Tag Archives: Ken Blackwell

News

Donald Trump names Ken Blackwell as head of his domestic transition team

18 Comments
Ken Blackwell: Senior Fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council
Ken Blackwell: Senior Fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council

OK, so some of my readers may not know who Ken Blackwell is, but long story short, this would be like naming Ted Cruz as Solicitor General or naming Thomas Sowell as head of the Congressional Budget Office. Ken Blackwell has a reputation as a social conservative who is also a fiscal conservative. Don’t worry, I have things about him for you to read, but first the announcement, which was tweeted by the Family Research Council (!) where Blackwell is a Senior Fellow.

Associated Press:

The Ohio Republican selected by president-elect Donald Trump to lead his domestic transition is an outspoken conservative with a history as a party maverick.

Ken Blackwell prevailed in an intra-party feud in 2006 to become Ohio’s first black nominee for governor. He also took on fellow Republicans in the state Legislature while serving in statewide office.

As state elections chief, Blackwell played a pivotal role in administering the hotly-contested 2004 presidential election while serving as Republican George W. Bush’s honorary campaign co-chair. Democrats alleged in political attacks and lawsuits that Blackwell supported vote-suppressing policies favoring Bush, who won Ohio and the election. Blackwell prevailed in court.

Blackwell is on the boards of the National Rifle Association and Club for Growth. He’s also a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.

Oh my goodness, you can’t appoint someone from the Family Research Council. This is the organization that gay rights activists really hate – remember the attack by gay activist Floyd Lee Corkins? That was the FRC he tried to shoot up! Wow, this is my second favorite think tank.

Here is his fact sheet from the FRC:

Ken Blackwell

Ken Blackwell is the Senior Fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council.  He is a national bestselling author of three books: Rebuilding America: A Prescription For Creating Strong Families, Building The Wealth Of Working People, And Ending Welfare; The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency; and Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.

He serves on the Board of Directors of various high-profile organizations including the Timothy Plan, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the United States Air Force Academy Foundation, the Club for Growth, Grove City College, the National Rifle Association, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the National World War II Museum, and the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of Advisors, of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

Mr. Blackwell has had a vast political career. He was mayor of Cincinnati, Treasurer and Secretary of State for Ohio, undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He was a delegate to the White House Summit on Retirement Savings in 1998 and 2002. During the 1990s, he served on the congressionally appointed National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform and the board of the International Republican Institute. He was Co-Chairman of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board from 1999-2001.

He has received many awards and honors for his work in the public sector. These accolades include the U.S. Department of State’s Superior Honor Award for his work in the field of human rights which he received from both the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In 2004, the American Conservative Union honored Mr. Blackwell with the John M. Ashbrook Award for his steadfast conservative leadership.

Ken’s commentaries have been published in major newspapers and websites: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and Investor’s Business Daily.  In addition, he has been interviewed by many media outlets including CBS’sFace the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and Fox News Sunday.

His continuing education has included executive programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Mr. Blackwell has also received honorary doctoral degrees from ten institutions of higher education. He holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Education degrees from Xavier University in Ohio, where he later served as a vice president and member of its faculty. In 1992, he received Xavier’s Distinguished Alumnus Award and was inducted into Xavier’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2015.

I do have something that I can give you right away. A while back the Heritage Foundation made this public policy booklet that featured essays by social conservatives writing on fiscal issues, and fiscal conservatives writing on social issues. The idea was fusionism – that social conservatives and fiscal conservatives need each other. I am a fusionist. Well, Ken Blackwell is a prominent social conservative, and he wrote a chapter on “The Rule of Law” – exactly the thing that was lacking in the corrupt Obama administration.

Here is the PDF of the booklet’s table of contents AND the chapter by Ken Blackwell!!!! How did I get this so fast? I used my Wintery powers, of course.

Also, I have a copy of the full PDF. I would really recommend to everyone that they read this so that they can get a thumbnail picture of what social and fiscal conservatives believe. Each of the essays is only 3-5 pages long, so it’s not a lot to read. These are the things that I wish that every evangelical Christian understood about public policy. Really, everyone should understand what conservatives really believe, whether you agree with these positions, or not.

If you have wonderful things about Ken Blackwell to share, leave them in the comments. This is just incredible – I would have believed that Ted Cruz would have named Ken Blackwell to such a post, but never, ever Donald Trump in a million years. I expect Trump to nominate a bunch of moderates like Giuliani, but Blackwell is more like me – very conservative, and passionate about conservative ideas and policies. I think there will be a lot of picks that I disagree with, but this is one I really agree with.

News

Fiscal and social conservatives unite in new free e-book “Indivisible”

Leave a comment

There’s a new book that just came out from the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Jay Richards:

To listen to media and political strategists is to get the impression that American public life is a checklist of issues. Some are known as “social” issues (marriage, family) and some are known as “economic” (international trade, wages). There may be some good reasons for this distinction, but when we itemize and divide these topics into two separate categories, we fail to convey the underlying unity of the principles behind the American Experiment in ordered liberty. In reality, the two groups of issues are interdependent. For instance, a free economy cannot long exist in a culture that is hostile to it. The success of free market economic policies depends on important cultural and moral factors such as thrift, delayed gratification, hard work, and respect for the property of others. A virtuous and responsible populace derives, in turn, from strong families, churches, and other civil institutions.

Conversely, economic issues have a strong influence on culture and the institutions of civil society. High taxes, for example, put pressure on families and force parents to spend more time in the workforce, leaving less time to devote to their spouses and children. When government expands spending and control in education, it crowds out parental responsibility; when it expands its role in providing social welfare services, it tends to erode a sense of responsibility among churches and other groups doing good work to help neighbors in need.

The connections are such that the individual issues rarely fit neatly and exclusively into one set or the other. An “economic” issue is rarely exclusively about economics. For instance, poverty in America is often as much a moral and cultural problem as an economic problem. Reducing such poverty depends on civil institutions that inculcate virtue and responsibility as well as policies that promote economic freedom and discourage dependency. Most poverty among children in America is not caused by a lack of jobs but rather by factors such as family breakdown, negligent or absentee parents, substance abuse, or other social pathologies. To consider American poverty in strictly economic terms is to fail to see the full scale of issues involved in this problem.

[…]The following essays are intended as a concise exploration of the link between liberty and human dignity and of the policy issues that tend to cluster around these two themes in American life. This collection brings together a number of well-known social and economic conservatives. To encourage cross-fertilization of their ideas, those known as social conservatives have written on themes normally identified with economic conservatives, and vice versa. The authors highlight economic arguments for issues typically categorized as “social” and social/moral arguments for “economic” issues. Each author focuses on a single topic, briefly summarized below, that is associated with either social or economic conservatives or, in some cases, both.

That’s also one of the main purposes of my blog, to show how fiscal conservatives and social conservatives depend on each other.

Here are the essays and authors:

  • Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government – Joseph G. Lehman
  • Rule of Law: Economic Prosperity Requires the Rule of Law – J. Kenneth Blackwell
  • Life: The Cause of Life Can’t be Severed from the Cause of Freedom – Representative Paul Ryan
  • Free Exchange: Morality and Economic Freedom – Jim Daly with Glenn T. Stanton
  • Marriage: The Limited-Government Case for Marriage – Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
  • Profit: Prophets and Profit – Marvin Olasky, Ph.D.
  • Family: Washington’s War on the Family and Free Enterprise – Stephen Moore
  • Wages: The Value of Wages – Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr.
  • Religion:  Why Faith Is a Good Investment – Arthur Brooks, Ph.D., and Robin Currie
  • International Trade: Why Trade Works for Family, Community, and Sovereignty – Ramesh Ponnuru
  • Culture: A Culture of Responsibility – Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
  • Property: Property and the Pursuit of Happiness – Representative Michele Bachmann
  • Environment: Conserving Creation – Tony Perkins
  • Education: A Unified Vision for Education Choice – Randy Hicks

Seeing the names of people paired with these topics just blows my mind. It would be as though William Lane Craig were suddenly to write a book defending free market capitalism or the war on Islamic terrorism. It’s just WEIRD. And you’ll notice that many of the Wintery Knight’s favorite people are in there; Paul Ryan, Michele Bachmann, Jennifer Roback Morse.  I also like Stephen Moore’s writing a lot.

The entire book is available for free as a PDF download, or you can order it from the Heritage Foundation. I ordered 10 copies of everything at the store, because I wanted a bunch to give away to all my friends. I think this is the perfect gift to give someone who doesn’t see the relevance of public policy to Christianity, marriage and parenting. There is no such thing as an informed Christian who is fiscally liberally or socially liberal.

Oh, and by the way: Ryan/Bachmann 2012 for the win!