Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is tired of the Republican Party.
I wish the Republican Party would be—somebody would take it back, that we’d have a real Republican Party.
The Progressive-Democratic Party position, as demonstrated by Pelosi, is that the Republican Party should go back to being satisfied with being the loyal opposition and stop being so uppity.
The United Auto Workers union is bent on being the epitome of it. UAW’s President Shawn Fain:
I think we should push a 32-hour work week.
In return for working less, the union is willing to settle for
In an ideal world, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, along with the other major car companies that assemble their cars in the US, will have the stones to tell the union to take a hike. American companies are not job welfare entities, they exist to produce goods and services for consumers and to make profits for their owners.
If the union wants to have a light work week and big pay, it should start its own car company and operate within those parameters.
…out loud, to coin a hackneyed, but cogent, phrase.
On the matter of Federal government industrial farm policy, the Biden administration has made itself crystalline. This is the backdrop:
In January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, followed by other trade pacts, which significantly increased commercial opportunities for American farmers. Those arrangements have borne great fruit: US agriculture exports stood at $196 billion in 2022, up from $62.8 billion in 1997.
President Joe Biden’s (D) National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, doesn’t like that, but in a recent speech, Sullivan went even more broad than just NAFTA, to openly disparage the general policy environment surrounding the development of that treaty. Sullivan lamented that this era of policy was one that
championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.
Because leaving more money in the hands of us ordinary citizens by taking less of it as taxes, by reducing our cost of doing business by getting regulations out of our way, is inherently bad, says this maven of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even more: public action must take precedence over private action—because, apparently, Government Knows Better than us ignorant ordinary citizens. And trade liberalization, which further reduces our costs, is a bad end in itself.
This demand that Government must control what our private enterprises produce is a well-understood and textbook…ideology…regarding the importance of government control over our lives. And it’s a central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party platform.
House Ways and Means Committee chairman Jason Smith (R, MO) and Committee member David Schweikert (R, AZ) are pressing IRS Commissioner David Werfel for information regarding the IRS’ destruction of 30 million tax documents two years ago. They’ve sent a letter to Werfel
asking for the memorandum that explained the recommendation for the “unprocessed, paper-filed informational returns.”
Schweikert told Just the News‘ The Center Square
[W]e’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer from the IRS of why this was done was done, and is that policy that allowed it to happen? Is there a way to make sure this never happens again?
The IRS is being its usual uncooperative self, though:
The committee is looking for the memo by August 8, but the tax agency has not complied with previous requests for additional information. For example, the committee asked for the memo on May 17, 2022, but the IRS said on May 18, 2022, it would be too risky and declined to provide it, according to the letter.
The IRS isn’t the only Federal agency that refuses to cooperate. The DoJ is famous for its uncooperativeness, and so are State and DoD. There are others. DoJ is especially egregious because it just as routinely refuses to enforce Congressional subpoenas.
There is another way for Congress to get cooperation, or at least to sanction the agencies refusing to cooperate. Congress can apply the Holman Rule to reduce, even eliminate, the salaries of individual Federal employees who refuse. Congress can reduce, even eliminate, funding for the agency that refuses, or whose personnel refuse, to cooperate.
Congress should stop dickering over the matter, too. Immediately on first refusal, one of both of the above measures should be undertaken.
That, though, takes more political courage than too many incumbent Congressmen have so far demonstrated.
The Wall Street Journal thinks so regarding Texas border security. Here’s their headline and subheadline from last Friday:
Texas Spent Billions on Border Security. It’s Not Working.
Operation Lone Star, with $4.5 billion spent so far, has had little effect on migration while facing charges of civil-rights abuses
And this, in Findell’s third paragraph:
The program is an explicit challenge to the national government, which by law controls international borders and immigration enforcement.
The rest of her piece follows closely on her headline while largely ignoring that key datum in her third paragraph.
On the other hand, there are some actual facts regarding Texas’ Operation Lone Star:
Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to over 394,200 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 31,300 criminal arrests, with more than 29,100 felony charges reported. In the fight against fentanyl, Texas law enforcement has seized over 422 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.
That sounds pretty successful to this poor, dumb Texan. That’s also despite the national government’s—President Joe Biden’s (D) administration’s—conscious decision to not control our southern border, to instead allow record millions of illegal aliens to flood across that border.
The idea that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) administration faces civil-rights charges is literally, narrowly true. The cases brought, though, are risible. There’s nothing at all abusive about transporting illegal aliens—who volunteer for the trip—to loudly avowedly sanctuary cities where, by those cities’ proclamations, all illegal aliens are welcome. (Progressive-Democratic Party mayors, like New York City’s Eric Adams, now are whining about having the influx of illegals into their cities, but those plaints are just that—empty whining. Were Adams, et al., actually serious about no longer wanting the illegals, he and his cohorts would cancel the sanctuary status of their cities.)