Monthly Archives: November 2022

Anti-Democratic

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Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden claims he’s worried about anti-democratic forces in play in today’s American politics.

We must vote knowing who we have been and what we’re at risk of becoming. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment—but institutions that have held us together, as we’ve sought a more perfect union, are also at stake.

Here’s one of those democratic institutions that’s at risk even after the just-completed elections—from Biden and his National Labor Relations Board:

[The] National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced it would start the process rescind a 2020 rule implemented to protect workers’ right to vote on removing union representation.

The institution of company employees isn’t to be allowed to exercise—by voting in particular—their right to not join a union or their right to vote to decertify an existing union.

Never mind two central facts.

According to NLRB data, among petitions filed to hold elections to install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker was more than twice as likely to attempt to decertify union representation than a nonunion worker was to unionize….

And

[A] pro-union group, The Worker Power Coalition, argues the “surge in worker organizing is the largest in more than 50 years,” and the data shows a 53% increase in union representation petitions….

That’s democracy in the workplace in action. That’s democracy that the Hero of Democracy in the White House wants to destroy.

Rationalization

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Congresswoman Katie Porter (D, CA) is on Leave Without Pay from her job teaching law at the University of California, Irvine, and has been for the last four years while she serves in Congress. The concept isn’t particularly unusual; what draws attention is that the normal California (or at least UC Irvine) LWOP period is two years, and the school has just approved (after the fact) extending Porter’s status for the period January 2021 through December 2022.

What drew my attention, though, is the rationalization used by the UCI Dean, L Song Richardson, in arguing successfully for the decision to extend Porter’s status, especially after a senior Academic Personnel analyst at UCI had formally recommended against the extension.

…from the university’s perspective, it would not shed a good light on UCI for a member of the US House of Representatives to be told to either resign from a democratically-elected position or resign from UCI.
Moreover, this seems inconsistent with the aspiration for members of UCI’s faculty to serve at the highest levels of national public service. Finally, to have an elected member of the United States Congress who can advocate on behalf of Orange County, including UCI, surely has significant benefits for the campus.
I am also certain that when news of our decision to not grant her a leave of absence through the end of her second term in office goes public, it would surely reflect very badly on UCI[.]

[I]t would not shed a good light on UCI…. Here’s the school being more interested in its public image than it is in the rightness or wrongness of this highly unusual extension. There’s also nothing wrong with telling a (sort-of) employee to choose between her job at the school and the job she’s currently working instead. Porter’s job as a Congresswoman doesn’t alter that in the slightest. There’s no reason an employee of a collection of people in a district should be treated differently from any other employee of a local business who’s on leave to work an alternate job.

[I]nconsistent with the aspiration for members of UCI’s faculty…. Not at all. Nothing stops other faculty members from pursuing their aspirations for national service, at any level. They just would have to choose between jobs, the same as any other employee of a business.

[Having a] member of the United States Congress who can advocate on behalf of Orange County, including UCI…. No doubt, and that’s part of the duties of any Congressman. But they don’t have to be on leave from this or that organization in order to advocate for that organization while in office, or to advocate from any other platform. The well-known lobbyist revolving door is one of the more unsavory illustrations of that capability.

Finally, when news of our decision to not grant her a leave of absence…goes public, it would surely reflect very badly on UCI…. There’s that preference for public image over what’s right, bookending Richardson’s first rationale.

There’s that “rationale” term. It’s not entirely accurate. Richardson’s case is pure rationalization, and nothing more, for giving special treatment to a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even an Emeritus Professor, or a Senior Judge, shows up for duty on occasion.

Progressive-Democrat Contempt

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Recall the brutal murder of Keaira Bennefield in New York, who was murdered, allegedly by her estranged husband after he was released from jail, where he’d been detained—briefly—for the crime of…beating Ms Bennefield. Bennefield’s mother, in the aftermath of this failure of justice, said Hochul “should be charged for the crime. She’s also responsible for the crime.”  New York’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul contemptuously dismissed the elder woman:

All I can say that is a grieving mother. I understand the anguish she’s going through. She doesn’t understand how this could have happened to her beloved daughter leaving her children—her grandchildren without their mom…. The system failed and I will just simply say—I’m not going to argue with the facts with a woman who is in such pain.

Because of course the woman can’t possibly understand the gravity of the New York system favoring criminals over victims. The woman can’t possibly understand the politics that created the system. Being a woman, she can only be irrationally overcome with grief and not at all thinking clearly during her grief.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party.

DHS Responsiveness

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House Republicans have put Department of Homeland Security management on notice to hold onto a variety of data; they’ll be investing the department if they win a majority of the House this Tuesday (and the out-days of vote “counting”).

House Oversight and Reform Committee Ranking Member Congressman James Comer (R, LA) has warned Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that Republicans would seek to hold him and his agency accountable for the ongoing crisis at the southern border should they win in next week’s midterm elections.
“We cannot endure another year of the Biden Administration’s failed border policies,” Comer and his fellow committee Republicans wrote to Mayorkas, per the Washington Times. “We have written DHS fifteen times this Congress to conduct oversight over the border crisis. Again, we request documents and information to understand the Biden Administration’s plans, if any, to secure the border.”

Here’s a thought. Republicans should withhold funding (defund, in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s favorite jargon) for the DHS other than ICE, CBP, and other border/immigration-related agencies, and the Coast Guard unless and until all documents are turned over to the new House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s satisfaction, and DHS Secretary and Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and John Tien, respectively, have resigned.

They shouldn’t just yap about having called repeatedly for documents or bark about “we’re going to investigate the Hell out of you,” knowing there’s no hope of subpoenas being enforced—they should put some teeth into their demands. They should take their own, purse string-related, steps to enforce their demands and investigations.

The Progressive-Democrat President certainly will veto such a budget, and he’ll threaten to shut down the government. However, both the Biden administration in general and Mayorkas’ DHS are prime examples of why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Aside from that, the Obama Shutdown of 2013 is example of the harmlessness of the Federal government not operating for a time.