Monthly Archives: January 2019

Union Greed Realized

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Recall that the United Teachers Los Angeles union threatened to strike this week if they didn’t get their way.  Now they’ve gone ahead and done it, putting the education (such as it is in this district’s public—NTLA-manned—schools) of 500,000 children at risk.  For instance, at the Third Street Elementary School

[a] notice plastered on the school gate said that students will be gathered in the auditorium and the outdoor lunch pavilion area, instead of classrooms, during the strike, and overseen by administrators and teacher assistants.

No education allowed here, per the NTLA.

Recall the issue central to the union’s demands—the end of competition from charter schools that operate in the same district, sometimes in the same school buildings, and that attract students, who then do much better in school and get much better educations.

The union…cast the strike as a broader referendum on the growth of charter schools, which don’t have to follow some public-school regulations and whose teachers are largely nonunionized. Charter schools aren’t part of the contract bargaining….

In other words, charter school teachers have much greater flexibility in how they teach their students, and they aren’t bound by union demands regarding employment and employment parameters.  Charter school teachers also are regulated by the State rather than the union local jurisdictions.

What? Me Compromise?

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In a Wall Street Journal piece Sunday about the length of the current partial government shutdown—they’re touting is (as are most of the NLMSM) as the longest on record as though a partial closure is somehow comparable to a complete closure—Kristina Peterson, Michael Bender, and Rebecca Ballhaus closed with a description of a bill being developed by Senators Rob Portman (R, OH) and Jerry Moran (R, KS) that would pair DACA recipient legal status with funding for border security, which would include a wall.

However.

Democrats are unlikely to view the bill as a fair trade, as it swaps $25 billion in border security for legal status—and not a path to citizenship—for the young immigrants….

This would be just another example of the Progressive-Democrats’ absolute refusal to negotiate. Such a bill would move the DACA matter significantly in their direction, with nothing at all to prevent them from coming back later with a bill to move “legal status” to “path to citizenship”—the Reagan move of taking half a loaf today and coming back tomorrow for the other half.

The Progressive-Democrats only know “No,” however.

A Judge’s Error

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The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds.  Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.

Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong.  Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that

the [expansion] would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

For one thing, given how cheap birth control drugs and devices are and how easily obtained prescriptions for them are, it’s not at all clear that a “substantial number” of women would be unable to obtain birth control drugs or devices.

But the larger, vastly more important matter is this.  As Gilliam himself noted, the expansion would be a policy shift (massive or not, that’s irrelevant here).  Policy matters are political matters, and so they clearly are outside the purview of the courts.  Policy—political—matters are the exclusive province of the political arms of our government and of We the People.  A judge who intrudes, from his bench, into political matters clearly violates his oath to uphold the law.  Making policy has no place in his oath.

For Whom Do They Work?

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Some Progressive-Democrats in the House are beginning to wonder about their Party’s strategy for dealing with the border wall funding question, immigration reform generally, and, proximately, the current partial government shutdown.  For instance, here’s Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (D, MI):

There’s a number of us on the Democratic side who are quite concerned that we’re not working on negotiated positions and taking the bull by the horns and trying to think about what it would look like[.]

Some are just irrational, like Harley Rouda (D, CA):

Next he’ll want a moat with alligators[.]

Reasonable or foolish, though, Progressive-Democrats must decide—sooner is better—whether they work for their constituents or for their Party leadership.

Pelosi Abandoned DACA Recipients

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‘Way last December, now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) revealed the depth of Progressive-Democrats’ opposition to anything Trump or Republican.

[Then-]House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…rejected the idea of partially funding President Donald Trump’s border wall in exchange for amnesty for “Dreamers….”

Recall that in President Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address, he laid out his four pillars of immigration policy:

  • legal status for 1.8 million illegal aliens brought to the US as minors, including those who had not registered under DACA
  • a secure border
  • ending the visa lottery
  • ending chain migration

Aside from “secure border” including a wall along parts of it in Trump’s lexicon, notice that he offered legalization for 1,000,000 more DACA types than the Progressive-Democrats had pretended to fight for during the Obama administration.

The Progressive-Democrats were for DACA recipients relief before they decided to completely abandon them.  Can the Progressive-Democratic Party get any lower, any more despicable, in its hysterical opposition to Trump?