Category Archives: ethics

More Disingenuosity of the Left

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Buried in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill that they’re so desperate to hurry up and get passed before anyone can peruse it is this payoff to unions:

The bill the House passed would allow union members to deduct up to $250 of dues from their tax bills. The deduction is “above the line,” meaning filers can exclude the cost of dues from their gross income. In other words, union dues would get the same treatment now reserved for things like insurance premiums and retirement contributions.

The Progressive-Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, claims it’s no payoff at all; it’s because

Unions are the backbone of the middle class. This legislation would put money back in the pockets of working families.

Never mind that union membership in the entire private sector is only a bit over 6%, not close to any sort of middle class backbone.

What the Progressive-Democrat carefully ignores, too, is that absent the vast increase in taxes included in the reconciliation bill, there’d be no need to put money back in the pockets of working families because that money wouldn’t be leaving those pockets in the first place.

The WSJ has the right of it:

The true goal of the tax break is to fill union coffers by making dues less of a deterrent to joining. The incentive would be particularly strong in 23 states without right-to-work laws, where workers pay partial union fees whether or not they’re members.

(Keep in mind, too, that the Progressive-Democrats also are pushing legislation that would eliminate right-to-work laws in those 23 States and nation-wide.)

Bread and circuses. Vote buying.

Rules Don’t Matter

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The Progressive-Democrats want to toss inconvenient Senate rules so they can have anything they demand. And they’ve become very open about that.

A group of House Democrats, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) penned a letter urging the Senate’s Democratic leadership to ignore the Senate Parliamentarian ruling that a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill.

And from the letter,

We do understand that the Senate Parliamentarian has issued a memorandum dismissing—despite evidence to the contrary—the budgetary impact of providing a pathway to citizenship. But the role of the Parliamentarian is an advisory one, and the Parliamentarian’s opinion is not binding.

Never mind the carefully unsubstantiated claim of budgetary impact. Consider the demand that the Parliamentarian’s ruling be blithely ignored. It is an advisory ruling, but under Senate reconciliation ruling it is binding, and the Senate is bound by it.

Sure, the ruling can be overridden, but that capability is irrelevant, as the Progressive-Democrats know full well. Statutes are binding, also, as are Federal agency regulations, and statutes and regulations also can be overridden: by subsequent statute or regulation, by the issuing agency rescinding its regulation, by the courts overruling or striking altogether the statute or regulation.

But overrule it the damned thing, Progressive-Democrats demand; it’s inconvenient to their purpose.

Nor will such disregard be limited to immigration. They’ll move to ignore any Senate rule, any regulation, any statute that gets in their way.

The Progressive-Democrats, in their drive to “fundamentally transform our nation,” now are saying out loud that a Critical Item in their desired transformation is that we should no longer be a nation ruled by law, but a nation ruled by men and women—their men and women in particular.

Remember this next fall, and keep it firmly in mind for 2024.

Be Like Austria

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That’s what Biden-Harris want for us with zir continued penchant for isolation and demands for vaccination—”[t]his is not about freedom or personal choice“—demands for masking, even of small children, and threats of lockdown, whether explicitly or by outcome.

Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg, by fiat, is locking up all Austrians in the nation—even his vaccinated (but apparently still “unprotected”) subjects in order to “protect” all from the Wuhan Virus.

Schallenberg said the lockdown will start Monday and initially last for 10 days. Most stores will close, and cultural events will be canceled.
He initially said all students would have to go back into homeschooling.

After those 10 days, if the subjects don’t satisfy their Chancellor, Schallenberg may well extend his locking up for another 10 days.

At least now the Progressive-Democrats are getting specific, and not just pushing their more amorphous “be like Europe” mantra.

Not Government Overreach

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Biden-Harris and zir’s Merrick Garland-led Department of Justice’s FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on Project Veritas‘ founder and boss James O’Keefe’s home, searched it, and seized his phones and began searching through the phones. This is separate from the FBI’s raid on the homes of reporters working for Project Veritas.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop extracting data from the phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe days after his home was raided….
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According to the order, the DOJ must confirm to the court by Friday that it has paused its review of O’Keefe’s phones.

Days after. The FBI has had those days to extract, copy, and paw through the data.

A special master has been appointed by the court to oversee this and to cull the data that the Privacy Protection Act, along with DoJ regulations, explicitly bar Government from seizing from reporters. However, on what basis do we believe the FBI has actually “paused” its review? Even were the phones physically transferred to the possession of this special master, on what basis do we believe that agents this government have stopped pawing through the data they’ve seized? On what basis do we believe those agents of this government have destroyed—or even sequestered—their copies?

Among those data are

confidential and privileged information…of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications

And

reporters’ notes. A lot of…sources unrelated to this story and a lot of confidential donor information to our news organization.

This is not overreach. This is naked abuse of raw power and a deliberate, considered disregard for law, for the liberties and rights of American citizens.

It’s going to be a long three years.

(Aside: what was this stuff doing on a cell phone, anyway? This is taking convenience too far at the expense of security.)

Biden-Harris Diktat

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The 5th Circuit has affirmed its stay of OSHA’s mandate that employers must require—be deputiz[ed] their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme as the court acknowledged—employee vaccines, testing, or termination, or face deliberately destructive fines for not doing so.

An array of petitioners seeks a stay barring OSHA from enforcing the Mandate during the pendency of judicial review. On November 6, 2021, we agreed to stay the Mandate pending briefing and expedited judicial review. Having conducted that expedited review, we reaffirm our initial stay.

The appellate court went on:

[T]he Mandate…exposes them [the covered businesses] to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road.

And [citation omitted, emphasis added]:

Under the traditional stay standard, a court considers four factors: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.”
Each of these factors favors a stay here.

Regarding that first criterion, whether the stay applicant is likely to succeed on merit:

[T]he Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat).

And [emphasis in the original]:

The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well.

And:

OSHA’s attempt to shoehorn an airborne virus that is both widely present in society (and thus not particular to any workplace) and non-life-threatening to a vast majority of employees into a neighboring phrase connoting toxicity and poisonousness is yet another transparent stretch.
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Any argument OSHA may make that COVID-19 is a “new hazard[]” would directly contradict OSHA’s prior representation to the D.C. Circuit that “[t]here can be no dispute that COVID-19 is a recognized hazard.”

And [citation omitted, emphasis added]:

It is thus critical to note that the Mandate makes no serious attempt to explain why OSHA and the President himself were against vaccine mandates before they were for one here.
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Because it is generally “arbitrary or capricious” to “depart from a prior policy sub silentio,” agencies must typically provide a “detailed explanation” for contradicting a prior policy, particularly when the “prior policy has engendered serious reliance interests.” OSHA’s reversal here strains credulity, as does its pretextual basis. Such shortcomings are all hallmarks of unlawful agency actions.

The ruling goes on in similar veins regarding the other three factors of consideration for issuing a stay.

Here is an example of the Progressive-Democrat administration’s penchant for ruling by diktat and its utter disregard for pesky laws, our Constitution, and We the People—our government’s employers—when any of them, or us, become inconvenient to any Progressive-Democrat wish.

Especially in this regard, as the court noted in its assessment of the degree of harm to us individual citizens were a stay of this OSHA rule not granted, is this [citation retained]:

For the individual petitioners, the loss of constitutional freedoms “for even minimal periods of time…unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” Elrod v Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 373 (1976) (“The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”).

The court’s ruling can be read here.