Category Archives: politics

An Insight into Agility

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NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte isn’t stupid. He’s worried about how to absorb the increased military spending that some NATO members finally are doing and turning that money into modern hardware and men and women trained to employ them in combat.

He’s adept at a particular style of politics—that of sycophancy toward President Donald Trump (R), referring as he does to NATO’s increased spending as the “Trump Trillion.” That’s nothing but a recognition that it took Trump’s hard words and mean tweets to prod the nations into actually increasing their defense spending instead of perennially yapping about it.

Importantly, he stated out loud a critical insight into modern military preparedness. Regarding lessons available to be learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine, he had this, using drones as his example:

It’s not about producing drones, but having the production capacity to produce drones because the technology itself is constantly adapting and is changing every two or three weeks.

That production agility doesn’t only apply to drones or to weapons and weapons systems, though. It also applies to tactics, to campaign strategies, and to soldier, sailor, and airman training.

It requires, too, the political stones to support those agilities. And that requires NATO’s member nations to understand that parochiality inhibits, possibly fatally, any chance for success in any war against an experienced NATO enemy.

Countries seeking to protect domestic companies are…duplicating efforts, such as building too many different types of armored vehicles. That kind of fragmentation is inefficient. It also means less cash for things such as air defense and deep-strike missiles.
Large systems that need to integrate armed forces across the continent, like intelligence, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities, could also be at risk of losing out.

It also leads to the outright failure of nominally agreed joint weapons programs. In the latest case, France, Germany, and Spain spent the last eight years arguing over their defense companies’ priorities for producing a joint fighter, the core pillar of Europe’s largest ⁠defence project. That parochialism led, finally, to complete failure to produce anything.

The leaders of Germany and France have agreed to scrap a landmark project to ​develop and build a new-generation fighter jet, officials said on Monday, bowing to industrial rivalries over Europe’s most ambitious defence programme.

It’s on the military and its political masters alone, though, to develop and deliver the means of protecting the logistic lines of communication. It doesn’t matter how well trained and dedicated are the personnel or how combat capable the equipment if they and the consumables they need—food and fuel—cannot be delivered to the front. Private enterprise can’t build any of that without the military’s clear specifications and the politicians to override nationalist parochialism and to provide the funds for the development and production—and the fortitude to monitor and call out, with stern sanctions, failures to perform, whether politicians or favored companies.

NATO still is less of an alliance than it is a committee of rivals. Correcting that would be Rutte’s next project, if he can last long enough.

Eroding Foundational Checks and Balances

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Greg Ip is worried that the checks and balances built into our Federal government by our Constitution are rapidly eroding due to President Donald Trump’s (R) unilateral actions. He’s badly mistaken. The erosion began long ago, and it accelerated starting in 2008. Trump has been resisting the erosion, for all the discomfort he’s causing a Leftist press too used to and too comfortable with that washing away.

FDR then tried to pack the Supreme Court; his own party revolted.

Ip ignored the rest of that story and its impact. Roosevelt didn’t get the additional Justices he wanted, but by 1943, he’d succeeded in getting appointed to the Court 8 Justices of his choice ou of the 9 comprising the Court. Our nation has been paying the price of that ever since, from Wickard which increased Federal economic power at the direct expense of the States, through Kelo, which increased Federal power at the direct expense of individual citizens and our property rights, and Chevron deference, which increased the power of Executive Branch agencies at the direct expense of both Congress and the President.

Shortly after taking office, he [Trump] fired the Democratic members of several independent agencies, including the FTC, effectively transforming them into executive departments.

On the contrary, this was Trump executing his constitutional authority as the head of the Executive Branch, and exercising his control over all of the Agencies and Departments of the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court, only recently restored to a body that adheres to what our Constitution actually says rather than what a Liberal, Roosevelt-esque-dominated Court want it to say, acknowledged that constitutional authority. The erosion here is from Congress, with its creation of an “independent” Federal Trade Commission in 1914 and subsequent further “independent” Agency creations. These creations were Congress’ unconstitutional attempt to create a fourth Branch of government by masquerading these creations as part of the Executive Branch.

The Supreme Court also took a step toward restoring Constitutional order in our Federal government by—finally—eliminating the knee-jerk deference to those so-called independent Agencies, and others properly constituted as subordinate to the President, when it rescinded that misbegotten Chevron deference and emphasized the importance of and constitutional requirement that Congress do its own legislative work, work it cannot pass off to those Agencies.

Regarding Trump’s unilaterality in particular, in one sense, he’s only following the examples set by ex-President Barack Obama (D), who infamously bragged about—and used—his pen and telephone to ignore or override Congress, and ex-President Joe Biden (D) who ignored so many of our nation’s laws in his attempt to virtually erase our southern border.

That unilaterality also is being reined in by a constitution-supporting and -applying Court. Trump can fire those Agency personnel. His unilateral application of taxing, via tariffs, has been severely curtailed. His efforts to cancel already-committed Federal grants have been successfully blocked.

Other of his unilateral actions, though, actually are moves back toward Constitutional order. His moves to greatly reduce Department of Education employment and to closely circumscribe DoEd authorities are aimed at getting rid of the Department altogether. This would be entirely appropriate, since the Department is a relatively recent Congressional creation done at the direct expense of the States, taking as it does, control over the education of our nation’s children away from the States, and in many ways away from the parents, and centralizing that control within the Federal government.

The erosion of our government’s checks and balances has been vast, but it’s not only due to a President overstepping his authorities or deliberately ignoring his duties. It’s also been due to Congress shirking its legislative duties and to a Court ignoring its own duties. At present, though, it appears as though the erosion is being slowed, and an increasing move back toward order is in progress.

There Are Three Branches

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Under our constitutional Federal government there are exactly three branches—judiciary, legislative, and executive—neither more nor fewer. The legislative—our Congress—can, and does, create departments (other than the Constitutionally mandated State and Defense (however titled)) and agencies within the Executive Branch. Our Constitution names the President as the Chief Executive of the Executive Branch with sole responsibility for enforcing the laws that Congress enacts.

Whether Congress claims this or that agency to be “independent” or not, all of those agencies, by being within the Executive Branch, are—must be—under the control of the President, which control includes the hiring and firing of all of an agency’s employees, and the firing aspect of that includes politically appointed employees who must be confirmed by the Senate after a Presidential nomination in order to fully take office.

That firing authority was finally acknowledged by the Supreme Court in its just released ruling in Trump v Slaughter, which explicitly overruled the 91 years prior wrongly decided Humphrey’s Executor v US.

William Galston demurred from that ruling in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

While the chief justice is right that the FTC’s executive functions have expanded since 1935, it hasn’t ceased to exercise legislative and judicial functions as well. The FTC isn’t simply part of the executive branch; it was designed to be independent. It’s hard to see why Congress can’t mandate special firing procedures for such hybrid entities.

The FTC isn’t simply part of the executive branch; it was designed to be independent. That’s Galston’s error. There are only those three branches of our government; “independent” agencies cannot exist outside of those three, and being within one or another of them, they cannot be independent. Nor can they carry out, from within one of them, any of the functions of either of the others—that would eliminate the separation of powers that is at the core of our government’s structure.

Galston made this argument, citing James Madison in Federalist No 47:

Separation of powers doesn’t mean the branches of government have no role in any other branch. It means that when “the same hands” control more than one branch of government, the fundamental principles of a free Constitution are subverted.

Madison was right, but Galston’s usage is a non sequitur. “The same hands” do not control more than one branch of government except when one branch dictates to the others how they must go about their constitutionally mandated duties, as Congress attempts to do when it sets about hamstringing the President’s control over the entities in his branch.

In particular, Congress

  • cannot create a legislative agency, place it with the Executive Branch, and then tell the President he must do what that agency requires
  • cannot create a judicial agency, place it within the Judiciary Branch, and then omit the judges from that oversight, leaving that task to the Executive) Branch—to the President
  • cannot reach into either of those other branches and dictate to its chief how he must carry out any oversight
  • must place an agency with judicial functions inside the judiciary branch and leave the entirety of oversight to the Chief Justice
  • must place an agency with executive functions inside the Executive Branch and leave the entirety of oversight to the President
  • must keep an agency with legislative functions inside the Legislative Branch. Only then can Congress specify how oversight must be carried out. Of course, a Legislative Branch agency would have no enforcement capability; that is the sole province of the Executive.

Congress exercises all the control over the Executive Branch it needs and is allowed to have via its constitutionally created ability to control the funds available to the Executive and any of his Departments and agencies, and through the oversight hearings it uses to inform itself of Executive Branch doings.

Record Profits

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Or at least near-record and with room to rise a bit more. These make those companies obvious targets for the Left and for the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, all of whom view those profits as immoral and needing to be confiscated by Government or as public goods needing to be confiscated managed by Government or both.

The net profit margin for companies in the S&P 500 rose to 14.8% in the first quarter, according to FactSet. This marks the highest net margin, a measure of the profit generated from every dollar of revenue, reported by the index since the data provider began tracking this metric in 2009. The previous peak of 13.2% was set just a quarter earlier.
It isn’t just tech companies, either. In the first quarter, multiple sectors including financial services and industrials reported net margins above their five-year averages.

Those companies would do well to pass some of those profits on to uses of their choosing, rather than just sitting on them. At the least, the companies need to state openly their plans for the future of the business and its accumulating profits and then demonstrably execute on those plans.

Those uses and plans might or might not make good business sense in the economic world, but it would make good business sense in the political world where the now-openly socialist Progressive-Democratic Party reigns over us.

There’s a Reason for That

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As The Wall Street Journal‘s astute editors noticed, less than a dozen—10, by their count of the fingers of two hands and no toes of either foot—members of the Progressive-Democratic Party caucus in the House of Representatives are willing to oppose the Democratic Socialists of America agenda. My count via the thumbs of just one of my hands (or maybe the social finger of that hand), only one Progressive-Democratic Party Senator is willing to oppose the DSA agenda.

It’s an agenda of government control of our larger businesses (but it won’t stop there), government control of private property, government given (and so able to be taken away) national medicine, ever rising taxes because…”necessity,” and political rather than economic globalization through entirely open borders and an end to deportation of illegal aliens (there being no such thing in the DSA ideology).

Less than a dozen across our Congress. Eleven, out of an aggregate of 255 Progressive-Democrat Congressmen. Those 244 Progressive-Democrat Congressmen demonstrate pretty conclusively that the Progressive-Democratic Party is an overtly socialist party, the direction in which it began moving with the election of Barack Obama as President just 18 years ago, with the pace sharply accelerating after the election of the “squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley just eight years ago.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is rapidly and enthusiastically coming out of the closet, assimilating the DSA (or being swallowed by DSA), and openly asserting that DSA political and economic positions are its own. Those policies are what Party will attempt to inflict on our nation if it gains majorities in the House and Senate after this fall’s elections.