Category Archives: ethics

The Dangers of Welfare

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These are illustrated by a Letter to the Editor in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.  The letter-writer wrote of a pay raise his company gave its employees and a bit of Panic of 2008 history:

Despite high unemployment rates [during the Panic], we still struggled to find well-qualified employees. We were competing against the federal government’s repeatedly extended subsidy for unemployment programs. We interviewed dozens of people who flatly told us they were only interviewing to obtain another log entry to remain qualified for unemployment benefits, and that they didn’t need to work for us when they could get paid almost the same to not work at all—for 52 weeks or more.

This is one contributor to an abominably slow recovery.

The Supreme Court

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As I write this (Saturday morning), Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh has not been confirmed; although, that seems more likely than I had thought Friday morning before the cloture vote.  Nevertheless, here’s why we need another textualist Justice on the Court—from the words of another Supreme Court Justice.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said Friday she fears the high court may lack a justice going forward who would serve as a swing-vote on cases….

And

Kagan said at a conference for women at Princeton University that over the past three decades…there was a figure on the bench “who found the center or people couldn’t predict in that sort of way.”

She made her view explicit:

It’s not so clear, that I think going forward, that sort of middle position—it’s not so clear whether we’ll have it[.]
…
It’s an incredibly important thing for the court to guard is this reputation of being impartial, being neutral and not being simply extension of a terribly polarizing process.

In one respect, it’s shocking that a Supreme Court Justice would have so little understanding of the role of American judges in our nation—in their role at the foundation of our freedom.

What’s polarizing and destructive of the Court’s credibility is its penchant for ruling on the basis of their individual views of what society needs or wants, even to the point of rewriting a law, as Chief Justice Roberts did in order to “save” Obamacare.  Determinations of what society needs and modifications of law are political decisions, that only We the People, through our elected representatives, can make.  That’s clear from our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Short, sweet, to the point, and not at all susceptible to misunderstanding.

Nor can a judge rule for the sake of achieving what seems to be—to the judge—some sort of “middle ground.”

A judge can only rule on the basis of what a law, or our Constitution, says.

Full stop.

Civility

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Congressman Andy Harris (R, MD) had an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal in which he decried the quality of current discourse and its lack of basic norms of decency. He closed his piece with a bit of naïve hope:

We must return to civility. We need to be able to agree to disagree, and express our disagreements through the democratic process.

That would be nice. However, notice that it was persons of the Left attacking Conservatives and people of the center right whom he described. The Progressive-Democratic Party has become the party of character assassination and destruction.  While they are not—yet—antifa dominated, the Party’s methods are those of the worst of the Left’s thugs.

It isn’t possible merely to agree to disagree with those who would destroy.

There’s a parable about a mouse and an owl. The mouse thinks the owl is mistaken. The owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

An Investigation

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No, not that one.

Senator Lyndsey Graham (R, SC) said on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo that he’s going to investigate [the whole program is interesting, but skip ahead to 15:28 for the Graham interview, which lasts for a bit in its own right] who “destroyed Dr Ford’s trust” by outing her after she had requested anonymity when communicating her charge to her Congresswoman, Anna Eshoo (D, CA), and her Senator, Dianne Feinstein (D, CA).  Graham pointed out, too, that there were only three groups of people who knew about Dr Ford’s letter: Feinstein and her staff, Eshoo and her staff, and Dr Ford’s lawyers.  Someone or some ones from those groups are the only ones who could have leaked Dr Ford’s letter and outed her.  Yes, I’m omitting the obvious fourth—that Dr Ford outed herself.

What’s instructive here is that it’s a Republican who wants to get to the bottom of that despicable betrayal.  The Progressive-Democrats are shockingly silent on the matter.

A Deported High School Student

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Recall the first debate between Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) and Beto O’Rourke, Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Texas Senator.  Ol’ Beto told the tale of a mistreated Dreamer [emphasis added]:

the salutatorian at tiny Booker High School in the Texas Panhandle, recently deported to his country of origin, not even speaking the language.

Oops.

It didn’t happen [emphasis added].

The honor student in question was actually the valedictorian.
She spoke the language.
It happened a decade ago, not recently.
And most importantly, said Yamile Guerrero Rosales, “I wasn’t deported….”

Oh, the lady was, at the time, here from Mexico, and she had to deal with six months of paperwork concerning her then baby, still stuck in Juarez.  But she’s now a naturalized citizen (tough to achieve after having been deported) and an accountant for a Booker area company.

Aides insist that O’Rourke was operating on second-hand information.  But come on, even the Dallas Morning News checks this kind of information, why didn’t O’Rourke?  Even if this was nothing more than an honest mistake—I’ll spot him that, tentatively—he’d repeated that tale on the campaign trail several times before he got to the debate and got fact checked.

Nor is this the first serious…error…O’Rourke has made (he now claims that an unidentified passenger in his own vehicle corroborates his claim).  It likely won’t be his last.  Is this the level of “carelessness” we want representing us in Texas?

Remember this, this fall.