Tag Archives: culture

More Federal Intrusion

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Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D, NY) and Senators Ron Wyden (D, OR) and Cory Booker (D, NJ) will soon unveil their plot to legalize marijuana at the Federal level. Among other steps in the initial stages of their plot is this:

establish dedicated funding streams for women- and minority-owned marijuana businesses.

Leave aside the destructive nature of marijuana. There are two other aspects of this particular step that are especially destructive. One is the sexist and racist nature of their “funding streams,” explicitly and deliberately favoring particular groups of government-approved Americans while simultaneously, and necessarily, excluding other groups of Americans, those of whom government disapproves. The contempt these Progressive-Democrats have for average Americans is obvious in the Senators’ decision to include this rank discrimination in the face of repeated court strike-downs of Progressive-Democrat moves to provide farm debt relief to favored races while deliberately excluding disfavored races.

The other utterly destructive aspect of this marijuana plot is the wolf in sheep’s clothing of those funding streams. With those Federal dollars will come Federal demands to control the recipients.  This is the Progressive-Democrats’ push for control.

Cowards Flee

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have done it again. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called a special session of the Texas legislature because Texas’ Progressive-Democrats cravenly ran away from the last days of the legislature’s regular session explicitly to deny a quorum and prevent debate and votes to pass or reject a number of critical bills, including a couple of voting bills that would increase ballot security while facilitating voter access to ballots.

These wonders of Progressivism were too cowardly and too arrogant (with all the overlap between the two) to debate and vote—even to allow debate and voting. So much for their pious pretense of favoring voting.

Now, those same Progressive-Democrats have blown up the special session, wasting all the Texas taxpayer money spent on that special session, and run away again.

And they bragged about their cowardice. James Talarico (D, 52nd District), among the Progressive-Democrats who jetted out of the state on a chartered jet:

Just landed in Memphis on our way to DC. Thank y’all for your well wishes.

They showed their privilege again, too: they chartered private jets in which to flee to DC; they couldn’t even be bothered to fly commercial, or to take the train, or (gasp!) drive themselves.

Rich cowards fleeing.

Some did jump on a bus, though.

Others were reportedly pictured on a DC-bound bus with packs of Miller Lite.

Not even a Texas beer, even if it is a Dallas Cowboys sponsor; that just shows the Precious Ones’ virtue signaling. Miller is sold by Chicago, IL, headquartered Molson Coors. These wonders couldn’t even be bothered to bring packs of Shiner Bock or Texas Red.

Party down, guys. In every sense of that phrase.

Oh, and one more thing. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s leadership has already termed the filibuster a relic of Jim Crow. Here is that party–the Party that invented Jim Crow–by running away, reviving this relic. And they’re proud of it.

Washington State and Abortion

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Washington passed a law—SB6219—that mandates all health coverage policies issued in that State provide (and charge for) coverage for abortions, with no exceptions whatsoever, including no exceptions for religious belief regarding life and conception. Under SB6219, no insurer can offer a policy that does not include abortion coverage.

Leave aside the cynical claim by Washington’s lawyers that

its no-exception abortion coverage mandate in health plans does not necessarily require health plans to include abortion coverage.

Leave aside that the Supreme Court has already ruled—repeatedly—that religious exceptions and conscience exceptions must be included in any such law.

The Cedar Park Church, in Bothell near Seattle, is challenging that law in Cedar Park Assembly of Kirkland v Kreidler (Kreidler is Myron Kreidler, Washington’s Insurance Commissioner; Jay Inslee, Washington’s Governor, also is a defendant. Both are defendants in their official capacities); the case currently is before the 9th Circuit.

What really jumps out at me, though, is this assertion by the State [emphasis added]:

The state lawyer emphasized what the church didn’t allege: “no carrier” would offer a plan consistent with its beliefs, it sought such a plan from other carriers, or that the state rejected a submitted plan.

On what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private enterprise’s business decision?

More importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private citizen’s medical decision that should only involve that citizen and his doctor and secondarily (with no tertiary) his health coverage provider?

Most importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority to allow a baby to be killed before it’s born?

The answer to each of those questions is that there is no legitimate basis for such claims.

All Politics is Local

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That’s what an erstwhile Democrat and Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill said some 40 years ago. He’s right: every elected politician is beholden to his constituents and to no one else (at least legitimately so), and those constituents are the citizens in his district.

It doesn’t get any more local than school board elections, and lately, it hasn’t been much more political than with those school boards whose members choose to ignore their constituents, the parents whose children those members demand to indoctrinate. That indoctrination, coming deliberately at the expense of reading (because literature is just stuff by a bunch of old, dead, white patriarchs), writing (because sentences and paragraphs in the American English way are White Supremacist constructions), arithmetic (because that’s just racist), is carefully centered on critical race theory, our nation’s evil Founders, and the divisiveness of celebrating our national flag, our national anthem, our Pledge of Allegiance—that last to the point that those school board members ban our Pledge’s recital in class and at school board meetings.

And so parents—who became exposed to the indoctrination sewage being inflicted on their children while locked up in their homes during Government-mandated lockdowns related to the Wuhan Virus situation—have begun fighting back, emphasizing their localness and getting political: calling out those abusive school board members and running for school board positions themselves—and overwhelmingly replacing those abusive members.

One example—an example of increasing typicality—is this.

Leigh Wambsganss is one of those parents who sparked a grassroots, anti-CRT revolt in Southlake, Texas, that mobilized record turnout in local school board elections to defeat pro-CRT board members by landslide margins.

Even though the Left so hates having its diktats challenged that Leftists overtly threaten the Wamgsgansses of the parents for their impudence, Wambsganss had this:

it’s like once you walk through that fire, you’re untouchable. And the more national news we got and the more we were hit, the more invincible we became. Because now you can say anything, it just doesn’t matter to us anymore.

Because the point of it all—the hugely important point—is this, also from Wambsganss:

If we are going to take America back, we have got to take our public school systems back. And the only way you’re going to do that is win your school board elections.

Preach it, Sister.

Compelling Interest and Racism

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly decry President Joe Biden’s (D) race-based “equity” programs and diktats as taking our nation back to an ugly past.

By equity, Mr Biden means preferences for some racial groups over others to achieve equal outcomes.

And

Mr Biden sells his agenda as taking America into the future. But allocating government funds or privileges by race is a step back to an uglier past. … If applied on the scale Mr Biden hopes, America would become a nation of groups competing for racial spoils and defined outcomes rather than seeking equal opportunity for everyone.

The editors added this near the end of their piece, and here I demur from them.

Strict scrutiny requires that the government have a compelling interest for discriminating by race, and that it must use the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. If less restrictive ways can achieve the same purpose, the policy fails.

There shouldn’t be any strict scrutiny on such matters; the policies should fail on their face. There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections clause that permits Government-determined “compelling interest” to override our Constitution [emphasis added].

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All of that plainly applies to our Federal government every bit as much as it does to each of the governments of the several States.

The Strict Scrutiny standard, as applied here, has been unconstitutional from the start and was an earlier Supreme Court attempt to duck its responsibility in applying our Constitution rather than seeking out excuses and methodologies for getting outside of it.

Government’s compelling interest is to defend and uphold our Constitution.

Full stop.