Wrecking Crew member reviews Wrecking Crew

The Boston Globe shows the bad editorial judgment to assign a man, Mickey Edwards, to review Tom Frank's The Wrecking Crew whose key claims in his own book, as I demonstrated in my Washington Post review of it, are simply made up:

Until the second Bush administration, he argues, "conservatives had always understood that a president had no more right to simply disobey the law than does the guy who cleans the windshield at the local filling station." He forgets how the right greeted Oliver North as its rock and redeemer in 1987 for unashamedly circumventing a law -- the Boland Amendment, banning U.S. funding for the Nicaraguan Contras -- that Edwards praises in this book as an admirable instance of the First Branch exerting its Constitutional power of the purse.

Similarly, Edwards claims that until recently "the most prominent supporters of the line-item veto had been liberal Democrats." He admits that Ronald Reagan also sought the power to strike individual spending items appropriated by Congress. But he argues that Reagan (whom conservatives, whatever else they may disagree about, almost universally consider to have been conservatism incarnate) was only bluffing: "In effect, proposing a line-item veto was a public relations stunt."

Such solecisms cannot survive the Internet age. Using the Proquest Historical Newspapers database, I quickly checked every instance in this newspaper in which someone proposed a federal line-item veto going back to the notion's debut in 1967. I found not a single liberal Democrat. I found, on the other hand, plenty of articles in the 1970s about then-Gov. Reagan's delight in exercising line-item veto power in California -- and, later, Republican after Republican proposing to give him that same power as president. It was, to be sure, a debate among conservatives, not a doctrine: "One of the few proposals rejected," ran a dispatch from a May 1981 conference of Republican officials, "was the suggestion by Gov. Christopher Bond" -- the conservative governor of Missouri -- "that the Constitution be amended to give the president line-item veto authority on appropriation bills." The Post article goes on to chalk up that defeat to the insistent opposition of a congressman named . . . Mickey Edwards.

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