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On November 9th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments challenging the constitutionality of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences. In preparation for oral arguments, JLWOP: Faces & Cases will be an on-going series on The Foundry that will tell real stories about juvenile offenders who are currently serving LWOP sentences.

Defendant: Martize M. Smolley (16)
Victims: Kelly Houser, Amy Allen
Crimes: Two counts, felony first degree murder & other charges
Crime date: June 14, 2004 in Peoria, Illinois

Summary
Martize Smolley shot and killed a mother and daughter who had stopped at an ATM on their way to an ice cream parlor.

Facts
On the evening of June 14, 2004, Martize Smolley announced to his friend Monterius Hinkle that he was going to “get some money.” He armed himself with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun and headed out toward Jefferson Street. Continue reading…

               
On May 10, 2007 sixteen-year old Blair Holt and his friends were riding the bus home from school in Chicago. This was Blair’s last ride. A Chicago juvenile gang member looking for another gang member pushes his way onto the bus and fires wildly at the other gang member who is sitting just behind Blair. The shots hit five people, including one which killed Blair. The juvenile was convicted and sentenced to life. Blair’s father, Chicago Police Officer Ron Holt, tells Blair’s story and explains why juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) for juvenile killers and violent teens is necessary and appropriate in the right cases. Officer Holt says JLWOP is not a liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican issue; it is, in his words, a “public safety issue.” Officer Holt believes LWOP for juvenile killers and violent teens keeps communities safe and strong in their fight against crime.

Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two lawyers currently working at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), spoke out against cap and trade in their Washington Post column. Zabel has first hand experience with cap and trade, overseeing California’s cap and trade and offsets programs. The article is full of good reasons why a cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a bad idea. They also highlight how it differs substantially from the acid rain cap and trade plan, which proponents  tout as a reason to cap and trade CO2:

Cap-and-trade means a declining “cap” on total emissions, while allowing trading of pollution permits. Confidence in the certainty of declining caps is based on the mistaken assumption that cap-and trade was proven in the EPA’s acid rain program. In fact, addressing acid rain required relatively minor modifications to coal-fired power plants. Reductions were accomplished primarily by a fuel switch to readily available, affordable, low-sulfur coal, along with some additional scrubbing. In contrast, the issues presented by climate change cannot be solved by tweaks to facilities; it requires an energy revolution through investments in building clean-energy facilities.”

Continue reading…

For the second day, Republican Senators boycotted the scheduled markup of the Kerry-Boxer (S.1733) cap-and-trade bill. Senator Inhofe (R-OK) appeared briefly to emphasize that the minority is holding firm to their demands that the Environmental Protection Agency complete a comprehensive economic analysis.

Rather than use a procedural gambit to trounce the rights of the minority, Senator Boxer announced the committee would receive a briefing from committee staff on the actual provisions of the latest version of the bill. That is certainly not objectionable, but common sense suggests a thorough understanding of the legislation would be a prerequisite for a markup.

In addition, just as Senators prepare to gain a better understanding about the legislation, Senator Rockefeller (D-WV) hinted, “some people are talking about not doing it [global warming] until after the 2010 election.” Senator Olympia Snow (R-ME) went as far to say, “Obviously, it’s not an issue we will be readily addressing this year.”

Continue reading…

Czech President Vaclav Klaus has signed the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty proclaiming, “the Czech Republic will cease to be a sovereign state.” He’s right. The Lisbon Treaty contains the building blocks of a United States of Europe and will shift power from the member states of the EU to Brussels in crit­ical areas of policymaking, including defense, secu­rity, and energy–areas in which the United States finds more traction on a bilateral basis. The treaty is a blueprint for restricting the sovereign right of EU member states to determine their own foreign poli­cies, and above all, the treaty underscores the EU’s ambi­tions to become a global power and challenge Ameri­can leadership on the world stage.

It contains all the essential components of an EU super­state including a President, a Foreign Minister, a single legal personality, a diplomatic corps and a public prosecutor. Majority voting replaces unanimity voting in at least 40 new areas, including foreign policy, immigration, energy, humanitarian aid, sport and investment. Continue reading…

Yesterday the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment unanimously approved legislation to ban the importation of foreign radioactive waste for disposal in the U.S. Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN) introduced H.R. 515: Radioactive Import Deterrence Act in January of 2009 and the bill could soon be up for a vote in the House of Representatives. The full committee will vote on the bill tomorrow with a full House at some future point after that. When the subcommittee approved the legislation Barton said,

We’re the only nation in the world that buries the nuclear waste of other countries in our soil. We already have limited space in our country for the radioactive waste generated by American entities and it should be preserved for them – the medical facilities, university research labs and utility companies.” Continue reading…

In February 2009, President Obama revealed his trade policy agenda in the opening chapter of the 2009 Trade Policy Agenda and 2008 Annual Report. Short on substance, the agenda outlined many of the same broad ideas presented during his presidential campaign: enforcing trade rules and making trade “fairer” rather than freer. While the chapter did provide for America’s commitment to the World Trade Organization, moving forward with at least one of the three pending U.S. free trade agreements awaiting congressional approval and keeping any new climate legislation consistent with America’s international trade obligations, these general objectives lacked the details needed to restore confidence that America would continue to set the standard for liberal international trade policy, or remain a responsible leader of the global economy.

The President promised a more thorough review America’s trade policy over the first half of 2009 and a new road map for U.S. trade relations this summer – a promise that remains unfulfilled as his first year as president comes to a close. Lacking the Administration’s willingness to detail a comprehensive and transparent trade agenda, the nation’s trade regime is instead being shaped and undermined by a slow and steady creep of protectionism in Congressional legislation and in ad hoc measures designed to cater to special interests. Continue reading…

A Lewin Group study commissioned by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, finds that although the Baucus health care bill (the legislation that recently passed the Senate Finance Committee) is often touted as the most fiscally responsible of all of Congress’s reform plans, it “relies on certain cost containment approaches that have not worked in the past” and therefore “does not bend the total health care cost curve downward.”

Rather than fundamentally realigning incentives in the health sector to lower the overall cost of care, the Baucus bill imposes top down cuts in payments to medical providers which will only serve to shift costs around the current system. Here are some of the other key findings from the Lewin study on the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 (S.1796):

• Adds to the Deficit. The bill would add to the federal deficit in the first ten years and beyond if it included a permanent “doc fix” to prevent cuts in Medicare payments to physicians under the Sustainable Growth Rate instead of only a one year temporary fix. Every year, Congress defers these reductions in pay to doctors but the bill creates false savings by pretending that Congress would suddenly let these cuts occur. More than $404 billion in savings over the first ten years are attributable to these savings– and reductions in uncompensated care funds for hospitals that treat the uninsured (DSH payments)– that are unlikely to fully materialize. Continue reading…
  

It has been one year since the 2008 national election. During this period, the cause of missile defense has suffered serious setbacks. The overall budget for missile defense for this fiscal year will be $1.6 billion less than the amount allocated in fiscal year 2009. The number of fielded long-range defense interceptors in Alaska and California will be 30, as opposed to 44. The Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) program for countering decoys and countermeasures designed to overwhelm or confuse the defense has been terminated. The Airborne Laser (ABL) program has been curtailed. The boost-phased interceptor program, called the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) has been terminated. Finally, the program to field ground-based interceptors for countering long-range missile in Europe has been canceled.

As bad as the past year has been for missile defense, the future appears even bleaker. The Obama Administration is prepared to subordinate missile defense to its arms control agenda, most particularly President Obama’s desire to achieve global nuclear disarmament. It is also pitting one missile defense program against another, which is likely represents a serial approach to killing most of these programs. Continue reading…

On October 30, the United States voted with the majority in the General Assembly to support U.N.-sponsored negotiations to regulate the conventional arms trade. The vote was 153-1, with the pariah state of Zimbabwe the lone hold out. More significantly, some of the world’s more ethically challenged arms traders – the states of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, India, Pakistan, and Cuba – abstained in the vote.

U.S. support for the negotiations reversed the policy of the Bush Administration, but the U.S. agreed to participate only if the negotiations were conducted on the basis of consensus, which the Obama administration claims will “ensure that all countries can be held to standards that will actually improve the global situation.”

The vote is not, in practice, as immediately significant as its supporters claim. The Open-Ended Working Group on the treaty that was already meeting in New York – and in which the U.S. was already participating – has been transformed into a Preparatory Committee for the crowing U.N. conference on the treaty. But that conference was always supposed to be held in 2012: the latest resolution simply confirms that goal and date. Continue reading…

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Munich in March she presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift intended to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire to “push the reset button” on U.S. relations with Moscow. Problem is, the lettering on the little red button said “overload” (peregruzka), not “reset” (perezagruzka). This high level gaffe is just about the perfect symbol for how Obama’s Russian relation relaunch has gone.

White House wordsmiths seem to also have forgotten that if you push the reset button, old software bugs get reloaded. When it comes to Russia’s visceral suspicion of America, that’s exactly what happened. Continue reading…

Yesterday in a victory that was not as close as the final pre-election polls had suggested, voters in Maine adopted a “people’s veto” to protect the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The margin was 53-47. The voting was closely watched for several reasons, as each of the other 30 states that have held popular votes on marriage redefinition has seen popular majorities approve the traditional understanding. Even more important, had proponents of same-sex marriage prevailed in Maine, it would have marked the first time that the public would have ratified a prior state legislative decision on this issue. Continue reading…

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding confirmation hearings this afternoon for five nominees. One of the nominees, Jide J. Zeitlin, is being nominated to be Representative of the United States to the United Nations for U.N. Management and Reform and to hold the rank of Ambassador. There are a number of issues the Committee should explore during their deliberations on Zeitlin’s nomination.

As discussed in an article today in The Washington Post, Zeitlin “has faced some financial setbacks and clashes as a private investor, including legal complications involving a telecommunications start-up he owns in India and the bankruptcy of a pharmaceutical company he helped finance.” Specifically, an Indian firm is accusing his company of reneging on a contract to pay for wireless towers in India. An Indian court has ordered the liquidation of his firm to pay for the contract.

The matter is still being litigated not necessarily unusual—after all, a number of businessmen encounter financial difficulties and wrongfully undergo court action. However, there are other troubling issues in Zeitlin’s background. Continue reading…

Conservatives may have defeated Hillarycare fifteen years ago, but in the intervening years the left succeeded in passing a slew of incremental reforms that have led to a slow but steady march toward a government takeover of health care in this country.

These Hillarycare-lite measures include adding more middle-class kids to the children’s health care program (known as SCHIP), along with expanding Medicaid eligibility. As of 2007, the federal government controlled 46% of every health care dollar spent compared to 44% in 1993.

But should Obamacare become law (specifically the House bill) the government takeover of health care would be greatly accelerated. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the Obama HHS department, the government could control more than 50% of all health care spending –even before most of the major spending provisions in the House bill are implemented.

Government takeover of the health care sector? You decide.

International expectations went through the roof one year ago today with the election of Barack Obama. The United Stated had elected the man whom many across the globe expected to be the anti-Bush. As controversial abroad as President Bush’s stance on the long war against terrorism had been, just as euphoric was the reaction to the election of the Democratic presidential nominee. The jubilation reflected a belief that as president, Obama would think less like an American and more like the rest of the world – however that was defined.

During the presidential campaign, candidate Obama had done much to encourage this belief. In his July speech in front of the Victory column in Berlin, Obama set the theme for many of his later foreign policy speeches, the apology for American actions. “I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lives up to its best intentions.” The German audience and the world lapped it up. Continue reading…

Visiting the complicated world of emerging adults (young people between the ages of 18 and 29, with data now available up to age 23), Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker report back with findings that raise challenges for the future of marriage as an institution. Some of their findings, which will appear next year in a volume from the Oxford University Press titled Premarital Sex in America, were presented last week at a Heritage Foundation conference on what scholarly research says about religious practice in America.

The good news is that emerging adults (five percent of fewer) say almost without exception that they expect and want to marry someday. The bad news is that this goal is not only being postponed for their late 20s or even 30s chronologically, but repositioned in ways that call into question whether marriage as they conceive it can be more than a mirage. Continue reading…

On the anniversary of the November 2008 election, it seems appropriate to assess the impact of the Administration on America’s relationship with the United Nations. After all, one of President Obama’s sharpest criticisms of the Bush Administration was its supposed resistance to multilateral efforts—particularly U.N.-led multilateral efforts—to resolve international problems.

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned. In its first 9 months, the Obama administration has sought to purchase goodwill at the U.N. by conceding U.S. policy positions, downplaying the U.N.’s many problems, and seeking to engage with the U.N. on a host of priorities in which is unlikely to prove a capable partner.

Shortly after the election, Obama described the United Nations as “an indispensable and imperfect forum” that was vital to U.S. interests. While he acknowledged the need to reform the body, his comments clearly indicated that he was far more interested in seeking to make the U.N. a “more effective … venue for collective action” than in fixing the problems facing the organization. Continue reading…

On May 12, 1990, 28-year old Jimmy Cotaling of Michigan drove his car to a store to buy his mother a Mother’s Day card. When he failed to return home, his family filed a missing person’s report. His car was found in Ohio. The police investigated the two occupants of the car, one of whom had suffered a stab wound to the stomach. Three days into the investigation, one of the suspects confessed that she and the co-defendant lured Jimmy into a house and killed him. Further investigation revealed that they lured Jimmy to a house in Michigan on his way to the store, stabbed him 26 times, and almost cut his head off. Police found Jimmy’s body in the house. The 16-year old female, who was the ring leader, received life without parole.

Last night, elections were held in several states across the nation, and by most independent observations, the results served as a warning to liberals. Whether it was Republican victories in Virginia, New Jersey or even in typical liberal bastions like Westchester County, New York, the post-analysis was framed on what does this mean on Capitol Hill, and more importantly, what does this mean for the conservative movement. However, last night did not represent a new day for conservatives. On Monday, the same could have been said: the state of conservatism is strong.

The state of conservatism can be measured through its popularity, its policies and its people. Most observers would say Election Day 2008 was not a good day for conservatives. However, putting election results aside, President Obama campaigned as a centrist. Obama promised to address jobs, the economy, our national security and even hold teachers accountable for our children’s education. Obama promised that most of America would receive a tax cut. He promised to win a “necessary” war in Afghanistan. These are conservative principles. Continue reading…

Do Americans have a right to government-run health care? Is it “the consent of the governed” to be forced to obey the dictates of unelected bureaucrats? Does religious liberty allow our government to impose a secular culture?  These are among great questions of the day to which Americans ought to apply the guiding principles of our nation’s founding, Matthew Spalding, a constitutional scholar at The Heritage Foundation, argues in his new book “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future.”

Spalding is sure to talk about “We Still Hold These Truths” in the context of these and similar rumblings on the American scene Wednesday morning, when he guests on the national radio show “Bill Bennett in the Morning” (Listen Here) at 8:05 a.m. EST.  It’s fair to say author, commentator and radio host William J. Bennett, who served as Secretary of Education under President Reagan, is a fan of Spalding’s book. Bennett happily contributed the foreword. Continue reading…