2016 August 29^th

Today we have a very unhappy Mona Charen writing about “Clinton’s felonious friends in Virginia.” We must not blame Ms. Charen for being unhappy; if she weren’t unhappy about something, what would she write about in her column? Unhappiness is the stock in trade of all columnists and, I am forced to say, of this blog as well. I am unhappy with Ms. Charen’s unhappiness and so I have a theme for today. It’s all very convoluted.

Charen is unhappy with Virginia’s Governor, Terry McAuliffe, who has restored the voting rights of many convicted felons. She does not disagree with the result; she claims to be “open to the idea of restoring rights” to these people. She objects very strongly, and over many paragraphs to the method. McAuliffe did this restoration by using executive powers of various kinds, pardon, clemency and so on. Charen believes he should have persuaded the Virginia Legislature to change the law instead of going the Obama route (my term).

Charen points out that Governor McAuliffe’s action is unprecedented. She writes, “Never before have any of the prior 71 Virginia Governors issued a sua sponte clemency order of any kind, whether to restore civil rights or grant a pardon to an unnamed class of felons without regard for the nature of their crimes or any other individual circumstance relevant to their crime.” Fifty word sentences like this keep Charen from arriving quickly at the point of her message. (Sua sponte is Latin for of its own accord, that is without prompting. Charen is a law school graduate and so is inclined to insert some scholarly Latin phrases where possible.) The point Charen makes, that if a thing has never been done before, that is a good reason for not doing it now, seems like a fine conservative position. I wonder if that has a Latin name.

The Virginia General Assembly, which would have to agree to any change in the law about enfranchising felons, is two-thirds Republican and one-third Democrat. It is obvious from that imbalance that Governor McAuliffe should not waste his time trying to get a change in the law.  Happily, the public agrees with the outcome he has produced anyway: 65 percent are in favor of restoring voter rights so Governor McAuliffe will lose few votes over his action.

The General Assembly is not all that popular; they get only a 28 percent approval rating. Keep in mind that is about twice the approval rating the Republican led US Congress gets.

Charen has some difficulty here. She obviously is not a Clinton fan and she despises Donald Trump. Here is what she recently wrote about The Donald:

“I first became aware of Donald Trump when he chose to make cheating on his first wife front-page news. It was the early ’90s. Donald and Ivana Trump broke up over the course of months. Not that divorce is shocking, mind you. Among the glitterati marriage seems more unusual. Nor is infidelity exactly novel. But it requires a particular breed of lowlife to advertise the sexual superiority of one’s mistress over the mother of one’s children. That was Trump’s style. He leaked stories to the New York tabloids about Ivana’s breast implants — they didn’t feel right. Marla Maples, by contrast, suited him better.”

Charen goes on from there, but you get the picture. Poor Mona, whom can she vote for? Where’s Ross Perot when you need him?