Monthly Archives: March 2025

A Real Progressive-Democratic Party Problem

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It’s not Party’s only problem, but it is a Critical Item problem, and it’s illustrated by an exchange between a constituent and Senator Michael Bennet (D, CO) at his recent town hall and by a Wall Street Journal newswriter’s assessment of the exchange. The constituent’s call:

A man who identified himself as Colin from Denver asked Bennet to consider the “dire times” facing the nation. “Schumer had no plan in the Democrats’ only moment of leverage against Trump,” he said. “When will you be calling for him to be replaced as minority leader?”

Bennett essentially responded with words to the effect that Schumer needed to go.

The writer’s assessment:

House and Senate members have publicly criticized Schumer’s handling of the matter in a remarkable public show of disunity at a time when they hoped to be unified against Trump.

Leverage against Trump. Unified against Trump. No plan for what Party thinks is good for our nation. No plan for how to achieve those Good Things. Not even any nascent ideas.

It’s No to Trump/Never Trump turtles all the way down.

That’s not good for our nation. Not good at all. All Party has, all Party seems interested in, is its toddler temper tantrum over not getting its own way.

University Dependence on Federal Funds

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And one other matter. Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s withholding/canceling of $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia University, there are a couple of things that stand out.

One is this:

[S]ome board members deeply concerned the university is trading away its moral authority and academic independence for federal funds.

Columbia has already shed any pretense of moral authority—see below. Columbia’s dependence on Federal funding is Columbia’s conscious, deliberately done choice. The school has a $14.8 billion dollar endowment. Even if that were to be frozen—no further donations into it, the endowment’s investments would only break even—that’s enough to fund 37 years of grants and contracts at the rate of those $400 million per year Federal largesse. A lot can happen in those 37 years.

Then there’s this, from Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia:

It is really a red line for the independence of universities, for academic freedom, for shared governance.”

No it isn’t. Requiring a university to shed—to divest itself of—its antisemitic bigotry and (not or) its support for terrorists is not a threat to university independence or of academic freedom. Indeed, as Columbia’s support for that bigotry and that support demonstrates, removing them would produce a sharp increase in academic freedom, especially for the students—an aspect of academic freedom the Precious Ones of Columbia’s faculty carefully ignore.

Beyond that, there should be no “shared governance” at universities. Administrators should govern; professors should teach. Full stop.

Hurt Feelings

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Lots of ex-Federal employees are feeling the pain of being terminated. Many in the private sector think that’s unimportant, and they’re correct to think so.

Catherine Byrd, who owned and ran her own business before she retired:

I don’t feel bad for them a bit. I’ve worked in the private sector all my life[.]

She noted that she’d been fired a number of times in her early working days, and said,

You know what you do? You go out and find another job, and there are plenty of jobs to find.

As indeed there are, even if not in an area that lets the fired bureaucrat follow his bliss.

And so, we get the hurt feelings of government employees who have been terminated. Recently fired Meredith Lopez is upset over the alleged general callousness toward federal workers being fired.

I think people forget that working in public service is not just a job, it can be a calling for many people[.]
For me, it is really about the ability to help people and communities on a personal level[.]

Judy Cameron is upset at the very concept of being fired from her government job.

All I know is I did not appreciate being fired. Let me do something wrong to fire me… It was just “Oh here, let’s kick you out like trash.”

And, of course—because that’s where the clicks and eyeballs are—the press hypes these things while ignoring the fact that none of them incur an obligation on the part of any employer, much less the government, to retain folks just because those folks want a particular job.

No. A government employee needs to be terminated if the job position itself is duplicative, excess to the government’s objective needs, or otherwise unnecessary. Recall, during the Obama Shutdown of 2011, the EPA acknowledged that most of its employees were unnecessary, furloughing 90% of them for the duration of the shutdown.

A government employee needs to be terminated if his performance is subpar as measured objectively, which requires a cessation of inflating annual reports and the even harder step of eliminating union objections to terminating for merit reasons.

Disingenuous Excuse-Making

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That’s what seems to be the case involving Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong and a variety of personages criticizing her decisions, or their lack, or their careful vagueness, regarding Columbia’s rampant antisemitic bigotry and overt support for “protestors” supporting terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank.

Armstrong’s waffling on those items already has cost her university $400 million in Federal grants and contracts, yet she continues to waffle.

Chief among her excuse-making supporters is Johns Hopkins Medicine International President, Charles Wiener:

She’s in a situation now where every minute, every hour, there’s no way she’ll be able to do anything that pleases everybody[.]

Armstrong isn’t there to please everybody; she’s not even there to please anybody at all. She’s there to do the right thing: put an end to the school’s antisemitic bigotry that exceeds the bounds of free speech by overtly denying others their rights to free speech and religion—even merely to attend class—and expel the terrorist-supporting “protestors,” including faculty members; have those “protestors” who are not students or faculty arrested for their trespass; and have those—student, non-student, or faculty—involved in stealing university buildings (which is what their “occupations” amount to) and vandalizations arrested and brought to trial for their criminal acts.

Full stop.

Then the newswriters of this WSJ piece offer their own shabby excuse:

Armstrong has walked a fine line between acknowledging that some aspects of the university need to change while also asserting the importance of the school’s academic independence.

No. There is no fine line here. There is no academic freedom in an environment where the school’s Jewish students are prevented by those terrorist supporters from speaking, prevented from getting to class, even physically attacked simply for being Jewish, much less speaking anyway.

Ans this:

If she cedes [sic] to White House demands over campus antisemitism allegations, she risks revolt from faculty fearing a loss of academic freedom.

More excuse-making. Faculty members who revolt over this are simply self-selecting for prompt termination. Getting them out of the way would both reduce the bigotry that so rampantly denies Jewish students their free speech rights and increase academic freedom by removing those who insist that academic freedom means being free to do things their way only.

Armstrong needs to stop waffling. Or she needs to be replaced by someone willing to make the hard decisions necessary to reduce the bigoted attacks on disfavored groups and get rid of the “protestors,” and to enforce those decisions.

Update (compared to when I wrote this): Columbia University has, finally, acceded to many of the government’s demands regarding curbing its antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorists.

A Simple Enough Solution

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Even if it isn’t necessarily politically easy to implement. But the political impediment is merely a lack of political courage in the same politicians who natter on about how expensive and abused is the system in question. I’m writing here about our nation’s Medicaid system.

Medicaid is broken, and Republicans in Washington and in state capitals have an opportunity to fix it. President Trump has pledged to protect the program, in part by cutting waste, fraud and abuse. The House budget target would reduce the growth of federal Medicaid payments over the next decade from $2 trillion to $1.2 trillion. That is a good start. Medicaid wastes enormous amounts of taxpayer money as states use it to reward politically powerful healthcare providers.

Instead of making this sort of namby-pamby tweaks around the edges, and masquerading putative reductions in growth as cuts, the simple enough solution is this.

Take the Medicaid-centered Federal transfers to each State in the current year as the baseline, and convert that amount to a block grant with no strings attached, other than the State must spend the block money on its Medicaid program. Then, each subsequent year transfer the Medicaid block grant, similarly without strings, reduced further each year by 10% of that baseline amount. In a short few years (I’ll leave the third grade arithmetic to the reader, rather than insult his intelligence), the block grants will reach $0.00, and the Federal government will, quite properly, be out of this aspect of the State’s business.

Notice that this solution also does not touch the heart of our nation’s Medicaid system, which is each State’s responsibility. On the contrary, it moves the system entirely into the States’ individual purviews, giving each State complete control over its own Medicaid program, free of Federal touching.