John Fund Quotations

When the islands became a state in 1959, ... there was a broad consensus in Congress that Native Hawaiians would not be treated as a separate racial group, and that they would not be transformed into an 'Indian tribe.'

No party has a monopoly on honesty, but with the collapse of old-style GOP machines in places like Indiana and Long Island, New York, it's Democrats who have a greater opportunity to cheat.

Hawaiians would also be unable to fight back, as the state does not allow for referendums, ... And, just as on American Indian land, a shopkeeper who is part Hawaiian could claim exemption from state taxes and other laws, giving him an advantage over his next-door, non-Native Hawaiian competitor.

I think the bitterness generated by this election should prompt people of good will in both parties to try and find common ground, or as Democratic Senator Chris Dodd put it, ""Make it easy to vote, but tough to cheat.

Other speakers claimed Georgia's new photo-ID law would suppress poor and elderly minority voters who might lack such a document. When the bill passed the Georgia House in March, black legislators sang slave songs and one even slammed a prisoner's shackles on the desk of the sponsor,

Regardless of whether or not the vetting process was complete, it represented impossible conflicts of interest,

The astonishing thing is how puzzled the Yale community was that the rest of the world cared and they didn't.

Well, Mr. Kerry's constant unfounded references to African-Americans having their votes: "stolen" or "taken away" in 2000 are far more likely to exacerbate racial divisions.

The bottom line on all of this is that, increasingly, election systems are so sloppy in New York that you cannot tell where the incompetence ends and the fraud could begin.

That the decision is taken away from the voters, and as in 2000 turned over to the lawyers and the courts.

That is a judicious way of handling these charges, rather than having them played out on television, where everything gets confused and the trivial gets mixed in with other stuff that is legitimate.

The Voting Rights Act, whose 40th anniversary we celebrate this month, has helped minorities elect 81 sitting members of Congress and thousands of local officials. But the rally civil rights groups held in Atlanta earlier this month to push for extension of the act's key temporary provisions downplayed those gains and instead pushed wild claims that some state laws requiring an ID to vote are the functional equivalent of Jim Crow poll taxes,

I suggest three things a) every state should require photo Id to vote. We demand it to board planes and rent a video at Blockbuster. Why not when voting? B) Clear statewide registration lists that can be pruned of ineligible names and which can be compared with those in other states to weed out duplicates. C) More effective and frequent prosecution of voter fraud crimes, with no regard to whose party they impact.

The current scandals in Washington should remind us just how far we have strayed from the vision of limited government the Founders handed down to us. So long as government grows more powerful, money will find its way to Washington to attempt to influence it.

I think Democrats often hold the unconstrained vision, and Republicans focus more on the Rule of Law.

One Blue Dog Democratic House Member reminded me earlier this month of the saying that 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' He wondered if his fellow Members weren't more in need of advice from psychiatrists than from economists at this point.

I think the only way we retain credibility with the Arab world is to say, 'When push came to shove, despite the mistakes we made in the past, we are with you in democracy.'

Remember, the Islamist view of democracy is: one man, one vote, one election, and that's it.

The RNC was run so badly you could walk through their deepest competence and not get your ankles wet.

I believe careers should be judged independently unless there's a clear conflict of interest in a specific case.

The Civil War was about a lot of things, but the core of it was slavery. That was the original sin.

There have been brilliant satires about the tax bureaucracy before, from the Beatles song ‘The Taxman’ to the film ‘Harry’s War,’ but in some ways Jim Greenfield’s The Taxman Cometh outdoes them all. His tale of a little guy who can’t take it anymore is both compelling and timely, given the tax scandals we read about in Washington almost every day.

Dozens of members of Congress will be retiring next month, and some should be missed. But there is only one Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator the Christian Science Monitor has dubbed 'a rabble-rousing statesman.'

Tom Coburn never forgot that members of Congress are spending the hard-earned money of the people back home. Even a lot of conservatives end up forgetting that. Here's hoping that back in the private sector, Tom Coburn keeps up the fight for his beliefs and that he remains a constant reminder to lawmakers and the White House of ethical standards to which all should aspire.

Given that Mr. Kerry is clearly exaggerating what happened to minority voters in the 2000 election in Florida, maybe we should wait for him to provide evidence of what he is alleging in 2004.

Rhetoric is cheap, evidence comes more dearly.

As government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system.

One thing members of Congress need to realize is how much their reliance on staffers is hurting the institution and helping make it unaccountable.