Democrats:

Two races illustrate why Democrats are tough to take seriously right now in Texas. In the US Senate there will be a run-off between a bright lawyer from Houston named Barbara Ann Radnofsky and Gene Kelley an 80-year old perennial candidate who never campaigns. Radnofsky won’t beat Texas’ most popular office holder but if she did she could be a credible senator. Kelley would be an embarrassment if he bothered to show up.

The second race is Lieutenant Governor where a former long-time member of the Texas House Ben Z. Grant will be in a run-off with Austin activist Maria Alvarado. Ms. Alvarado is not a joke but she is not a credible candidate to run the Texas Senate. Mr. Grant would be.

It is likely Ms. Radnofsky will win the run-off but it is not so clear Mr. Grant will. The November electorate can only see that Democrats aren’t for real in Texas anymore. And that is not good for anyone.

Governor:

Gov. Rick Perry should have had his eyes focused like lasers on a single race last night: Arlington’s Patrick vs. Grusendorf. The result should cause the governor some sleepless nights because the circumstances that propelled the Patrick win over the chairman of the House Education Committee could propel the Mad Grandma into his office.

I talked to a dozen long-time friends in Arlington who were convinced Mrs. Patrick was tilting at windmills. The Republicans were particularly disdainful. “Our primary is a conservative primary,” they snorted while suggesting an “educrat liberal” would get run out of town. Only one, a moderate Democrat thought Grusendorf had made a lot of enemies and Patrick might run well. She did not predict victory.

Patrick won handily. Why? The Arlington district is Republican and a Republican was going to win in November. So if you care who your state rep is you vote in the GOP primary. Tarrant County is a Republican county and county wide Republicans will win in November. So if you want a say in electing your District Attorney, you vote in the GOP Primary. That is exactly what a lot of erstwhile Democrats and independents did. And they have a different view of education than the Republican activists.

Grusendorf bemoaned a failure of the GOP base to vote in its own primary. He is wrong. They did vote. They were just a minority in their own party.

This could happen in November in the Governor’s race. The polls clearly show a majority of Texans support higher funding levels for education and don’t support vouchers. The Republican base is evenly divided. If Perry caters to his base Carol Strayhorn may well find a winning combination in Democrats who know their guy has no hope and independents who probably vote GOP in November anyway. This is why Perry is backing Democrat John Sharp’s tax plan. Of course, that may anger a lot of Republicans.

Dallas

The Democrats nominated the wrong guy for DA. They had an opportunity to nominate an ex-Marine and accomplished former Federal Prosecutor who would have been attractive north of the Trinity. Instead they nominated a man with a history of not paying income taxes and who forgot that he was an “intern” and not a “prosecutor” in Tarrant County. The Republicans nominated as strong a candidate as you can run in Toby Shook.

This doesn’t guarantee a Shook victory. Dallas is a two-party county trending Democrat not a Republican county. The turn out will be very high for this race because District Attorney matters – a lot. But Jarrett would have been a candidate all Democrats could have been proud to back. Watkins is an embarrassment.

A seven-month truce has been declared in the battle over the Wright Amendment. Curiously, this truce was not reached by the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, nor by American and Southwest Airlines. The combatants in this latest skirmish are Members of Congress from the Metroplex and other parts of the U.S. who claim to have an economic interest in the outcome of the Love Field “liberation” battle.

Ostensibly, the truce is supposed to give the mayors of Dallas and Fort Worth an opportunity to come up with a “solution” to the conflict. Through ticketing, one-stop service from Love, or a wider perimeter are among the alternatives that have been proposed. Another is to set up a regional airport authority similar to those operating in New York, Chicago, and Southern California. Some, including this author, have proposed closing Love Field to scheduled air service. And Southwest Airlines is once again threatening to move its headquarters from Dallas if the “solution” is anything less than full repeal of Wright.

Unfortunately, the press and the politicians are ignoring the fundamental problems with commercial aviation in the DFW region, which have nothing to do with the Wright Amendment restrictions at Love Field. First is the lack of any meaningful competition and second is the region’s excess airport capacity.

American Airlines, with 87 percent of the passenger traffic, possesses a virtual monopoly at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Southwest, with more than 90 percent of the passenger traffic, enjoys a virtual monopoly at Love Field. Consequently, travelers to and from the Metroplex pay higher average fares than are found in any other major market. To make matters worse, both DFW Airport and Love Field are underutilized—especially DFW with the addition of Terminal D and the Delta Airlines pullout from Terminal E (now known as the “ghost” terminal) last year. Put differently, we’ve got too much concrete and not enough aluminum in the local commercial aviation industry.

Given the sorry state of U.S. airlines, with most of the legacy carriers in bankruptcy or skating on thin ice, repealing Wright won’t solve the excess capacity problem. It will simply result in flights being shifted from D/FW to Love, which is already occurring with the recent addition of Missouri to the Wright Amendment states.

Southwest wants to be perceived as the “White Knight” in its quest to “liberate” Love Field. But in fact, they’re being extremely disingenuous. Where were they 20 years ago, when the industry was healthy, profitable, and expanding—and I co-chaired a task force of the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce that was trying to repeal or modify the Wright Amendment?

If Wright had been repealed back then, we would probably have witnessed a more competitive evolution of commercial air service in the region, though we surely wouldn’t have invested $3 billion in upgrading and expanding DFW. Why did Southwest wait nearly three decades to abandon their “passionate neutrality” on the Wright issue? The answer is simple: They “love” their monopoly at Love. And they know that given the precarious financial footing of American Airlines and other carriers, any competitive response at Love will be limited. American has even admitted they’ll probably lose money on their new service from Love Field to St. Louis and Kansas City.

We should also be mindful of the fact that 64 percent of DFW Airport, as well as 100 percent of Love Field, is owned by the citizens of Dallas. Sure, Love Field is an important city asset. But it pales by comparison with the city’s $10 billion investment at DFW. While competition between carriers is always good, competition between airports can be bad—especially when they have the same owner, serve the same local market, and are only eight miles apart.

The ideal solution to the dilemma posed by the Wright Amendment—one that could help fill DFW’s empty gates, spur competition, and bring down north Texas’ high airfares—would be for Southwest to shift its operations from Love Field to DFW. Southwest claims it can’t operate profitably from a “congested” airport like DFW. But that’s sheer nonsense. They’ve been serving Los Angeles International for more than 20 years with more flights than they currently operate out of Love. Surely, LAX isn’t a loss leader for the company.

Citizens of Dallas should be concerned first and foremost with protecting the city’s huge investment at DFW International. But since Southwest has stated emphatically it won’t relocate to DFW, the only alternative is to close Love Field to scheduled air service. Love would remain an attractive airport for general aviation and industrial uses. And if Southwest then decides to pick up its marbles and leave the market—which is hard to imagine—so be it.

Dr. Bernard Weinstein is Director, Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas

Lynn WoolleyIn the continuing political battle over immigration in the United States, perhaps nothing is more contentious – and misunderstood – than the 14th Amendment, which many politicians say confers automatic citizenship on the children of illegal aliens. It doesn’t.

The 14^th Amendment is one of the so-called "Civil War amendments" that were designed to settle the still-uncertain status of the Negro. The 13^th Amendment placed an official end to slavery into the Constitution, and the 14^th was ratified in 1868 to confer citizenship on the Negro as a condition of readmission to the Union for the rebel states.

The doctrine of "Birthright Citizenship" comes directly from Section 1:

That’s the clause that leads most of our elected officials to conclude that if foreigners sneak into the United States and have a baby here, the baby is a citizen by birthright. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, who serves on the House immigration subcommittee, says it would take a Constitutional amendment to deny citizenship in such cases. On my own radio program, Rep. John Carter and Senator John Cornyn – both Texas Republicans and both former judges – told me essentially the same thing.

Certainly, the myth is perpetuated by the immigrant rights lobby and by Latino organizations such as the National Council of La Raza. To those groups, the 14^th Amendment serves a valuable purpose. It provides many illegals with citizen children, often called "anchor babies" who can take advantage of social services and who can later sponsor their parents for legal status.

It’s a good deal for illegal aliens. But it makes the term "temporary worker program" somewhat silly since many of those "temporary" workers will get busy having children for the obvious benefits.

But the realities of the 14^th Amendment fly in the face of what most members of Congress seem to think.

The major intent of Section One was to overturn the ruling of Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had denied citizenship to blacks – even freed ones. The amendment did that by making U.S. citizenship take precedence over state citizenship. That meant that the states no longer had the power to withhold citizenship.

The 14^th Amendment was, in part, a way to place much of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 into the Constitution. This act had carried much of the same language that ended up in Section 1, but some language about "excluding Indians not taxed" was left out. Senator Jacob Howard, who wrote the "Citizenship Clause," was adamant that it did not make Indians citizens if they maintained their tribal relations.

So, according to the author of the clause, birth inside the United States was not, by itself, enough to confer citizenship. The word "jurisdiction" in the clause was seen to mean more than just being subject to our laws – but "exclusive" allegiance to the United States. By that reasoning, the authors of the amendment made it clear that birthright citizenship was not to be conferred on foreigners, aliens or children born in the United States to families of ambassadors.

Indeed, the old British concept of birthright citizenship was much discussed – and rejected – by Senator Howard and others during debate over the Expatriation Act of 1868.

Furthermore, in Elk v. Wilkins in 1884, the Supreme Court ruled that a native born Indian could not become a citizen of the United States merely by renouncing allegiance to his tribe. The Court ruled there would still need to be some type of action or assent on the part of the United States. In 1870, that’s exactly what happened. The Congress decided that it would extend offers of citizenship to certain Indians, and that Congress could properly decide who was under the "jurisdiction" of the United States. The Congress did this by using specific powers granted under Section 5 of the same amendment.

Then, in 1898, the Supreme Court heard the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark and interpreted the 14^th Amendment to mean more of a common-law definition of birthright citizenship. But even so, Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller dissented partially on the grounds that the ruling went against the original intent of the amendment’s authors. Under the ruling, children of legal immigrants were automatic citizens.

But what about children of illegal immigrants? To this day, there has been no case before the Supreme Court that would affirm birthright citizenship for them. And there is precedent, under Section 5, that Congress has the power to make that decision.

Few nations today – none in Europe – confer a birthright citizenship. Whether the United States should is a matter of deep political division. However, no amendment is necessary since Congress is fully empowered by the Constitution to make that decision.

Not just from Antonin Scalia, and not just from Clarence Thomas; rather, from a unanimous U. S. Supreme Court this week came the juicy rebuke to 36 law schools trying to bar military recruiters from their premises.

The learned justices put the matter more elegantly, not to mention circumspectly, but basically they said to the law schools and law profs demanding to keep our government's recruiters at bay: Can’t you guys read? Or is it that you don't want to?

The implications of the latter question lend poignancy to the case of Rumsfeld vs. Forum for Academic and Institutional Research (FAIR).

The legal factories demanding the right to protect students from exposure to the idea of a career in military justice thumb their noses at mainstreet America. The Supreme Court had to settle this thing? Why couldn't common sense, tinged with some latent affection for our country, have done the job? Because at too many institutions of the higher wisdom you prospect for weeks without striking a vein of common sense. Leftwing ideology -- plenty of that, nevertheless.

FAIR arose from the revulsion that the American Association of Law Schools felt at the notion of seeming to endorse "antigay" discrimination by admitting military recruiters to the campus. After all, the Clinton-era compromise on admission of gays to the military --- don't ask, don't tell -- fell short of according gays unquestioned access to military service. The law schools retaliated. You don't do it our way, they said to the military, you do it someplace else.

I pause for reflection on that one. The instrument of government whose purposes is the defense of the nation couldn't recruit law students inasmuch as law profs saw the military as an instrument of discrimination. Congress intervened via the Solomon amendment, whose present form provides for cutting off federal funds to institutions that try to trammel military recruiters. FAIR objected that such a requirement interfered with its members' freedom of speech.

Replied Chief Justice John Roberts, in behalf of a unanimous court (missing only Justice Sam Alito, who hadn't been confirmed when the case was argued): "Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with every speech by recruiters, and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military policies."

It helps to recall what the Harvard faculty did to its president, Larry Summers, for wondering -- in the course of wondering about the paucity of women scientists -- whether women's minds are formed for science in the same way as men's minds are formed for it. Does anyone know the  answer to that one? I think not. What brought the roof crashing down on Summers' head, and contributed to his eventual demise as president -- was that he had implied the question of sex differences might be worth discussing. Egad! You might have thought he had proposed a School of Creationism Studies, with Pat Robertson as dean. .

Perhaps a few thousand retirements, or funerals, will take care of this particular problem eventually. And perhaps not. It's reassuring meanwhile, as per the Rumsfeld decision, to learn that the academics can push illogic only so far, with any expectation of prevailing. You kind of take what you can get these days, don't you?