Tag Archives: political parties

Progressive-Democrat Obstructionism

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The Trump administration, this time in the form of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, has extended an 8-month buyout offer to the CIA. Typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s insistence on Federal government power, Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) had this objection:

There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer[.]

That’s the Party position on government: nothing is permitted unless Government explicitly permits it. Of course, that’s not how our government works in the structure laid out by our Constitution. Quite the opposite, in fact: the lack of explicit statutory authority is no bar at all against the President—or the CIA Director in the present case—making such an offer.

For Kaine’s benefit, though like his Party cronies, it’s doubtful he’ll read it, here are the 9th and 10th Amendments to our Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Of course, Trump, and Ratcliffe, would need statutory authority to require those folks to take the buyout offers, but no such requirement exists—only the offer. Which is a better severance package than most any private sector organization has ever offered. The CIA personnel, and those other Federal civilian personnel, under the offer even get to keep their current insurance benefits; they won’t even be forced onto the horribly expensive COBRA plans for the eight months.

Government Moving at the Speed of Business

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This is what the Trump administration has done in the first couple of weeks, much less its first 100 days.

  • offered buyouts to 2 million civilian full-time federal workers. Remains to be seen how many will take the offer, but the offer was paired with warnings of being fired if the offer isn’t taken
  • more on Federal employment:
    • ordered federal workers back to the office full-time and agencies to take steps to halt remote work arrangements
    • freeze on federal hiring, except for military, immigration enforcement, national security, and public safety jobs
    • reinstated first-term Schedule F Executive Order, stripping potentially hundreds of thousands of government workers of government employment protections, making them easier to fire
    • acting director OMB memo: agency heads told to identify employees on probationary periods, or who have served less than two years
    • 160 NSC staff members “sent home”
  • outright fired some folks
    • 1,000 officials appointed by Joe Biden
    • heads of Coast Guard and TSA, and “other officials” fired
  • 20 senior career attorneys at the Justice Department, including environmental, criminal, national security, civil rights lawyers, and some immigration court staff, have been reassigned, some to newly formed Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group
  • issued memo pausing potentially trillions of dollars in federal aid…. The freeze was blocked by a Federal district judge, but the review/audit and requirements for substantive recommendations for cutting remains in place
  • freeze on new civil rights litigation, halted all pending environmental litigation
  • ordered a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending assessments of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy
  • review of FEMA with a view to reform or close down
  • eliminated government diversity programs, including closing all federal offices, eliminating DEI-related jobs. Workers in those positions put on paid leave. Ordered hiring to be based on merit, with no racial, sex, religious discrimination allowed
  • reinstatement of thousands of troops involuntarily discharged for refusing Wuhan Virus vaccines during the Situation

Whodathunk a government could move that fast?

So Much for Bipartisanship

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, after spending the Biden years ignoring Republican input, have pushed for bipartisanship since President Donald Trump (R) resumed his position in the White House. Other Progressive-Democrat politicians have said maybe not.

Now, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), has made it official. Regarding what he views as “extreme MAGA Republican agenda,”

We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.

This is why nothing a Party Congressman—in either house—can be believed when he claims to want bipartisanship. This Party practice of deliberate obstruction for obstruction’s sake and divisiveness solely in the name of Party, is why it’s so hard for us as Americans or as a nation to have nice things.

No They Haven’t

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the press-alleged difficulty of putting into action President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order specifying that the number of human sexes are two—male and female—the authors wrote this opinion masqueraded as received fact:

As social norms around gender have grown more fluid in recent years….

No, they haven’t.

Their subheadline pushes matter:

Executive order requires changes to passports, prisons and other areas of American life

The implication is that enforcing the outcomes of only two sexes will be very difficult. Never mind the simple fact that difficult means doable.

It won’t be that hard to undo what the Biden administration inflicted over its short term. Passport changes can be reversed as easily as they were inflicted on us, prisons can easily undo the assaults on its female prisoners simply by no longer putting male prisoners in the same prisons as female prisoners and (re)transferring existing male prisoners (back) to male prisons, “other areas of American life” won’t require much change beyond the existing—and vastly incomplete—moves to eliminate DEI bigotry from our institutions.

Not much change will be required because it’s eminently legal for men and women to live their lives as though they were the opposite sex, except where mingling would be inappropriate: males in females’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and the like.

The vast majority of Americans know biology better. We understand full well that in human (for instance) biology, beginning with genetics, there are only two sexes, and which one defines a particular individual is immutably specified at conception—that’s when the chromosomes come together as XX or XY.

It’s true enough that biological mistakes do, rarely, occur and a child gets an XXY or an XYY combination, but those are extremely rare. It’s also true that gender identity disorder (which the authors of the politically written DSM-5 were pleased to relabel gender dysphoria), which is generated primarily by hormonal developments that mistakenly contradict biology and by cultural aspects, occurs, but GID also is an extremely rare occurrence. It’s instructive that GID didn’t become a political matter until the last few years, when identity politics pushers, taking advantage of adolescent hormonal confusion, began pursuing their demand for ever more identities to push and for which to collect government monies and “protections.”

Social norms around gender have not at all grown more fluid except as the Leftist press pushes the narrative created by those activist identity politics pushers. We remain a nation that knows biology better than that.

There’s Clemency, and There’s Clemency

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On his way, almost literally, out the door, now-ex-President Joe Biden (D) issued preemptive pardons to Congressional members of the J6 Committee and the committee’s staffers. Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA), running the follow-on committee for the last two years, has the right of it:

You don’t forgive somebody of something unless they have potentially done something[.]
I mean, to me, this is basically, if not an actual admission, it’s truly the perception of admitting that there was wrongdoing done[.]

And, as Just the News put it at the link:

It was a stunning act…that begged a provocative question: what did an official panel of Congress do that was so bad it needed to be absolved by an act of presidential clemency?

It’s instructive that none of those preemptively pardoned—Congressmen and staffers alike—have rejected Biden’s pardon, not even on the grounds that they don’t need it and don’t want it, being innocent of wrong-doing in the first place. Not even Senator Adam Schiff (D, CA) who as Congressman was a member of that committee, declined the pardon, going no farther than to protest the lack of necessity for it.

Winning in court is a high financial price to pay for one’s innocence, to be sure, but those haled in have avenues for being made whole: malicious prosecution, for instance, and in civil cases, collecting costs from those who sued and lost. They’re not even settling in order to avoid costs; they’re ducking down behind their pardons.

How would they get their reputations back after going through trial? On the other hand, how will they get their reputations back after having been pardoned? At least with court outcomes, they’d have official declarations of no wrong-doing. Their acceptance of these pardons deny them even of that much, even as those acceptances do nothing to lend credibility to claims of having done nothing wrong.

I echo JtN’s question: what have they done that’s so bad they fear exposure in court?