Monthly Archives: March 2023

“Ran out of Time”

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The Washington, DC, City Council, dominated by the Progressive-Democratic Party as it is, voted a month ago to allow non-citizens, including illegal aliens, to vote in city elections, so long as they have been “resident” in the city for at least 30 days.

Congress has a 30-day review window during which it can override DC Council-passed laws and remove them.  The Republican-led House did so, but the Progressive-Democrat-led Senate…did not. As Fox News meekly put it, the Senate ran out of time before the review period ended.

No, the Senate didn’t run out of time. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) wouldn’t even let the matter come to the floor for a vote. Apparently, he didn’t want his majority caucus to have to be on the record as favoring non-citizens voting in American elections.

This needn’t be the end of the matter, though, the 30-day window is a statute, not a constitutionally set limit. Here’s what Art I, Sect 8, of our Constitution has to say on the governance of the District of Columbia:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States….

That exclusive legislation over the District means that a later Congress can withdraw DC laws allowed under prior Congresses. This business of allowing non-citizens—including those illegal aliens—to vote in American elections, a quintessential factor in being an American citizen, needs to be rescinded. Elections have consequences, and we have another one coming in a year-and-a-half.

I have a caveat to this, though. Some might suggest that DC’s voter rolls might be useful things to search for illegal aliens in the District, round them up, and deport them. That must not happen. Government must not run around searching jurisdictions’ voter rolls to find illegal aliens, no matter how convenient such a search might seem.

Government must never be allowed to any search voter roll for groups of folks of whom Government, from administration to administration, disapproves and…silencing…them. The only purpose for a voter roll, the only legitimate purpose for local government searches of them, is to establish eligibility to vote in a jurisdiction and to remove individuals who are not eligible from those rolls. The Federal government must not be involved in such searches.

What He Said

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Rick Wallace has the right of it—and exactly so—in his Letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section:

The Republicans should be sending one message to the American people loud and clear: The Democrats want to cut your Social Security benefits by 26% in 10 years. There is no other pertinent debating point. If the GOP is going to be vilified for trying to save the program with responsible alterations, the alternative should be made clear. Should the Democrats have their way, the program will collapse, and everyone will face major cuts to their benefits. That’s their Plan A. The GOP offers Plan B.

Those 26% are the size of the reduction in Social Security payouts to then-existing retirees when the Social Security Trust Fund runs out of money in those 10 years, and payouts after that come solely from incoming payroll tax collections.

The Progressive-Democratic Party politicians in both houses plainly don’t care about that damage to our retirees, preferring instead to keep the threat of reduction as an active cudgel with which to attack their political opponents. That’s why they react to loudly against any effort by Republicans and Conservatives to adjust Social Security in order to save it and avoid that 26% cut in benefits.

The Republicans and their Conservative allies, though, do need to stop cowering behind glittering generalities and instead be explicit in their solution, how it will work, and when/over what schedule it will be implemented.

Counterproductive

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The government of the People’s Republic of China now claims, at the end of its three-year Wuhan Virus shutdown, to be open for foreign business. A broad range of folks running American businesses actually are taking that government’s blandishments seriously.

Many companies that are increasing their commitments to China are consumer-facing. They still view China’s enormous market as a promising long-term bet, even if sales took a hit during the zero-Covid era.

This is, at best, counterproductive.

Any product’s technology, consumer-oriented or not, can be dual-used for military or intelligence collection purposes, and in the PRC, it will be—not only to the detriment of PRC citizens, but to our detriment and that of our friends and allies.

More than that, American investment, any sort of doing business, inside the PRC works to the benefit of the PRC’s economy.

No American company should be doing any sort of business with or within an enemy nation.

Full stop.

Gun Control and Racism

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Jacob Gershwin opened his Wall Street Journal piece on gun control with this lede:

Historical, racist gun laws are taking on new relevance in legal battles over modern-day gun regulations, following a Supreme Court ruling that expanded the right to bear arms.

He followed up [emphasis added]:

In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today, but they have entered the gun-rights debate as judges look to apply the Supreme Court’s decision last June that said gun restrictions must be anchored in historical traditions.

Now, despicably, many Federal and State government “lawyers” are claiming that those old, ugly, and by-design racist and anti-religion—those Evil Catholics—are part of that historical tradition as they continue their efforts to disarm all of us average Americans, in toto. US prosecutors in front of an appellate court:

They [[those racist gun control laws] nevertheless show that the Framers understood that legislatures could make such judgments to categorically disarm groups of people deemed to be dangerous.

Dangerous groups of Americans like those of us who might want to demur from Government behaviors, behaviors like the IRS targeting conservative American political groups, like the Department of Justice targeting mothers disputing with local school boards as domestic terrorists, like the FBI targeting traditional Catholics (those folks again…) as right-wing extremists and “investigating” them.

What prosecutors like those so carefully ignore is that that prior set of laws, that prior “tradition,” was wholly erased from the American body politic—the honest body politic—by the Civil War, the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, and the recognition that all Americans are equal under American law—under all American laws.

For those persecutors prosecutors to argue that those racist gun control laws are somehow still part of our historical traditions is for them to ignore critical parts of gun control law history: the part that had post-Civil War South and too many jurisdictions in the North enacting gun control laws explicitly to disarm and keep unarmed and helpless black Americans—freed and newly freed—along with their white supporters against depredations, that ranged from rape through lynching, at the hands of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Those prosecutors are showing their own invidious racist bent.