Monthly Archives: July 2021

Another Progressive-Democrat Gives Another Part of the Game Away

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Laura Saunders, in her Friday Wall Street Journal column concerning the Roth IRAs, the rich and deplorable, and us average Americans, has a striking quote from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D, OR).

Saunders was writing about how efforts to lay punitive limits and punitive taxes on the Roth IRAs of the super wealthy can only have deleterious effects on the rest of us.

Here’s Wyden’s statement on the matter:

IRAs were designed to provide retirement security to middle-class families, not allow mega-millionaires and billionaires to avoid paying taxes[.]

Wyden has two beefs here. One is his progressive view that the wealthy don’t deserve to be under the same law as the rest of us Americans; the success of the wealthy must be called out and that success denied them—because the rich are the piñata of government disfavored groups of Americans.

The other is that business about avoiding paying taxes. Never mind that the rich and deplorable—and the merely rich—already pay the vast bulk of the taxes the Federal government collects, while the bottom half of income earners pay close to nothing in taxes, and the very bottom—including those who don’t have any job-related income—get tax payments from the rest of us. The amount the rich pay isn’t enough for Progressive-Democrats. More is better.

All of it is better, yet.

I Dissent

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…from the dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s voter law is entirely legitimate. That law, you’ll remember, among other things limited who is allowed to return early voting ballots for another person—banned ballot harvesting—and barred counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Among the reasons for upholding Arizona’s law is this:

The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of the law.

Writing in dissent (it was a 6-3 majority), Justice Elena Kagan claimed in part

What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute [the 56-yr-old Voting Rights Act] designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent[.]

The irony in Kagan’s dissent is breathtaking in its depth. She complains of damaging the “end of discrimination in voting” even as the Arizona law treats all voters equally rather than giving special treatment to some. Reducing special treatment somehow increases discrimination.

The rejection of the concept that disproportionality is by itself, regardless of whether it’s a mere side effect, discriminatory also represents a great reduction in special treatment for particular groups—but this, too, is somehow an increase in discrimination in Kagan’s world view.

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, immigration, viruses, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

Two Serious Errors

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These particular two have occurred in the just concluded (sort of) Progressive-Democratic Party primary election for Party’s nominee for Mayor of New York City.

The first error is this: more than 920,000 votes were counted in that primary election, out of some 800,000 votes cast in person—and the count does not yet include 124,000+ absentee ballots cast.

But votes counted included 135,000 test votes—votes used to check procedures in and to practice for the ranked choice vote counting that would be used in the “live” election. Those test votes were supposed to have been purged before the actual live election and not counted in the results.

How does that happen, exactly? Most likely, it’s from the sloppiness and outright incompetence of the city’s Board of elections persons.

The second error is more of a failure and is even more serious, and it goes to the heart of ranked choice voting.

[V]oters…list their top five candidates in order. Since no candidate was the first choice of more than 50% of voters, a computer on Tuesday tabulated ballots in a series of rounds that worked like instant run-offs.
In each round, the candidate in last place was eliminated. Votes cast for that person were then redistributed to the surviving candidates, based on whoever voters put next on their ranking list. That process repeated until only two candidates were left.

A computerized process that uses cast and in-hand ballots to resolve the question from the bottom up. Computerized should take a few hours (I’m being pessimistic here; we’re long past the days of card-punch UNIVACs—and if you don’t recognize what those are, that’s my point) to complete.

However.

The final result is not expected until mid-July.

Wait—the Progressive-Democrats’ primary election was held ‘way back on 22 June. It’ll take weeks, not hours, for the computers to run this process to completion?

How does that work, exactly?

I see two factors in play here that could slow the computerized process. One is that all the absentee ballots have yet(!) to be included. Why weren’t they included in the count from the start? Because they weren’t available at the start. A State law enacted just last year allows absentee ballots arriving as late as a week after primary day to be counted, so long as they’re postmarked by primary day.

Another is that the test ballots weren’t marked in any serious way, so they have to be hand-identified and hand-removed from the pile of ballots cast.

Wow.

Compelling Interest and Racism

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly decry President Joe Biden’s (D) race-based “equity” programs and diktats as taking our nation back to an ugly past.

By equity, Mr Biden means preferences for some racial groups over others to achieve equal outcomes.

And

Mr Biden sells his agenda as taking America into the future. But allocating government funds or privileges by race is a step back to an uglier past. … If applied on the scale Mr Biden hopes, America would become a nation of groups competing for racial spoils and defined outcomes rather than seeking equal opportunity for everyone.

The editors added this near the end of their piece, and here I demur from them.

Strict scrutiny requires that the government have a compelling interest for discriminating by race, and that it must use the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. If less restrictive ways can achieve the same purpose, the policy fails.

There shouldn’t be any strict scrutiny on such matters; the policies should fail on their face. There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections clause that permits Government-determined “compelling interest” to override our Constitution [emphasis added].

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All of that plainly applies to our Federal government every bit as much as it does to each of the governments of the several States.

The Strict Scrutiny standard, as applied here, has been unconstitutional from the start and was an earlier Supreme Court attempt to duck its responsibility in applying our Constitution rather than seeking out excuses and methodologies for getting outside of it.

Government’s compelling interest is to defend and uphold our Constitution.

Full stop.