Daily Archives: 17 September 2025

A Constitutional Amendment Proposal

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As  Nicholas Ballasy, of Just the News, wrote Saturday, the Federal government is once again nearing the end of a fiscal year with no serious plan for funding the next year. His lede:

Congress is on its way to missing a “basic” budget deadline for the 29th year in a row, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

And just to emphasize the point:

Meanwhile, the deficit so far into the current fiscal year is larger than the same period last year.

Hence my Constitutional Amendment in its outline if not in its final wording:

If, at the end of any fiscal year, the following year is not fully funded—that is all 12 of the necessary appropriations bills are not enacted into law—then the only Continuing Resolution that is allowed is this one, which is automatically implemented beginning on the first day of that following fiscal year:
All spending by the Federal government is reduced by 10% of the prior year’s level, with the exception of spending on our national debt and our national defense. These two will have their spending held unchanged from the just concluded fiscal year. The spending reduction includes all Federal government spending, including so-called entitlement spending and all “off the books” spending.

This Continuing Resolution will continue in effect until the Federal government is fully funded for a fiscal year by enacting each of the dozen appropriations bills for that year. The Continuing Resolution, including the year-on-year spending reductions, will continue in effect for all subsequent consecutive fiscal years across which the funding failure continues. This means that if Year0 concludes at a spending level with Year1 not fully funded, then Year1’s spending level will be reduced to 90% of Year0. If the funding failure continues into Year2, then Year2’s spending level will have an additional 10% reduction, for a total reduction to 81% of Year0’s, and so on into Year3, Year4, etc.

Amending our Constitution is, by design, a difficult process, and that’s correct: our Constitution is our blueprint for governing ourselves rather than for us being governed; it cannot function as a limit on government if it’s reduced to a reflection of what we think ought be done in the moment and from moment to moment. Nor is a Convention necessary; We the People can convene ourselves to create and then push through an Amendment. It is time, though, to get started; it does take time to propose, write, and then ratify the thing.

Dealing with the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China has decided that the American company Nvidia has violated PRC anti-trust laws and is holding the company hostage in trade negotiations with the US.

China’s antitrust regulator said Monday that a preliminary investigation found Nvidia violated the country’s antimonopoly law in connection with an acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulator said the investigation was continuing, and it didn’t elaborate on the alleged violations or say whether it would punish Nvidia.

The PRC is centering its case on Nvidia’s commitment to not cut the PRC off from its chips as a condition of PRC approval of the acquisition. That might make a basis for a legitimate anti-trust beef; however:

Since 2022, the US. government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top-flight artificial-intelligence chips to China.

Here is the PRC threatening an American company for its compliance with American law.

There are now two strong reasons for American companies to walk away from the PRC and discontinue all business with PRC-domiciled companies or within the PRC under any guise. One is the overt interference with the domestic affairs of our nation. If the PRC doesn’t like our government’s block of Nvidia, et al., selling their best chips into the PRC, its beef is with our government, not with the American businesses it tries to take hostage in its “negotiations” with our government.

The other reason is the PRC’s presumption that it should have veto authority over whether an American company acquires, or otherwise takes a stake in, any non-PRC-domiciled company. If American companies stop doing business in/with the PRC, then the PRC has no approval/disapproval authority over acquisitions—it becomes irrelevant. And that’s as it should be with an enemy nation.