Tag Archives: politics

Blame Ducking

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It’s not blame shifting or blame casting, even though it might seem so. Those are just tools, though, employed in the cause of ducking blame. Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Josh Shapiro, has provided the latest version.

Electricity rates are spiking in the State over which he rules. PJM Interconnection, the State’s largest power provider, has approved 38 GW of new generation, but the generators are not being built: high interest rates and inflation, not Shapiro’s fault but demonstratively that of his party’s actions at the Federal level, have made the building too costly, even with the plethora of green subsidies.

Shapiro has, though,

pitched an energy plan to fast-track the construction of renewables and a cap-and-trade program that would effectively subsidize them by punishing fossil fuels. Such policies would likely lead to the retirement of more base-load fossil fuel generators….

And that restriction on energy supply can only further drive up energy prices for Pennsylvanians. This sort of thing already has done so, in fact, hence the present spike for the State’s citizens.

Now Shapiro is blaming PJM for those rising prices while ducking away from his own green policies, and his party’s national-level policies, that are the actual cause of the straits in which Pennsylvania’s citizens find themselves.

This is the Progressive-Democrat mantra: it’s not their fault; it’s never their policies. It’s always and everywhere someone else’s fault.

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.

Chaos? Whipsaw?

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Some folks think the speed with which tariffs were laid onto Canada and Mexico and then delayed happened in a chaotic manner, with whipsaws in the mix. After all, shortly after President Donald Trump (R) announced the tariffs, US automaker managers called Susie Wiles, Trump’s Chief of Staff, and she supposedly assured them of carve-outs IAW existing trade treaties. Then Trump reiterated his tariff threat with no word of automotive carve-outs. Then agreements were made with Mexico and Canada that satisfied much of what Trump has wanted from those two nations, and he agreed to delay the tariff’s implementation. Or at least that’s what the newswriters’ imaginary “people familiar with” tell them. And all of that happened in just two days.

It’s certainly possible that the situation was a chaotic as newswriters claim.

There’s another interpretation, though.

This is just the Federal government, with a businessman in charge now better schooled in politics and the techniques of maneuvering politicians, moving at the speed of business.

In conjunction with that, keep in mind that those automobile makers assemble their vehicles in American- and Canada-domiciled factories from parts made in, or passing through, both Mexican and Canadian factories and middlemen. Whatever this administration does vis-à-vis cars and trucks, thus, would get back to those Mexican and Canadian companies and their governments.

Accordingly, a two-pronged approach: pass words back to those governments through their companies, and speak directly to those governments, with what amounts to a backdoor carrot and stick process that emphasizes the stick.

There’s this, too: the tariffs were delayed, not called off. It’s a clear move to see whether the Mexican and Canadian governments actually do what their President and Prime Minister have said they’d do.

Aside: It’s illustrative of what passes for news media today, that the news writers and news commenters (I hesitate to call them analysts) generally choose the most negative interpretation to tout, and never offer other, just as apparent, interpretations (and not just mine) with explanations of why they think those interpretations are not in play.

Another aside:

[T]he United Steelworkers, who lobbied for an oil exemption to protect their members working in refineries, decried the tariff action, saying that “lashing out at key allies like Canada is not the way forward.”

This from an organization that, like each of its brethren, feels perfectly free to lash out at businesses, threatening their existence with production-blocking strikes whenever they don’t get their own way.

“Completely Unprecedented”

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In an article centered on the Musk-led DOGE’s move to poke heavily into each of the Federal government’s agencies with a view to identifying misspent—for whatever reason—monies, Alexander Ward and Ginger Adams Otis quoted Richard Painter, Bush the Younger’s Ethics Lawyer, as he lamented,

This is completely unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

That really is a weak argument against DOGE’s moves. Precedent does matter; it gives a measure of stability and predictability in law and in economic activities and in other milieus.

Precedent isn’t immutable, though; making unprecedented moves isn’t even illegal, nor should it be. If we never did anything because it would be unprecedented, we’d never get anything done. Everything that’s ever been done was done for the first time—was unprecedented—when the doing got started initially.

“Completely unprecedented”—so what? We’ll see soon enough the outcomes of these unprecedented moves.

Lots of Angst

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DOGE personnel have been granted, by newly seated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, access to Treasury’s payment system that distributes trillions of dollars in entitlement benefits, grants and tax refunds. The bodice-ripping from the Left, from Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen, and from too many Republicans is awesome in its loud anxiety. No small part of that hysteria centers on those personnel’s ability to cut off all payments to everyone—including Social Security payments! Except that the access is read only; there is no ability to change anything, only to see and then to report.

The need for the seeing and reporting centers on this: the payment system is one that is run by career civil servants. It’s certainly true that allowing an entity not itself subject to oversight except by the President is fraught with danger. More than the privacy aspect of the access, though, I suspect the danger primarily is to Party and those career civil servants’ prerogatives.

We’ve already seen the extent, depth, and expense in dollars and liberty the danger already realized from so much of Federal government being run by career civil servants, bureaucrats entrenched in their long-term incumbency. It’s useful to have a group not beholden to the Bureaucratic State take a hard look at the doings and spendings of Treasury’s payment system and the “career civil servants” running it.

Stipulate that the vast majority of those personnel are entirely on the up and up and do their work diligently and with honest dedication. It would only take a few to do vast damage through misspending or stealing funds. A Treasury inspection, or an inspection run by civil servants from elsewhere in the administration, leaves too much room for papering over gross mistakes, for covering up outright wrong-doing.

The gains from largely unaccountable DOGE personnel doing this inspection is worth the risks involved, especially given the size of the realized risk from current practice.