because they hadn’t come to agreement on most of the implementation points.

Most damaging in the long run to Obama’s law was that the Senate version did not include a “severability clause” which is routine in bigger pieces of legislation.  Severability is normally included so that if some portion of a bill is found to be unconstitutional, it doesn’t take the entire bill down.

The severability issue brings us back to Obama’s claim that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn a law.  If it had never been done, why would Congress ever put a severability clause into legislation?

I am astounded at the blatant disregard for the truth that the President of the United States employs.  Does he really think that “warning” the Supreme Court is smart, let alone appropriate?  For him to equate overturning this horrific law to “judicial activism” is to turn the world upside down.  Striking down a law because it violates the constitution is not legislating from the bench.

Obviously, Obama is very worried about what might happen to his signature accomplishment.  But his outrage is misguided and he isn’t handling this in a very Presidential way.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu is under investigation for tampering with public records in the fall-out of allegations that he threatened his former boyfriend with deportation if their relationship became public.

As the Arizona Republic reports, emails that were requested by the paper related to Babeu were deleted. When questioned about the emails, the Pinal County Sheriff’s office claimed that it was a routine clean up of old emails and that they had been properly archived.

However, when the archives were searched it was discovered that more than 7,000 emails had been deleted.

While IT staff was conducting research before March 7, Behring’s e-mail says, they found a file on a drive that contained 7,220 documents, mostly e-mails. When they went back on March 7, that same file contained only 818 documents.

So, the emails in question were apparently deleted twice.

As we learned from Watergate, it’s usually not the initial act that causes political death, it’s the cover-up.

For a law enforcement officer to engage in his kind of cover-up is not only a violation of law, it’s a violation of he public trust.

Paul Babeu can’t be trusted to be a Congressman.

Budget wunderkind Paul Ryan has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.  With this get, Romney has picked up the endorsement of the two top rising stars in the Republican Party – Ryan and Marco Rubio.

Ryan’s endorsement demonstrates that the conservative intellectual wing of the GOP is now firmly ensconced with Romney.

Tuesday’s primary elections in Wisconsin (Ryan’s home state), Maryland and D.C. will likely be the end of Gingrich’s campaign and should, for all intents and purposes, be the end of Santorum’s campaign.

Conservative star, Senator Marco Rubio, has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.  That is a BIG get for Romney and one that is yet another nail in the coffin for Rick Santorum’s improbable quest for the nomination.

There are still some important conservatives who have not jumped onto Team Romney, but Rubio’s announcement will lead to more and more asking for a jersey.

I suspect we’ll see a couple this weekend.

Obama’s health care law may be on life support.  After three days of oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the challenge to the health care bill signed into law two years ago, the future of the law is very uncertain.

It’s clear that supporters of the law were rocked by how aggressive the questioning was by Justices Kennedy and Breyer – two justices that are key to which way the decision goes.  The Left is also very unhappy with Obama’s Solicitor General.  Mother Jones wrote, “If the law is upheld, it will be in spite of Verrilli’s performance, not because of it.”

I was struck my Kennedy’s first question right out of the box, “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?”  That is how a Supreme Court Justice “gets up in your grill.”

Justices Scalia, Alito and Chief Justice Roberts also asked withering questions.  Justice Thomas was typically silent – he hasn’t asked a question in the last six years.  It is assumed that those four are near-certain to support striking down the individual mandate and based on Kennedy’s questioning, he could be the fifth vote.

What has alarmed the Left more than anything is the discussion in the final day of arguments when the Court discussed whether it was more reasonable to overturn the entire law if they agree that the individual mandate is struck down.

While I strongly believe that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and have been cautiously optimistic that the Court would so rule, I have been very pessimistic about the Court overturning the entire law.  That would be a nice gift to the American people if it were to happen.

Transcripts of the three days of arguments are here:

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday here and here

With oral arguments in the case challenging the individual mandate of Obama’s health care law starting in the Supreme Court on Monday, this piece by Charles Krauthammer is worthy of posting in total. It is a must read.

Obamacare: The reckoning

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: March 22

Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground.

Now it’s back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law’s constitutionality and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate.

Cost:

Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact.

But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number.

It gets worse. Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.

Constitutionality:

Beginning Monday, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. The American people, by an astonishing two-thirds majority, want the law and/or the individual mandate tossed out by the court. In practice, however, questions this momentous are generally decided 5 to 4 — i.e., they depend on whatever side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy gets out of that morning.

Ultimately, the question will hinge on whether the Commerce Clause has any limits. If the federal government can compel a private citizen, under threat of a federally imposed penalty, to engage in a private contract with a private entity (to buy health insurance), is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do?

If Obamacare is upheld, it fundamentally changes the nature of the American social contract. It means the effective end of a government of enumerated powers — i.e., finite, delineated powers beyond which the government may not go, beyond which lies the free realm of the people and their voluntary institutions. The new post-Obamacare dispensation is a central government of unlimited power from which citizen and civil society struggle to carve out and maintain spheres of autonomy.

Figure becomes ground; ground becomes figure. The stakes could not be higher.

Coerciveness.

Serendipitously, the recently issued regulation on contraceptive coverage has allowed us to see exactly how this new power works. All institutions — excepting only churches, but not excepting church-run charities, hospitals, etc. — will be required to offer health care that must include free contraception, sterilization and drugs that cause abortion.

Consider the cascade of arbitrary bureaucratic decisions that resulted in this edict:

(1) Contraception, sterilization and abortion pills are classified as medical prevention. On whose authority? The secretary of health and human services, invoking the Institute of Medicine. But surely categorizing pregnancy as a disease equivalent is a value decision disguised as science. If contraception is prevention, what are fertility clinics? Disease inducers? And if contraception is prevention because it lessens morbidity and saves money, by that logic, mass sterilization would be the greatest boon to public health since the pasteurization of milk.

(2) This type of prevention is free — no co-pay. Why? Is contraception morally superior to or more socially vital than — and thus more of a “right” than — penicillin for a child with pneumonia?

(3) “Religious” exemptions to this edict extend only to churches, places where the faithful worship God, and not to church-run hospitals and charities, places where the faithful do God’s work. Who promulgated this definition, so stunningly ignorant of the very idea of religious vocation? The almighty HHS secretary.

Today, it’s the Catholic Church whose free-exercise powers are under assault from this cascade of diktats sanctioned by — indeed required by — Obamacare. Tomorrow it will be the turn of other institutions of civil society that dare stand between unfettered state and atomized citizen.

Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.

But there’s no escaping it now. Oral arguments begin Monday at 10 a.m.