In an audacious power grab, the Colorado Supreme Court recently embraced, by a 4-3 decision, a judicial doctrine that would relegate the other two branches of government — and the voters — to a perfunctory role.
The high court’s activist majority used Lobato vs. State not only to intrude on the legislature’s constitutional authority to determine [...]

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Talk about personal responsibility is cheap. Legislating personal responsibility isn’t.  Take the movement to require everyone to purchase government-approved health insurance.
If at first this seems like a reasonable requirement necessary to reduce cost shifting by those who do not pay their own fare, then step back and think again.  The damage caused by such a [...]

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Say what you will about Bill Clinton’s foreign policy shortcomings, but for the most part he had the good sense not to squander Ronald Reagan’s legacy of peace through strength.
By contrast, Barack Obama’s foreign policy seems to be predicated on a boundless faith in his own persuasive powers and the naïve notion that our international [...]

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Our ongoing debate about government’s role in health care is proving worthwhile because it forces people to focus on the real tradeoffs in a system mandated — if not directly operated — by government, rather than one selected by individuals or their employers.  Today, our system is a dysfunctional hybrid.

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It’s becoming a ritual at the State Capitol: a committee is meeting to study the competing pressures of spending mandates and spending limits on the state budget.  Like those before them, this year’s panel has heard from a litany of experts and special interests, almost all of whom will complain about the Gordian knot in [...]

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Impending mortality tends to focus the mind, and looming elections tend to focus politicians’ ears on vox populi.  But just as theologians debate the sincerity of “deathbed conversions,” voters should be skeptical of lawmakers who find religion as elections near.
Although 15 months remain until the 2010 elections, Democrats are learning — just as Republicans discovered [...]

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Listening to President Obama explain “his” health care plan, I can’t help but wonder if he actually believes his own words.
Maybe it’s been so long since the adoring press corps has held him accountable for his innumerable exaggerations, omissions and misstatements that he believes he can create a new reality simply by speaking it into [...]

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Once climate-change regulators strangle the economy and carbon-counters turn gas, oil and electricity into expensive luxuries, perhaps American farmers will recognize how “our friends” in Washington, D.C., sold us out in the name of political compromise.
Last week, Capitol Hill’s agriculture lobby had a choice:  withhold support from the Waxman-Markey climate control bill or agree to [...]

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Grappling with declining state revenues makes for some very unpleasant budget choices, as Governor Ritter and the Democrat majorities in the state legislature learned over the past 12 months.
It’s fair to criticize those choices, including the governor last year denying for several months that a problem existed.  Yet anyone who has shouldered the responsibility of [...]

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America’s health care system certainly has its share of problems — of which most emanate from politicians’ tinkering, tempting frustrated consumers with promises of better benefits at someone else’s expense.
So the prospect of President Obama and Congress remaking American health care in their own image should scare the pants off anyone who looks not merely [...]

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