Monthly Archives: April 2023

Lobbying

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Even Senators do it on occasion. Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV), a few years ago (and only now appearing in some of the press) lobbied Alejandra Castillo, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development, to approve the Appalachian Climate Technology Now coalition’s application for as much as $100 million in Federal funds for

creat[ing] an industrial cluster around a number of climate resilience technologies while focusing on the development of resilient infrastructure and site readiness, attracting, training and retaining a skilled workforce, fostering entrepreneurship and startups, and building community capacity[.]

The coalition ultimately was awarded nearly $63 million in grants for the purpose.

ACT Now is a West Virginia-base entity. So far, so good; it’s entirely appropriate for Senators to front for their constituents.

ACT Now also is a coalition that includes, among others, the Charleston Area Alliance, which is chaired by Jack Rossi. Rossi also is listed as the Treasurer of the Joe Manchin for Senate campaign. Still so far, probably so good; Senators are allowed to lobby for constituents that are in some way connected to the Senator.

When Manchin wrote his lobbying letter to Castillo, he neglected to mention his connection to Rossi. Oops.

That far, no good. Manchin should have done the full disclosure bit and freely mentioned the Rossi-Manchin relationship, and he should have done so up front, in that letter and in any preceding and subsequent communication with Castillo and anyone else with whom he spoke on the matter.

Taking Questions?

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Nah. That’s for rubes. So is speaking extemporaneously, which is involved in taking questions that aren’t from pre-selected questioners with pre-submitted questions and carefully scripted answers.

That’s why President Joe Biden (D) is planning to issue his campaign for reelection announcement by carefully set and scripted video, rather than doing so publicly and taking questions from the madding crowd that is the non-preselected press questioners.

Nor will it even be a current announcement with current reasons for his campaign.

Biden and a producer reportedly filmed the video early this month at the first family’s summer home in the Rehoboth Beach, Delaware[.]

A President who so assiduously avoids direct contact with our nation’s citizens is unfit for the office.

Aiding and Abetting Child Abuse

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Washington and California both have bills wending their way through their respective legislatures that would shut a child’s parents out of the decision-making, even the knowledge that the decision-making is in progress, associated with the application of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and breast and genital removal, and other “treatments”—cynically called gender affirming care—to their children.

Washington is on the verge of denying parents notice that their runaway children are living in licensed shelters if the children are seeking “protected health care services,” defined as gender affirming care and “reproductive health care” such as abortion and contraception.

And

The California Assembly approved legislation this month…that would let children 12 and up in the Medi-Cal program “consent to mental health treatment or counseling on an outpatient basis, or to residential shelter services,” if the “attending professional person” believes they are “mature enough to participate intelligently” in the services. Legal experts told the Associated Press that would cover gender identity counseling.

Were an individual adult to do this to a child, he’d be guilty of child sexual abuse and metaphorically drawn and quartered, and rightly so. But when an institution does it, it’s OK.

Go figure. And then go figure why any parents would want to risk their children by living in such a State.

Debt and Spending

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Here’s a fun fact, one that every child from three years old and up who gets an allowance clearly learns, one that’s made explicit in any high school basic economics class, and one that’s driven home in junior college and college Econ 101 classes: when you spend more than take in, you owe the difference, either explicitly by borrowing separately to make up the arrears or implicitly by the existence of the deficit resulting from spending more than is taken in.

There are two outcomes that are absolutely critical to successfully resolving such a situation: pay the debt that has been incurred, and reduce spending to fit within income in the subsequent years so as to not incur that debt again.

So it is with our nation’s Federal budget.

We have, for decades, but especially with the Obama administration’s overwrought response to the Panic of 2008, again during the Trump administration’s overwrought response to the Wuhan Virus situation, but especially with the Biden administration’s deliberate explosion of spending in response to no particular “emergency,” and without any regard for actual Federal intake under its Grove of Money Trees Modern Monetary Theory foolishness. This is coupled with a statutorily set debt limit, a limit that stops the Federal government from borrowing at all when the amount of debt already incurred reaches that limit. The bar on further borrowing forces a complete stop in spending above current Federal income—which represents a significant spending cut.

Those spending cuts include not paying on existing Federal contracts, reductions in or complete halts of welfare program payments, reductions in Social Security and Medicare payments, and reductions in payments on Federal debt, the latter which would be reductions in principal payments. Payments at least of the interest owed are Constitutionally required, which especially drives reductions in or complete withholding of any or all of those other payments in order to be able to make the debt interest payments.

Which brings us to the Federal government’s only solutions to the current debt ceiling crisis: pay the debt and reduce spending to fit within Federal intake in the subsequent years. These must be done together, or we’ll just keep needing to raise the statutory limit on Federal debt accrued.

That, in turn, brings us to the current situation vis-à-vis debt and spending. For months Republicans and Conservatives in the House have sought negotiations with President Joe Biden (D). (Republicans and Conservatives in the Senate have been remarkably silent. Some of that is driven by the Constitutional requirement that revenue and spending bills must originate in the House, but some of it, also, is driven by the timidity of those Senators.) For months, Biden has refused to negotiate, refused to talk with House Republicans and Conservatives at all.

Lately, Speaker Kevin McCarthy put forward a bill that would raise the debt ceiling by enough to support excess spending for a year while clawing back various appropriated but unspent monies, cutting spending in other areas, and capping non-defense discretionary spending at 1% growth for each of the next 10 years. Associated with that is a proposal to use that year to negotiate serious spending reductions for the next budget year and subsequent years.

Biden has ignored the proposal. Biden’s stubbornness—a stubbornness that is born of the man’s ego-driven pride—is threatening our nation with default on our debt. Such a default will be Joe Biden’s doing, and no one else’s.

McCarthy wants a different outcome:

…Biden [to] return to the negotiating table for debt ceiling negotiations….
I think as president and the leader of the free world, this is one of the problems. We have challenges around this country, around the world. He needs to show leadership and come to the negotiating table instead of putting us in default. This is risky, what he’s doing.

Biden needs to get past his ego and stoop to negotiating.

Full stop.

ERIC Surveillance

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is an increasingly farther-Left standing organization that shares voter registration data among the member States, ostensibly so the States collectively have cleaner voter rolls that contain fewer ineligible registrants. Apparently, ERIC also shares those data with others than the member States, too, and does so in deliberate secrecy, without required permissions, and outside the center’s charter—for instance, with the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which got $70 million from the Leftist Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just in time for the 2020 elections. I’m actually more concerned about another aspect of ERIC’s activities [emphasis in the original].

The authors [of a Heritage Foundation report] note concerns about ERIC forcing member states to engage in active voter registration activities, despite states already making it easy for citizens to register to vote. …the membership agreement forces states to send out notices essentially yearly (every 425 days, to be precise) to at least 95 percent of the individuals in a state who are potentially eligible to vote but who have not registered “inform[ing] them how to register to vote.”

How does a State know who is eligible to register but has not? Certainly, the needed data are generally publicly available, but they need explicitly to be sought out, collected, and then fused into an eligible-but-not-registered list. Why are States being required by ERIC to conduct this surveillance, instead of leaving that up to the citizens of each State to do or to refuse to do? Why is it any American government’s business why this or that American citizen chooses to register, or not? Why is it any American government’s role to hector any American citizen to engage in this lawful behavior rather than that one? What other government surveillance is this supposed Organizational Compact trying to get governments to carry out at its behest? For what purposes? Maybe more States should be leaving ERIC and leave the government surveillance of private citizens to the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States whose governing personnel actually think this level of surveillance is a good idea.