Daily Archives: 21 October 2026

Factions

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Recall that our Founders abhorred factions in our national politics, even considering it, in those first few elections, to be inappropriate for a candidate for office to personally campaign, the candidate relying instead on supporters to talk them up before the elections occurred. The Founders’ idea was that the subjects coming before Congress should be debated and then voted up or down by those initial 65 Congressmen and 26 Senators and signed into law by the President, or vetoed (and subsequently overridden by Congress, or not), on their individual view of the bill’s merits.

Of course, that goal quickly went into the trash heap, and immediately we got the straightforwardly named Pro- and Anti-Administration Parties, followed quickly by the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party, and on through to the Progressive-Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America Party of today.

Today we have factionalism laid bare and operating especially nakedly. Grace Mauser, Co-Chair of the New York City chapter of the DSA:

If someone needs your votes to make something happen, they should give you something in return[.]

The incoming DSA Caucus of the Progressive-Democratic Party is not alone in this naked trading of support for support. The Chaos Caucus of the Republican Party paralyzed the House and prevented the Republican Party from getting much of anything done beyond one tax-cutting bill, most infamously failing to pass the SAVE Act, which would have made our elections more secure if only by limiting the franchise explicitly and nation-wide to American citizens.

There’s not even any pretense of acting on the merits of a proposal anymore. A bill passes or fails (and the President signs or vetoes) based on the pecuniary or political value of what’s offered in trade for a politician’s—or today, a claque small caucus’—support. All along, too, we’ve objected as a people to the buying and selling of votes in our elections, yet our politicians actively buy and sell their own votes in the halls of our Congress–and we accept that as the nature of political sausage.

Given that factionalism has been and is here to stay, the longer-term danger of today’s factionalism is that the Progressive-Democratic Party and its DSA Caucus in the House will avoid paralysis and get much of the latter’s socialist goals passed and sent up to a Senate controlled by a Progressive-Democratic Party with its own DSA Caucus of Senators. After all, during Nancy Pelosi’s reign as Party Leader, we had Party acting on everything in the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party. That’s how we got Obamacare inflicted on us that last time we had the Progressive-Democratic Party unilaterally reigning.

We’ll see whether Party and its Caucus can maintain that discipline.

Featherbedding in Trucking

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It’s coming. In fact, it’s already being pushed for in California.

Driverless trucks have been operating for some time in Texas and other States across the south, moving the middle mile—the travel from warehouse/depot to warehouse/depot. Human drivers handle the first and last mile, loading and hooking up/unhooking and parking and unloading freight trailers at the start and destination sites. Especially at the destination, since driverless trucks still can’t back up (that’s skill that’s much harder to teach a computer to do).

With this empirically demonstrated capability and safety as backdrop, California enacted state regulations that removed a ban on driverless trucks weighing 10,001 pounds or more, and allowed testing and deployment of such vehicles through a permit process. Naturally, unions don’t like that, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in California sued the State’s DMV over those regulations. The Teamsters’ plaint:

The deployment of Self-Driving Trucks, authorized by the regulatory changes, has the potential to eventually wipe out the jobs of more than 200,000 employee semi-truck drivers working across California[.]

The union doesn’t care that there is no intrinsic right for anyone to drive a truck for a company or for himself. Hiring, or not, truck drivers is strictly a business decision as companies seek to hold down the cost of their delivery operations, and as customer companies seek to hold down costs of getting deliveries. Driverless trucks are cheaper to operate than driver-ed trucks: as recently as 2025, roughly 44% of the cost of operating a truck was in driver wages and benefits. Robots don’t have much need for those.

Peter Finn, the Teamsters’ Vice President At-Large, added that communities want to see investments in people and middle-class jobs against the broader backdrop of artificial-intelligence growth. Again, this is a business decision, not an inherent right to any particular job in the pursuit of those investments.

If the union succeeds in scotching those California regulations, its next move will be to push for literal featherbedding: a human in the driverless tractor pulling those freight trailers, even though they’re not needed for any reason other than fueling union coffers. And artificially elevating costs to trucking companies, companies receiving truckers’ deliveries, and us American consumers as the end buyer of the trucked goods.