Tag Archives: politics

Downsizing Government

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Or, perhaps more accurately, an earlier buzz-term: right-sizing government. With our Federal government so bloated with employees, it may be that a partial solution is developing, particularly in DC, where the bulk of our Federal government sits.

The Biden administration has struggled to get more of the tens of thousands of members of the federal workforce in the District of Columbia back to the office on a more regular basis. That struggle is likely to continue if a Democrat wins the White House in November, especially Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden endorsed Sunday when he announced he was exiting the race.
If [former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald] Trump returns to the White House, the district’s office market could be hit even harder. He has already pledged to abolish the Education Department, which has more than 2,500 employees in the district.

Trump is on the right track in eliminating no longer necessary Executive Branch departments. However, the Federal workforce is proffering its own solution, one that would work well in parallel with the Trump path: those who don’t return to the office to do their work are self-selecting themselves for termination from government employment.

There’s this, too, regarding the commercial landlords who might be hurt by such moves:

The district’s office market is poised to get worse regardless of the outcome of the election. ….
Six agencies, including the Justice and Treasury departments, have lease expirations between 2024 and 2027 in which they are expected to give up close to 600,000 square feet, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

A solution suggests itself for this, a solution that even Progressive-Democrats should love: DC, in partnership with those landlords, could translate those 600,000 square feet of space into affordable housing. Such a solution even would be intersectionally beneficial.

Alternatively, under a Trump administration, with reduced regulatory interference with the chief business of the American people (that being business, as President Calvin Coolidge noted), more businesses likely will move to DC and occupy much, if not most, of those newly available vacancies.

Incomplete Hearings

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Hearings this week intended to look into the security failure(s) that led to the assassination attempt against and wounding (fortunately minor) of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump are getting testimony from the Secret Service’s Director Kimberly Cheatle and the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray.

That’s good as far as it goes (always assuming, naively, the committee members each ask probative questions and get straight answers). It’s insufficient, though, since there are two additional agencies with important perspectives on the security setup and failure(s) surrounding the assassination attempt.

Those two additional agencies are the Butler, PA, police department; they being the immediate agency of the hosting city, and the Pennsylvania State Police, to which the Secret Service had delegated the task of securing the inside perimeter of the campaign rally venue.

What’s the Focus?

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, while he was campaigning for reelection, focused most of his argument—nearly all of it, in fact—on two things: beating Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, and his Progressive-Democratic Party winning the election.

Certainly, winning an election is a prerequisite to passing legislation that furthers one’s own and one’s party’s policies and brings to fruition one’s own and one’s party’s goals. But that would be a fallout of a winning campaign focused on those policies and goals and why those policies and goals are better than the other candidate’s and party’s.

That’s the question being raised these days, post Biden campaign:

…whether Harris, or any other Democrat, will be similarly burdened by public unhappiness about the economy—or whether they can pivot to focusing on the future, where the candidate stands a better chance against Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Even here, though, the question as phrased is about beating a man rather than a successful argument of having a better plan for the future.

So far, the new Progressive-Democrat candidate for President, of whom today the sitting Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris is the most likely, still is campaigning against the man and for her Party. There’s no move to argue her policies and goals. Party still is keeping it personal and not about its view of what’s better for our nation. Of course, given the damage those policies and achieved goals have done to our nation’s security and standing around the world and the damage done to our economy and to our safety domestically, she has little to campaign on other than being against her opponent.

Now that He’s Out

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has ended his campaign for reelection. Some, notably Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, have said that if Biden quits his campaign, he also should resign from office.

I tend to agree with that sentiment, but not from the idea that, as Vance has suggested, if Biden is too unhealthy to run for reelection, then he’s too unhealthy to continue in office for the next six months.

My view is that if Biden resigns soon—this week, maybe—that would make his Progressive-Democrat Kamala Harris the new Progressive President. That, in turn, would give Harris a measure of the power and influence of incumbency for her own election campaign. It’s a question, though, whether the scant four months until election day (especially with early voting starting so early in many jurisdictions) would give her that much of a boost.

It’s a question, too, whether any such boost would be mitigated by her already quasi-incumbency as the sitting Vice President. Sitting Vice Presidents do get elected, vis., George Bush the Elder, but not always, see Hubert Humphrey. On the other hand, Presidents campaigning for the first time after “inheriting” the office due to the departure in one form or another of the prior incumbent, typically don’t get elected, from John Tyler forward. Gerald Ford, who had three years of incumbency not a mere three or four months, is the latest example of that difficulty.

But maybe Biden is too selfish and feeling too much betrayed by those syndicate family members he thought he could trust to make the move. Or maybe he’s stubborn enough to stay in office just to show them they can’t, either, run him out of office.

White House Hatred of Israel

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That’s what this Wall Street Journal editors’ lede implies, if the claim is true.

Is US foreign policy on autopilot? On Wednesday we learned the Biden Administration is imposing sanctions on another Israeli while reissuing a sanctions waiver that lets Iran access more than $10 billion in frozen funds. Its priorities reflect a policy that long ago was overtaken by events.

That’s not autopilot. That’s the Biden White House continuing those folks’ long-standing disdain, extending to open hatred, of all things Israeli. Why do they think that way? The position is so irrational—Israel is our only real ally in the Middle East; it’s the only democracy there; the nation is inclusive enough to include Arab citizens and Arab Knesset members; the nation bends over backwards, even today, to avoid civilian casualties in a war inflicted by a terrorist entity for which civilian casualties, even of their own brethren, are the goal—that only those White House persons can answer the question. If they think about it at all.

The editors concluded their piece with this:

[W]e got Iran-backed war and assaults on US forces and commercial shipping. What will it take for Mr Biden and his advisers to recognize their failure and change course?

Maybe Biden, et al., don’t see a need for course correction. Maybe they don’t think their pro-Iran, anti-Israel moves are failures.

What’s at least as bad is the silence from the Progressive-Democratic Party regarding Biden’s moves vis-à-vis Iran and Israel. That the syndicate is so carefully silent suggests its own complicity in this irrational hatred.