This column by ACRU Senior Legal Analyst Ken Klukowski was published January 26 on Townhall.com.

It’s a positive sign of the times that constitutional expert Mike Lee of Utah was elected to the U.S. Senate. To make full use of Senator Lee’s extraordinary knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell should appoint Senator Lee to serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Lee may be the first of many, as there’s already a 2012 Senate candidate with credentials to match Senator Lee.

Mike Lee has credentials in constitutional law unmatched in the U.S. Senate. The son of former U.S. Solicitor General Rex Lee, Mike Lee graduated from BYU’s law school, where his father was the former dean. From there, Mike Lee clerked for a U.S. district judge, then for Sam Alito when Alito was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. When Judge Alito became Justice Alito, he brought Lee back, making him (to my knowledge) the only current member of the Senate to have clerked for a Supreme Court justice.

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This column by ACRU Policy Board Member and Professor of Economics Walter E. Williams was published January 26 on Townhall.com.

National debt is over $14 trillion, the federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion and, depending on whose estimates are used, the unfunded liability or indebtedness of the federal government (mostly in the form of obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drugs) is estimated to be between $60 and $100 trillion.

Those entitlements along with others account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls mandatory or non-discretionary spending. Then there’s discretionary spending, half of which is for national defense. Each year, non-discretionary spending consumes a higher and higher percent of the federal budget.

The spending path that Congress has chosen for the last half-century is unsustainable and will end up with economic collapse but little or nothing can be done about it unless I’m grossly wrong about the American people. Americans who detest our country and those who love our country are hell-bent, wittingly or unwittingly, on destroying it.

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