The Volokh Conspiracy
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Assessing the GOP Presidential Candidates Ten Days Before the Iowa Caucuses
Nikki Haley is libertarianism's best bet.
I consider myself to be a libertarian conservative with a Reaganite view of foreign policy. The Iowa Caucuses are now only ten days away, and it is appropriate to evaluate the merits of some of the Republican presidential primary contenders at this time given my viewpoints. I will comment on what I think are the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate given my own political philosophical perspective.
Donald Trump. Donald Trump was in many ways a very successful President, but the economic boom experienced during his presidency was significantly fueled by massive deficit spending and over-borrowing. Trump has a history as a businessman of driving his companies into bankruptcy and of being rescued by loans from the Deutsche-Bank that may well have come from his good buddy Vladimir Putin. A re-elected President Trump might very well drive the federal government into bankruptcy and that is something all voters should worry about. Vladimir Putin will not, and cannot afford to, bail out a bankrupt U.S. federal government.
I happen to think that Donald Trump should not be barred from 2024 election ballots. I also think the Jack Smith prosecution of Trump is unconstitutional. But, I do not think Trump should be re-elected President because of the way he behaved between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021.
The President has the high duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and Trump failed to do this after he lost the 2020 presidential election. Trump badgered his own loyal Vice President Mike Pence to violate federal election law by denying the validity of electoral votes cast for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. Instead of taking care that the federal election laws be faithfully executed, Trump tried to bludgeon his own Vice President into violating them. When that did not work, Trump assembled a mob in front of the Ellipse at the White House and urged them to march on Capitol Hill and to "fight" to take our country back. As a direct result of the riot, which Donald Trump incited, five people died and more than one hundred were injured. For the first time in 234 years of American history, there was not a peaceful transfer of power following a presidential election.
Trump watched all of this unfold for two and one half hours on television at the Oval Office. He knew then that he had the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. He also knew that a simple Tweet from him would have instantly ended the riot. He knew that he had the power to stop the riot by calling out the national guard. He even knew that some rioters were calling for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence to which he reportedly said that maybe Mike Pence deserves to hang.
Finally, after two-and one-half hours Trump urged the mob to peacefully leave the Capitol, and it did. That mob was under Donald Trump's total control, and he had a duty to take care that federal law be faithfully executed. But, instead of owning up to that duty Trump allowed a deadly riot to unfold, which he could have instantly stopped had he wanted to do so at any time.
In the wake of this, I wrote an op-ed calling for Trump's second impeachment and urged the Senate to permanently bar him from ever holding office again. The Senate was too scared of Trump and of his Proud Boy and Oath-keeper thugs to do its duty. And, so now we see Trump leading President Biden in some polls in the race to be re-elected President.
Now it is time for Iowa voters to do their duty. They ought to vote against Donald Trump ten days from now when the caucuses happen. Donald Trump quite simply cannot be trusted to do his duty as President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Voters must therefore do their duty and vote for someone else.
Again, I am not an advocate of keeping Donald Trump off of election ballots. I do not believe that the riot by unarmed Americans for two and one-half hours in one city was an "Insurrection" like the Civil War. I also think that the Jack Smith prosecutions of Donald Trump are unconstitutional. Two wrongs do not make a right. And, I firmly believe that criminal defendants deserve to be protected by the Constitution, however, vile their misconduct may be. If Trump is convicted of something, I am all in favor of commuting his sentence to house arrest at Mar-a-Lago in the winter and Bedminster in the summer so long as a condition of his commutation is that he agrees not to communicate in any way with the American people or with foreign dictators while under house arrest.
What is important is that the American people make sure that Trump is a two time loser at the polls. Beyond that, the man should be allowed to fade into history and the United States should move on.
Nikki Haley has proven herself to be a formidable debater. She knows how to go for the jugular in a disarming but very effective way. Steve Matthews, who I worked very closely with in the Meese Justice Department, which appointed some libertarian conservative judges, tells me that Haley did a superb job as Governor of South Carolina, including on judicial selection. Haley's experience as a former Governor is sorely needed as former Senator Joe Biden's stumbling presidency illustrates. Haley was a good administrator as Governor, and her campaign shows that she knows how to stay focused on her own message and not to be distracted from it as too often happens with Donald Trump. She is also a generation younger than Trump, and it is again time, as President John F. Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, for the torch to be passed to a new generation.
Haley's two year stint as Ambassador to the United Nations makes her the only candidate other than Donald Trump with foreign policy experience in the race. Haley's support of Ukraine and of the Reaganite post Cold War settlement in Europe makes me strongly prefer her to Trump and DeSantis and Ramaswamy. The United States worked hard under President Reagan and the senior President Bush to bring freedom to the captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe. To throw that all away because of an inexplicable fascination with pleasing President Vladimir Putin would be a serious mistake. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he will try next to conquer the Baltic Republics or Poland. Better to stop him now by financing the Ukrainian military and not putting U.S. troops on the ground than to deal with Russia destroying the NATO alliance. I do not think our support of Ukraine should involve putting troops on the ground, nor am I against a ceasefire with the current borders rather than Ukraine returning to its pre-2014 borders. But, I greatly admire Haley's willingness to stand up for the idea that the United States is a shining city on a hill and a beacon of liberty to all nations as Ronald Reagan used to say. We need Nikki Haley's moral clarity infused into our foreign policy.
I also admire Haley because she wants to cut the size of the government by cutting federal government spending, as Ronald Reagan did, rather than growing the federal government bigger, as Donald Trump did. Federal overspending and reckless borrowing poses a huge longterm threat to private property. For this reason alone, libertarians should take Haley seriously as a candidate.
Finally, I think Haley's position of no federal law on abortion but a six-week limit on abortion in her home state of South Carolina is one that can realistically allow her to win. As a woman, Haley is uniquely positioned to bring back to the GOP those republican women who have been alienated by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, an egregiously wrong Supreme Court precedent. Obviously, Nikki Haley would be both the first woman and the first Asian-American to be elected President. As a first generation American, Nikki Haley loves this country from the bottom of her heart just as I also do as a first generation American.
On the negative side of things, Nikki Haley has not been very specific about her domestic policy agenda other than to say she wants to cut spending. She would benefit from issuing a Contract with America that would spell out ten big things she wants to accomplish in domestic policy if elected President. That strategy worked for Newt Gingrich in 1994, and it might work as well for Nikki Haley right now as well.
Ron DeSantis. I am not, as a libertarian conservative, a supporter of Florida Governor Ron De Santis. His efforts to use government power in a blunt way against a private business, the Walt Disney Company, are repulsive to everything I believe in. While I dislike the woke DEI industry, I do not think government power should be employed against it except in government schools and institutions where it should not be tolerated. DeSantis has no foreign policy record, unlike Haley or Trump, and the ideas he has put forward on foreign policy advocating isolationism seem to me to be idiotic in a highly interdependent globalized world. De Santis does not support Ukraine at all in its battle for freedom against Russian invaders, and I think his election as president would invite a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and invasions by Russia of the Baltic countries and possibly Poland.
DeSantis started his presidential campaign with a huge monetary advantage over Nikki Haley, but he ran his campaign so badly that he is now falling into third place in national polls. If he were to run the country as badly as he has run his own campaign, we should all be very worried about electing him. He is also in my view a bad debater who might not be able to nail Joe Biden for all the many mistakes he has made.
The best case in favor of voting for DeSantis is that he does not carry the baggage that Trump does, but he appeals to MAGA voters who might not go for Nikki Haley. So far that argument, however, has not been selling.
Chris Christie. Chris Christie accomplished little as Governor of New Jersey, and he became ensnared in the Bridgegate Scandal in which one of his staff members and political appointees colluded to create traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge, possibly as a retributive attack on a Democratic Mayor who had opposed Christie's 2013 Gubernatorial election. There was evidence Christie might have known about the Bridgegate plot. While it appears that no laws were broken, the misuse of gubernatorial power by Christie's aides leaves me unwilling to trust him with the far greater power of the presidency.
Moreover, Christie said the whole reason for his candidacy in the first place was to stop Trump, and if that were so Christie ought to drop out now to give Nikki Haley a clear shot at beating Trump in the New Hampshire primary. Christie stubbornly refuses to do that. One is left to conclude that Christie is a narcissist who merely wants the power and glory of the presidency to satisfy his own vanity and not to make this country a better place. After Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the last thing this country needs in its next President is yet another narcissist.
Vivek Ramaswamy. Nikki Haley memorably said of Ramaswamy that every time he talked, she felt a little bit dumber, and I must confess that that was exactly my own experience. His attack on Haley's daughter led Haley quite rightly to call him "scum." He has even more extreme isolationist views of foreign policy than do Donald Trump and Ron De Santis. I could never vote for any ticket that Ramaswamy was on even as only the Vice Presidential candidate.
Iowa voters will have to weigh all of these considerations ten days from now when the caucuses are held. I hope my own thoughts about these five candidates are helpful in making a decision.
