Author Archives: eehines

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.

Obamacare Subsidies and Appropriations Bills

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen and Senators are attempting to extort Republicans into surrendering on extending/restoring Progressive-Democrat-passed (in 2021) Obamacare expanded subsidies.

Unfortunately, they’ll likely succeed, as too many Republicans in each house are too timid to stand their ground.

Never mind that if those Republicans would crawl out from under their desks, they easily could make the case that any government shutdown would be (and after the realization, was) the sole doing of those Progressive-Democrats. It’s those Party members, after all, who threatened to close our government if they weren’t meekly obeyed and who in the realization did close our government.

These Republicans think they face regarding the Progressive-Democrats’ announcement is a chimera, too. The Federal government never really shuts down. With current tax law, funds come flowing in to Federal coffers are plenty for the Federal government to keep paying, on schedule, almost all of existing Federal outlays. The losses from any supposed shutdown would be primarily via Federal contracts with businesses that provide services to the Feds, but most of these businesses would be made whole under the terms of those same contracts.

The larger, underlying problem this extortion exposes, though, is the Republicans’ failure, in their aggregate, to pass all of the dozen separate appropriations bills they’re nominally required to pass every year. These appropriations bills are the actual spending bills that commit actual dollars that the Federal government has committed through its various allocation bills, which is where the government says what it wants to fund. Appropriations are those funds.

Had the Republicans in Congress actually passed those dozen bills on schedule, or at least by the end of the current fiscal year (which has another week left, so theoretically they still could), as they promised at the start of the year and of which they’ve only passed three or four, there would be no risk of a shutdown, and the Progressive-Democrats would have no extortion bricks to throw threw government windows.

Will the Republicans learn this lesson for the second year of this Congressional session? They never have in the past. I’m not holding my breath for the future.

Not Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s War

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President Donald Trump (R) is dead [sic] wrong on this one.

This is not Trump’s war (it would never have started if I was president!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war[.]

No, this is not Zelenskyy’s war, either. This is, plainly, Biden’s and Putin’s war. It’s especially Putin’s war—he’s the one who invaded, and compounding his responsibility, he sent the invasion in utterly without provocation. Ex-President Joe Biden (D), played a critical role in Putin’s decision to invade when Biden gave Putin permission to do so, saying that a small incursion would be OK.

On the other hand, Ukraine, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is fighting for its existence as a sovereign, independent nation that is responsible for its own existence.

Trump is right, though, on this much:

[I]t would never have started if I was president!

“Political Violence Has Become a Terrifying Fact of American Life”

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That’s the headline. What it doesn’t include, and what the underlying article goes on to not include, is that the political violence is almost exclusively from the Left.

  • Then-Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D) shot and nearly killed at a rally
  • Progressive-Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer (NY), on the Supreme Court Building front steps, threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by an assassination attempt against one of the named
  • Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) accusing Republicans and Donald Trump of autocracy and dictatorship, followed shortly by a Leftist’s mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen practicing baseball
  • Antifa’s attacks on Conservative newsman Andy Ngo
  • Antifa’s attacks on Christian rallies
  • Attack against then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016
  • Months later another Leftist tried to steal a police officer’s pistol with which to shoot Trump at a rally
  • A 2017 attempt by a Leftist to ram a forklift into a Trump motorcade
  • A 2018 mailing of a ricin-laced envelope to Trump
  • George Floyd riots during which Minneapolis’ mayor held off sending in National Guard to quell the riots
  • Summer of Love in Seattle
  • Riots and attacks against Federal officers and buildings in Portland while Portland’s mayor objected to the Federal government sending National Guard troops to protect those Federal buildings
  • 2021 attack on the White House by a Black Nationalist, during which a Capitol Police officer was killed and another injured
  • Two murder 2024 attempts against then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump
  • Death threats and swatting made against
    • US District Judge Aileen Cannon
    • New York County DA Alvin Bragg
    • US District Judge Tanya Chutkan
  • Assaults against ICE agents as the go about enforcing immigration law, particularly against violent illegal aliens
  • Murder of Charlie Kirk, a Republican podcaster, speaker, fund-raiser, founder of Turning Point USA
  • The ammunition by the Kirk murderer inscribed with “anti-fascist” and transgender slogans
  • Death threats leveled against Kirk’s widow

Then there’s what Jonathon Turley calls “rage rhetoric,” which Leftists insist is provocative of physical violence, and on that, those Leftists are correct. It’s just that the rhetoric is mostly from their fellow Leftists. The following are in addition to Schumer’s and Sanders’ rage rhetoric. These have set the environment that justifies, in the Left’s collective mind, the violence they inflict.

  • 2022, then-President Joe Biden called the MAGA movement “semi-fascism.”
  • Vice President Kamala Harris yokked it up with Ellen DeGeneres about killing Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, or former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) declared “Elon Musk is seizing the power that belongs to the American people.”
  • Congressman Jamie Raskin (D, MD) said that [Elon] Musk and Trump were conducting a “rapidly expanding and accelerating coup.”
  • Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) said that a “coup” was being carried out.
  • Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said Musk was “taking away everything we have.”
  • Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D, NJ) said “God d—it shut down the Senate!…WE ARE AT WAR!”
  • House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) called on his fellow Progressive-Democrats to fight “in the streets.”

That’s just a taste.

Then there’s the Left’s cancel war against the Right, which while not kinetic is often just as destructive of careers and lives.