Such criticisms and caricatures, acceptable then, are conspicuously out of place today. Reagan had the vision and character needed to confront the great issues of his time, which equipped him to effect a sea change in policy while enduring the criticism that naturally comes when leaders steer a fundamentally new course. He entered the White House on the heels of several presidencies that had ended with some level of disappointment. Some questioned whether the office had become too much for one man. Those questions were laid to rest by the time of Reagan’s retirement.

On the domestic front, he knew that generations of uncontrolled government expansion had taken its toll on personal freedom. He redefined a national dialogue that seemed incapable of recognizing bloated government as part of the problem rather than the solution. In the face of seemingly incurable inflation, he broke with his predecessors and supported the Federal Reserve’s new tight money policies, weathering short-term pain for the sake of the nation’s long-term economic health. He pushed sweeping tax cuts and trade policies that helped lay the foundation for years of prosperity. In his first presidential campaign, Bill Clinton exploited a short-lived recession that he blamed on “twelve years of Reagan/Bush.” That claim does not withstand scholarly scrutiny today.

Reagan’s greatest achievement came in foreign policy, where the Cold War was won without a World War III. Here too he departed from the more defensive posture followed by predecessors of both parties. The Soviet economy, in his view, was weaker than most experts (including in the CIA) believed, and that weakness should be exploited. So he went on the offensive, waging an aggressive arms race and pushing for democratic reforms that precipitated Soviet collapse. The opposition to his defense policies was intense—the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in particular was widely lampooned—but President Reagan’s determination led the Soviets to back down. With the Soviet collapse that followed came the collapse of communist systems throughout Eastern Europe, freeing millions of people from totalitarian rule.

As with most great leaders, his view of the task before him was of the long term. When he addressed the Republican national convention in 1976, he spoke of a letter he was asked to put into a time capsule to be opened in 100 years. He thought he would write of the challenge posed by “a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other’s country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in. And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.”

It would not take 100 years to know that thanks in large part to his leadership, freedom had won.

Frank Scaturro, a former Counsel for the Constitution on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Republican candidate for the United States House of Representatives in New York’s 4^thCongressional District in 2010, is the author of, among other works, President Grant Reconsidered.

This and other articles on the Reagan Centennial are also featured at Liberty Central: http://www.libertycentral.org/category/front-page.

Last week, Carolyn McCarthy wrote a letter addressing the court-martial of three U.S. Navy SEALs who allegedly punched a terrorist.

The lack of knowledge about our troops, or of willingness to defend them, is disturbing.

In the letter, Rep. McCarthy not only fails to defend the SEALs against the overblown charges; she does not seem to know that they had already been cleared of all charges!

Rep. McCarthy on June 16, 2010: “As you know, the three SEALs maintain their innocence and want their names cleared in a court-martial. Their case will go before a special court-martial scheduled to begin in January. If convicted, the SEALs risk demotion and prison time of up to one year.

Coming on the heels of her concern for the Gaza blockade runners and disregard of Israel’s justified response, Carolyn McCarthy now cannot bring herself to acknowledge that three U.S. Navy SEALs have won their case against unfair charges. If our elected representatives do not show more support for our combat troops, how can we expect them to feel they have the proper support from their country?”

Credit to Brian Faughnan for addressing this issue and defending our troops.

Frank Scaturro is the leading candidate for the United States House of Representatives in New York’s 4thCongressional District. He has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, and Counsel for the Constitution on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2005 to 2009.

The reaction caught by the cameras was so subdued that it strains credulity to suggest that the Justice was trying to do anything remotely distracting or disruptive.  That did not stop Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Ted Kaufman (D-DE) from pointedly accusing Justice Alito of acting inappropriately.  Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) went as far as to single out Justice Alito in a floor speech with a snide attack on the Justice for supposedly going back on his testimony during his nomination hearings about the limited role of judges.  Sen. Leahy proceeded to make the same mischaracterization of Citizens United as the State of the Union Address with an uninformed reference to “100 years of the Supreme Court’s own precedents.”

There is a century-old federal statute that prohibits direct contributions to campaigns by corporations, but the Court’s decision did not touch that.  It struck down a more controversial 1947 provision banning independent expenditures by corporations and labor unions.  That provision only became law over the veto of President Harry Truman, who warned that the ban was “a dangerous intrusion on free speech.”  In cases that arose during the 1940’s and 1950’s, Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, Wiley Rutledge, and Chief Justice Earl Warren reached the same conclusion that the Court would in Citizens United.  Although a majority of the Court did not decide the issue back then, no one would consider those names of the past—all considered liberals in their time—to be pawns of corporations.  Regardless of whether you ultimately agree with their conclusion, the justices who joined the recent decision deserve credit for taking seriously the weighty free speech considerations involved in the case.

As a constitutional law counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee who worked on Justice Alito’s nomination, I was glad to see the nomination prevail over bitter party-line opposition, but disturbed by the tactics used against him.  Before and after his nomination, Justice Alito has consistently displayed the decorum and respect that was sadly denied him by opponents of his nomination when he faced the Senate.  He did not deserve this latest round of demagoguery, particularly from the body that handled his nomination.

Note: Frank Scaturro, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, served as Counsel for the Constitution on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2005 to 2009.  He is a candidate for the United States House of Representatives in New York’s 4^th Congressional District.