Category Archives: ethics

Clyburn Misleads

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Jim Clyburn (D, SC), in an interview on Fox News Sunday, made the below claim in defense of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together are intended to take the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives of Federal elections away from the States and to entirely Federalize those election procedures. In citing Alexander Hamilton’s (as alleged by Clyburn) statements that elections “cannot” and “should not be left up to the states,” he made this claim:

That’s why the voting rights act was necessary and that’s why the fifth amendment to the constitution, why the 18th amendment to the constitution are necessary—all because it had to go beyond the states to determine.

It’s impossible to determine what “amendments” Clyburn was referencing here: the 5th Amendment is concerned with trials, punishments, and takings; it has nothing to do with voting or elections. The 18th Amendment was the Prohibition Amendment attempting to outlaw liquor; it, also, has nothing to do with voting or elections, and it was rescinded a few years later with the 21st Amendment.

It’s clear, though, that Clyburn, far from misspeaking on the Amendments, was badly misinterpreting Hamilton’s views on elections to Federal office and the relationship between the States and the Federal government regarding those elections.

This is what Hamilton wrote in his Federalist No. 59 essay [emphasis added]:

[I]t will therefore not be denied, that a discretionary power over elections ought to exist somewhere. It will, I presume, be as readily conceded, that there were only three ways in which this power could have been reasonably modified and disposed: that it must either have been lodged wholly in the national legislature, or wholly in the State legislatures, or primarily in the latter and ultimately in the former. The last mode has, with reason, been preferred by the convention. They have submitted the regulation of elections for the federal government, in the first instance, to the local administrations; which, in ordinary cases, and when no improper views prevail, may be both more convenient and more satisfactory; but they have reserved to the national authority a right to interpose, whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety.

He introduced that discussion with this, in his lede [emphasis added]:

The natural order of the subject leads us to consider, in this place, that provision of the Constitution which authorizes the national legislature to regulate, in the last resort, the election of its own members.

The States, according to Hamilton, are to set their own rules for how their own representatives and those of their citizens in the Federal government will be elected, and the Federal government is to act in the last resort and only under extraordinary circumstances, most assuredly not in the first, or even merely default, resort. Clyburn’s touted bills would go beyond that, and make the Federal government the only serious determiner of how each State will determine its representation.

The Federal government, according to the Progressive-Democrats, will tell us citizens who it will permit to speak for us to it. We average Americans, after all, are, in the words of Herbert Croly, one of the modern Progressive movement’s founders,

morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [our] responsibilities as a democrat.

Walensky Fails

Posted on by
Reply

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was asked on Bret Baier’s Fox News Sunday episode last Sunday,

Do you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID, but they had other comorbidities? Do you have that breakdown?

Walensky proceeded to weasel-word her answer and segued to the only talking point she could remember, that everyone must get vaccinated and boosted and get their children vaccinated, too, as soon as they’re eligible. Only toward the end of her off-topic response did she reveal her larger failure:

Yes, of course, with Omicron we’re following that very carefully….

And then she said she didn’t have even those data for the Omicron variant—they take “weeks” to gather….

However.

Why hasn’t she been following this matter, collecting these data, since the Wuhan Virus first arrived? Walensky has, or her staff has—or should have—2 years of these data, for the first Wuhan Virus (which, in truth, is Robert Redfield’s failure); a year or more for the Delta variant, which is on her watch; and more than “weeks” for the Omicron variant.

Beyond Baier’s simplified question, of sort-of necessity in a single segment of several in his program, however, there are four mortality categories of interest, and those four should be of interest to CDC:

  • Those for whom the virus was the sole cause of death
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the virus was the primary cause of death, but the comorbidities were contributing factors
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the comorbidities were the primary cause of death, but the virus was a contributing factor
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the comorbidities were the sole cause of death, and the virus was merely present.

The CDC is ignoring all of that.

Congressman Jordan Demurs

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) has declined Congressman and Chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Bennie Thompson’s (D, MS) “request” to appear before that J6 committee. His letter carrying his decision to Thompson laid the matter out in no uncertain terms.

Leaving aside Jordan’s notice that the J6 committee’s summons of Jordan (and of Congressman Scott Perry (R, PA), I add) is an assault (Jordan used “pry”) on a sitting Congressman’s deliberative process informing a Member about legislative matters before the House is an outrageous abuse of the Select Committee’s authority, he laid out a number of other reasons for his decision.

As you well know, I have no relevant information that would assist the Select Committee in advancing any legitimate legislative purpose. I cannot speak to Speaker Pelosi’s failure to ensure the appropriate security posture at the Capitol complex in advance of well-publicized protests on January 6, 2021. I cannot elaborate on former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund’s statement that a concern about “optics”—following widespread calls from Democrats in 2020 to defund the police—contributed to the limited security response. I have nothing to add to the bipartisan, comprehensive findings of the Senate investigative committees or to those issued by federal inspectors general. I cannot testify about the Justice Department’s ongoing law-enforcement efforts, although I am aware of reports that the FBI has determined the violence was not coordinated or part of any “organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Jordan, in his letter, also took notice that the J6 committee seems superfluous (my term), since House Democrats have already determined the committee’s outcome:

House Democrats have already prejudged the results of the Select Committee’s work, declaring in their February 2021 impeachment brief that President Trump is “unmistakabl[y]” responsible for the events of January 6. Democrats have accused their Republican colleagues of “sedition” and called them “traitors” for objecting to Electoral College results in certain states—an official action taken pursuant to federal law, and the same objections that you and other senior House Democrats made following the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections.

He also laid out individual Progressive-Democrat committee members’ dishonesty:

  • In a widely distributed letter, you falsely accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik of attending a meeting in Washington on January 5, 2021, when Kerik was actually in New York City.
  • During a business meeting to consider holding our former colleague Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the Select Committee, doctored a text message I had forwarded to Mr. Meadows.
  • During the floor debate on the Meadows criminal contempt resolution, Representative Jamie Raskin, another member of the Select Committee, falsely attributed a second text message to a “lawmaker” when in fact it was not sent by any Member of Congress.

Jordan is being polite. Speaker Pelosi’s (D, CA) J6 committee is not just the cudgel for smearing Republicans that he terms it; it’s a kangaroo court being used to assault an opposition party and attempt to delegitimize it through innuendo, ad hominem, and outright lie.

Jordan’s letter can be read here via Fox News.

Weaponized Impeachment

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) thinks there’s a chance a Republican-majority House of Representatives would, in 2023, impeach the President Joe Biden (D) half of the Biden-Harris Presidency. It’s hard to tell from his remarks whether Cruz advocates such a move, or whether he’s merely making a prediction, given the mood of many politicians.

House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) has a different priority, but she doesn’t go far enough.

Anything is on the table when we are in the majority. But what I believe we should focus on is conducting oversight and making sure that we’re passing legislation to secure the border once and for all.

Impeaching Biden, however good that might feel in the moment, should not be part of the everything that’s on the table. It shouldn’t even be under consideration. Tit-for-tat impeachments aren’t the way forward for the Republican Party or for Conservatives—or for our nation. Republicans and Conservatives don’t need to act like Progressive-Democrats. We’re better than that.

Republicans and Conservatives—individually in their respective districts and in Progressive-Democrat neighboring districts, as well as at the party level—need to make the case for their policies, and not be solely against the others’ moves. They only should talk about Progressive-Democrat failures, of which our border is only one, and about Progressive-Democrat assaults on our republican democracy in terms of how Republican and Conservative policies will advance our nation and correct those failures.

The best “impeachment” of Biden-Harris would be to skunk him in the 2024 Electoral College.

Blame-shifting to Middlemen

Posted on by
Reply

Now Biden-Harris is throwing a billion dollars at the food supply chain problem, even as he’s blaming food supply chain middlemen for his supply problems.

This is just more blame-shifting by Biden-Harris.

Middlemen can, indeed, price gouge. So can end-sellers. So can original producers. However, in the vast main, middlemen drive prices lower: they insulate original producers from end sellers, giving those producers more flexibility in to whom to sell, the middlemen more choices to whom to sell, and they give end sellers more choices of from whom to buy. Competition among middlemen and on both sides of the middlemen drive prices down.

And never mind the risks taken by middlemen. They don’t broker deals between original producers and final buyers; they buy from those producers, own the product, and subsequently must find buyers to whom to sell. Even if middlemen think they’ve lined up their buyers prior to purchasing from producers, many of those deals are only potential and can fall through, or the agreed future price can prove to be wildly inadequate in the realization of delivery.

Biden-Harris actually claimed with a straight face, through his unsigned “fact sheet,” that

[m]ost farmers now have little or no choice of buyer for their product and little leverage to negotiate, causing their share of every dollar spent on food to decline.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But a farmer has far more choice than if there were no middlemen to take the risk of a bumper crop driving down the price he can get on sale after harvest, or of a poor crop driving up the price he could have gotten had the crop done poorly before he committed to sell.

Biden-Harris, aside from the dishonesty of their blame-shifting, in the particular case of farm production is pretending to be ignorant of the time lags involved from crop planting to final crop delivered to the end user, and of the time lags involved from crop planting to final delivery to the livestock rancher to the end user.