Monthly Archives: July 2023

Talk About Violating Separation of Powers

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In an effort to impose costs incurred by progressive States in their efforts to build out their “green” energy infrastructure onto conservatively governed States, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) is demonstrating his allyship.

Schumer is directing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to stick red states with the bill.
Mr Schumer last week sent a letter demanding that FERC expedite a “strong transmission planning and cost allocation rule” to deliver more “clean power to Americans.”

In particular,

Mr Schumer writes that FERC should order states that “act as free riders” to pay for transmission upgrades. He also wants FERC to clarify its “backstop authority” to issue permits when states won’t. In other words, if West Virginians don’t want to pay for connecting New Jersey offshore wind farms to the grid, FERC should mandate that they pay anyway.

Quite apart from whether Schumer’s move is a good or bad idea for our energy industry or economically—it isn’t; it’s a terrible idea—this is a cynical, and I say deliberate, disregard for our Constitution’s separated powers structure for our Federal government.

In our system of governance, legislators, whether as a group or as individual Senators (or Representatives), don’t get to dictate to Executive Branch agencies what they must or must not do. If they want to influence such an agency, or the Executive Branch as a whole, the Congress as a whole must pass a bill that does so and get the President, the head of the Executive Branch, to sign off on it. Alternatively, the Congress as a whole must believe strongly enough in its move to muster a supermajority of legislators in each House to override the President’s veto.

That Schumer chooses to ignore that aspect of our Constitution is all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt of and disregard for our Constitution.

Us ordinary Americans need to remember this in 16 months.

American Worker Shortage

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have taken note of our nation’s workforce problem and its relation to our immigration problem.

The birth rate has been sliding for years, and it’s about to translate into a shrinking labor force. By 2040, according to a study out this week, America could have more than six million fewer working-age people than in 2022. The only way to counter the domestic trend is by attracting workers from abroad.

One thing that would help with this worker shortage would be to raise the Social Security full retirement age to 70, or even 75. When Social Security was first developed at a national level, some 85 years ago, full retirement was 65, the worker:retiree ratio was 7:1, and life expectancy in retirement was on the order of 7 years. Today, the worker:retiree ratio is less that 3:1 and falling, and life expectancy in retirement is on the order of 15-20 years. Raising the retirement age would increase the number of workers in the labor force.

That by itself, though, would be only a Band-Aid fix outside the strong benefit it would provide to Social Security survival.

What’s far more broadly needed is to build the “big, beautiful wall” all along our southern border, pierced every mile with a border crossing station through which legitimate immigrants and guest workers could enter (and the latter leave), with that combined with a vastly streamlined legal immigration system that removed visa quotas, sped up vetting of immigrant wannabes, and applied requirements that the immigrant wannabes have economic value to add to our nation.

Even that, though, would be insufficient as a stand-alone fix. Our tax regime and our welfare program badly want reform. With lower tax rates on individuals and businesses, there’s more incentive to work and to hire. That incentive can be further expanded by eliminating the areas of overlap among our welfare programs (which will include eliminating some programs and combining parts of others into single programs) and adding work requirements to remaining programs.

Biden’s Ongoing Betrayal of Ukraine

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The lede in the Wall Street Journal article says it all.

The slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian invaders is dimming hopes that negotiations for an end to the fighting could come this year and raising the specter of an open-ended conflict, according to Western officials.

The terms of negotiation have been clearly, and repeatedly, stated by Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy. President Joe Biden (D) has steadfastly ignored them, as he’s more terrified of Russian President Vladimir Putin than he is supportive of actual Ukrainian victory, territorial integrity, and national sovereignty.

And this, in the immediately following paragraph:

A potential stalemate would test President Biden’s stated strategy of pouring billions of dollars in military aid into Ukraine, to enable Kyiv to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength.

It’s a stalemate created entirely by slow-walking—and outright blocking—delivery of the weapons, ammunition, training, and logistic support the Ukrainian defense establishment needs to win quickly and decisively. It’s a stalemate proximately created by Biden with his refusal to deliver the weapons and ammunition the Ukrainians needed to begin their offensive last winter. Instead, Biden’s timidity in front of Putin delayed the Ukrainians’ start for months, transferring to the barbarian, instead, those months for him to prepare his present defenses.

Then there’s this bit of despicable-ness in the article:

The US stay-the-course strategy holds some risks, however.

There should be no such strategy, and there never should have been. There should have been—and there still should be, with very good effect—a constant acceleration of delivery to Ukraine so that it could have, and still could, win decisively and quickly. Instead, Biden is perfectly happy to have Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including women and children, bleed and die for Biden’s battle between democracy and authoritarianism.

It’s also an immediate Ukrainian battle for national survival, for Ukraine’s very existence. But Biden doesn’t care about that.

Israel’s Judicial Reform

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Israel has taken a step toward limiting the governing power and authority of its Supreme Court. Prior to last Monday’s vote, Israel’s highest court could blithely strike down Knesset-enacted statutes based on nothing more concrete or measurable than the personal opinions of what constituted the statute’s “reasonableness” in the minds of the judges constituting the Court’s majority in any particular case. If those judges didn’t like the statute, they could cry “unreasonable,” and strike it.

This reform law will restrict

the power of the country’s top court and hand more control to lawmakers. It aims to restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government or executive decisions on the basis of reasonability…. Supporters say the reasonableness standard is too nebulous and allows the courts to overrule the will of elected officials for political purposes.

In fine, the new law requires the Supreme Court to have a far more specific and publicly measurable rationale for striking a law. Otherwise, the matter is returned to the representatives of the Israeli people, the Knesset, and to the people themselves. In particular, if the people disagree with the law, they can fire their Knesset representative(s) at the next election and replace those persons with representatives who will make the adjustments or recissions the people demand. The people have no such possibility with the Supreme Court; those worthies, once selected, are in office until age 70. The people making the ultimate decisions, rather than unaccountable office holders doing so, is the stuff of democracy, whether popular or republican.

Critics of the new law claim that it’s an attack on democracy. One citizen:

We refuse to accept this. It is clear to us all that there is no alternative. We either escalate or we leave the country.

And Yair Lapid, an opposition leader:

This is the destruction of Israeli democracy[.]

That’s democratic opposition? No, that’s opposition to democracy. It’s disappointing that the “opposition” in Israel is so opposed to the idea of the people’s representatives—and the people themselves through their democratically selected representatives—having the primary say in Israel’s laws. It’s also illustrative of the opposition’s ideology that they’re so opposed to that degree of democracy.

The kerfuffle also is illustrative of the problems stemming from not having an actual, written-down constitution to which anyone—government official (judge, member of the Knesset, Prime Minister) or private citizen—can point and say, “This is what our constitution requires,” and engage in open and transparent (to coin a phrase) debate concerning what a law or a proposed law says, rather than depending on cloistered judges’ obscure and too often limited explanations that are stripped of the reasonings and closed-chambered debates conducted as the Court arrives at its rulings.

When Did History Begin?

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According to members of the Progressive-Democratic Party, it began in 2022. Take, for instance, the Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Chrissy Houlahan.

As inflation cools, it’s important to think about how far we’ve come since the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

How far we’ve come:

At this time last year, due to the efforts of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats as we emerged from the pandemic, we were seeing strong economic growth, historically low unemployment, and large wage increases, particularly for low and middle-income workers.

What we were seeing at this time last year was the beginning of an Obama-esque slow recovery from the booming economy that already was expanding rapidly as we came out of the Wuhan Virus situation in the summer and fall of 2020 in that history that exists before this time last year.

What we are seeing since this time last year is the recovery to that latter half of 2020’s historic unemployment—for women, blacks, and Hispanics, especially—due to the recovery of jobs lost during the Wuhan Virus situation, and very few new jobs created.

What we are seeing since this time last year has been declining real wages in the face of Party-driven inflation as those wage increases—which Houlahan knows are only nominal, but chooses to elide—paled in the face of inflation. Only in the last month did nominal wage increases exceed inflation, and that’s far too soon to know whether this one time is the start of a trend or merely a one-off.

What we are seeing over the last two years is a widening of the wage gap between whites and minorities as that slow recovery and Party’s racist and sexist identity politics limit who gets back into those recovered jobs. That wage gap had narrowed significantly over the four years through 2020, as folks on the lower rungs—especially minorities and single mothers—actually got jobs (that historically low unemployment rate extant in 2020 and before) and had income. And their wages rose—nominally and in real terms—faster than did the wages of the middle and upper classes.

However, Americans were still experiencing high prices.

Yes, we are. And we will relative to our incomes for some years. Inflation may finally be coming back down—it’s still higher, though, than it was at the end of the prior administration, over two years ago—but as Houlahan admitted, inflation is a rate of price increase, it is not the prices themselves. The prices Party’s inflation drove up will not come back down.

One factor that contributes to those high prices in addition to overall inflation is the cost of energy. That has become even more expensive with Party’s open war on fossil fuel-based energy, and its effort to eliminate that industry altogether. They don’t care that energy is at the heart of the cost of production (and so at the heart of the cost of us ordinary Americans‘ purchases, especially for those of us on the lower economic rungs, below Houlahan’s middle class).

It’s certainly true that supply chain disruptions have contributed, also, to higher prices. However, the prior administration, and American businesses on their own, had already been working to revamp our supply chains to re-anchor them in more stable, more favorable locations. The disruptions of the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine also have contributed. But that invasion was encouraged to start by the Progressive-Democrat-run Biden administration’s open timidity in the face of terrorists in western Asia and in the face of the barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin.

New Democrat, same as the old Democrat.