Category Archives: rights

A Clear Statement

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The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on protecting women’s sports from male participation by gender identity last Wednesday. Progressive-Democratic Party committee members boycotted the hearing a’fter the committee’s Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D, IL) pooh-poohed the risk of boys and men playing against girls in girls’ sports, calling the hearing a vendetta against trans athletes.

This is Party’s overt, clear statement in favor of boys and men playing in what used to be girls’ sports, denying those girls the privacy of their own bathrooms and locker rooms, denying those girls the self-confidence that comes from competing against other girls and winning or otherwise doing well rather than being dominated by the boys and men against whom they’re competing—to use that term very loosely in this context. It denies girls access to the accolades, scholarships, and money that would otherwise accrue to them from success.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party. It proudly adds misogyny to their platform.

Naïve or Ignorant?

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Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R) and Donald Boudreaux, an econ prof at George Mason University, centered their op-ed in Monday’s WSJ on the premise that if the Republican party gets suitably drubbed this fall, the remnants will revolt against President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs and revert to Reagan-esque free trade economics. On regaining majorities in the House and Senate, there will be a Republican backlash against Mr Trump’s tariff policies and those policies suitably altered or rescinded.

I’m hard pressed to determine whether these two, who should know better, are really that naïve or they’re that ignorant.

An ascendant Progressive-Democratic Party, whose leadership has sworn to fundamentally change our nation and our economy will set about doing exactly that. Beginning with their elimination of the Senate’s filibuster, they will transform our nation’s republican democracy structure, a structure that protects minority party rights and authorities, into a popular democracy, a one-party structure that ignores minority party imperatives. Popular democracies in this way are indistinguishable from authoritarian- or tyranny-run nations. They will continue their “transformation” with packing the Supreme Court, installing a majority of activist Justices instead of Justices sworn to defend our Constitution and to apply it and any statutes before them as they are written rather than as the newly installed activists, or their Party masters, want them to be written. Party has long opposed election laws that limit the franchise to citizens; once they’re in control this time around, they’ll not only control voting laws, they’ll also control vote counting process.

Party has already begun its promised transformation, beginning with that filibuster elimination commitment. It’s continuing with its open clasping of the Democratic Socialists of America to its bosom. The DSA is committed to centralized government control of our private economy, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) fundamental economic transformation. DSA, and so Party, are committed to subordinating our Court system to Congress, although this would be redundant with the packed Court. More long-term, they’re committed to eliminating the Senate altogether, although this may prove unnecessary: with the elimination of the filibuster, the Senate would be indistinguishable from the House—each State would simply have two legislators elected at large along with those elected district by district. This is ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dream of changing our nation.

With Party control of government, there may well be no further Republican majorities in either house of Congress.

Pick One

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In an article regarding Europe’s censors’ efforts to govern and limit American speech, Nathan Harden, RealClearEducation Editor, warned about AI packages embedding invisible and supposedly unremovable watermarks in writing (and eventually in imagery and recordings of speech, also) so that those censors can identify and block speech of which they personally disapprove. In the course of that, the author wrote this about Anthropic AI-generated watermarks in particular.

The marking technology subtly biases words the model picks, in a pattern Anthropic controls via a secret key. The watermark survives ordinary copy and paste, and there is no way to opt out. Anthropic says the mark carries no information that could identify a user and won’t affect the overall meaning of the text.

It isn’t possible to subtly bias words in a text without the overall meaning of that text being so influenced. Surely Anthropic’s managers understand this.

Harden then asked the critical question:

Americans should be asking a more fundamental question: Why is European law dictating how an American company produces words for Americans?

The answer is because [Anthropic’s] managers are all too willing to surrender to Europe’s censors in order preserve their precious presence there and not willing enough, if at all, to spend that energy preserving the freedoms of the nation that nurtured them and provided them the environment in which they grew and now prosper.

How, then, can [Anthropic] or its products be trusted in America or anywhere else?

“Healthcare is a right”

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That’s the mantra of the Left and of their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, most recently articulated by Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon in her successful campaign for the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination for Senator from Florida.

She, and they, are wrong on this, though.

What is the actual right intrinsic in all of us as human beings and in particular via our Declaration of Independence, us Americans, is our right to Life. Full stop.

Health care is merely a tool in protecting that right and preserving the object of that right, our Lives. If this tool is a right in itself in the meaning of the Nixons of our nation, then so are other tools critical—even merely useful—to our ability to protect our right to Life.

These other tools include seemingly peripheral things like our right to vote to choose who we will have represent us in our government, a right currently threatened by the Left’s moves to allow illegal aliens to vote and resistance by the Left to purge voter rolls even of those accidentally registered, all of which dilute the value and effectiveness of legitimate votes. That dilution diminishes our ability to choose our own representatives in government, and that puts the quality of our lives in jeopardy, and that degradation risks our Lives.

Other tools include more directly impacting matters like barring abortion, which denies a baby’s right to its Life.

That last raises another failure in the Left’s healthcare is a right mantra. Rights are universal; we don’t get to pick and choose who has the right, and who does not. The right to Life includes the right of all babies to their Lives, whether they’ve been born or they’re still gestating. Health care is an important tool for preserving the object of that right to Life, the Lives of those babies. Healthcare is only that, though, only a tool for effecting the babies’ rights, it is not a right in itself.

Rent Freezes

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Are rent freezes unconstitutional? The question comes up in my pea brain by the moves of Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s move to freeze rents in New York City (though he’s merely expanding on prior city administrations’ rent freezes) and of Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democrat candidate for Florida Senator Angie Nixon, whose campaign platform plank was a national rent freeze.

The Fifth Amendment says, in part, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. A rent freeze plainly caps a landlord’s income, blocking him from increasing it at will or even consistently with market values or imperatives.

Nah—that won’t work. Government can’t take what doesn’t exist, and those increases are purely speculative.

But those rent freezes lead to reductions in value of the landlord’s property through denial of the revenue increases required, not merely useful or even needed, to maintain his rental properties in the face of rising costs of maintenance through aging degradation, misuse or abuse of the property by the tenants, and inflation which drives the prices plumbers, electricians, etc must charge.

Surely that freeze-driven devaluation of the property constitutes a taking within the meaning of the Amendment.

Probably not here, either. For one thing, the government wouldn’t be taking for public use, it would be just taking. That’s a technicality. One the merits, it likely isn’t a taking at all. All government regulations in one form or another impact the value of the businesses in the industries being regulated. In some cases, those regulations actually increase the value of the regulated industry participants. If regulatory caps are takings, then regulatory-prompted gains would seem to be taxable capital gains.

But those gains aren’t transfers by government to the regulatees anymore than the regulation-driven losses are takings.

Rent freezes are bad for business, bad for tenants in the long run, and bad for government revenue, but they aren’t unconstitutional. Just monumentally stupid.