Tag Archives: ethics

What’s Being Kept Hidden?

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Former Senator and Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel’s confirmation is hanging in the balance.  Senate Republicans are holding up a floor vote on his confirmation until President Barack Obama is more forthcoming about his involvement—or lack—in the Benghazi debacle in which an American ambassador was murdered by terrorists.

Naturally, the Democrats are unhappy.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) said

Chuck Hagel had nothing to do with the attack on Benghazi.  There are serious consequences to this delay.

Yet, with those consequences, Obama continues to delay and to stonewall.  All he’s allowed to be released so far is a letter from his counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to three Republican senators averring that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf on his behalf the night of the attack.  ABC News had this portion of Ruemmler’s letter:

This intensive response, which was directed by the President, included 13 meetings of interagency Principals and Deputies within a week of the attack and involved continuous outreach by senior administration officials to the Government of Libya, including by the President and members of his Cabinet.  As to the specific question in your February 12 letter, Secretary Clinton called Libyan President Magariaf on behalf of the President on the evening of the September 11, 2012 to coordinate additional support to protect Americans in Libya and access to the Libyan territory.  At that time, President Magariaf expressed his condemnation and condolences and pledged his government’s full cooperation.  The President spoke to President Magariaf on the evening of September 12th.

What did Obama do in this “outreach?”  What did he instruct Clinton to say to Magariaf on his behalf?  Why didn’t he make the call himself?  What did he say on the 12th?  Did he do anything else?

I have to ask: what is there in Obama’s behavior the day of the attack and that night—other than his decision to absent himself from the White House in favor of a campaign fundraising trip to Las Vegas, I mean—of which he’s so ashamed that he’s willing to blow up the confirmation of his own nominee in favor of keeping it hidden?

Update: Sorry–this should have been published over two hours ago; a software glitch prevented that.

Ethics and the Left

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Let’s talk about this in the context of Presidential elections and the Electoral College.

Two states, Nebraska and Maine, award Electoral College votes on the basis of which candidate won the state’s Congressional districts in the popular vote.  The winner of a district gets one Electoral vote, and (in general) the winner of the state’s overall popular vote gets two Electoral College votes.  Four other states, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, are actively moving in that direction, with a number of other states in the talking stage.  Virginia is the farthest along, having passed out of committee a by-district proposal in the state Senate (awarding the two votes to the candidate winning the most districts rather than the overall popular vote) and sent it to the full Senate.

What’s interesting here is not so much the rationale for making the move, but the arguments against and who is making those arguments.

Virginia State Senator Donald McEachin (D) calls the bill a “sore-loser bill” and added

The bill is absolutely a partisan bill aimed at defying the will of the voters, giving Republican presidential candidates most of Virginia’s electoral votes, regardless of who carries the state[.]

Virginia State Delegate Vivian Watts (D) sponsored or co-sponsored several bills over the years that would have apportioned Virginia’s electoral votes by Congressional district; she had this to say about that:

I’m age 72 so I spent a lot of years in the wilderness and the last time the state had gone Democratic [before 2008] was following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  I thought back in those days about how we were just totally ignored.

But she opposes the present bill coming before the House of Delegates.  The argument that Democrats weren’t getting their voices heard yesterday is valid, but the argument that Republicans aren’t getting their voices heard today is invalid.  Hmm….

Nationally, Democrats also oppose today what they wanted yesterday.  Mike Tate, Democratic Party Chairman, had this to say:

They can’t appeal to a majority of voters, whether it’s here in Wisconsin or Michigan or in the rest of the Midwest, so they are undermining a majority of voters.  The Republicans realize that where they are today, they can’t win a presidential election. It’s an audacious attempt to rig the system.

And, as The Washington Post summarizes,

Democrats nationwide attacked the proposed plans, which could tip the balance away from population-heavy urban centers to more rural districts that tend to favor Republicans.

Because bitter, gun-clinging, bible-toting rural Americans aren’t as important as more progressive, citified Americans.

Democratic political analyst Larry Sabato had this to say:

[I]t is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb—the whole hand, in fact—on the scale for future Republican candidates.  We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.

Republicans face a choice that can best be characterized by personalizing it.  A healthy, optimistic party is Reaganesque, convinced that it can win the future by embracing it, and by making a positive case for its philosophy and candidates to all Americans.  A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor.

No, we insist the handicap favor the Democrats.  We insist that Democratic Chicago alone carry Illinois in its entirety, against the will of the rest of the state.  We don’t accept that letting the grass roots—individual Americans themselves—determine the apportioning of Electoral College votes is in any way democratic.

It is the Democrats themselves, presently in the ascendant, who fear the future and want to seal their superiority by blocking—today—a more democratic apportionment.

Thus, as the Post points out at the end of the article at the first link above, this isn’t the first move (in Virginia, to take that state as our example):

[S]everal [Electoral College apportionment bills] have been introduced over the past decade, all with the same rationale of giving more say to voters on the losing side.  The only difference is that those bills were submitted by Democrats, back when they weren’t having as much luck in the state in presidential elections.

And Democrats nationally were in favor of changing the Electoral College system to better favor them in the aftermath of their narrow losses in 2000 and 2004.  And before that in response to the Nixon victories in the 1970s.

Ethics are what we say they are, say Democrats, when we need them to say that.

A Whole Eight Years

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Social Security’s disability trust fund will be bankrupt in three years, and all those folks currently on disability will see their payments slashed.  Those coming onto disability will see far smaller payments than they were expecting.  Whether or not there should be a disability program, if so at what level of payment, or who should fund it are separate issues.  Let’s talk about what we have, and how we got here.

With the Panic of 2008, unemployment spiked, reaching above 10%.  President Barack Obama’s economic policies have slowed our recovery to the point of not recovering at all.  Even the current unemployment rate of 7.8% both is as high as it was when he took office and misleading in itself since it’s based on a far smaller work force than when he took office.

On top of this unemployment rate, whose primary effects here are to reduce the tax monies going into the disability fund and to increase the number of people going onto disability—anything to get enough money for an unemployed person, or someone who’s given up trying to find work, to put food on his family’s table or to pay the rent/mortgage—we have the following.

Obama is actively making it easier to apply for disability with no parallel move to make funds available to make the payments.  Indeed, Obama has steadfastly refused to allow any of our entitlement programs to be fixed, or revamped, or changed in any way so as to enable them to survive (again, whether they should as Federal programs is a separate discussion).

His Lieutenant in the Senate, Chuck Schumer (D, NY), insists that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are off the table in any debt, deficit, or budget discussion.  Obama said in his inaugural address last week that

the commitments we make to each other—through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security—these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.

Leaving aside the vapid ignorance of this remark, the statement demonstrates his refusal to touch them in any way.

And we have this nonsense from a tired old man, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), about entitlements generally, using Medicare as his example:

…savings from cutting wasteful spending and fraud will extend the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by an additional eight years….

Let’s ignore the fact that Reid cannot name a single instance of actual wasteful spending or of fraud—or explain why those have not already been rooted out, if he knew of them—Medicare’s (for instance) lifetime could be extended for a whole eight years, he says, like he’s proud of that fact.

Then what?

Debt Ceiling Negotiations

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President Barack Obama had some thoughts on this in a press conference the other day.  Surprise—I have some thoughts on his thoughts.

Obama said this in response to a question from CBS News‘ Major Garrett on how Obama reconciles his refusal to vote to raise the debt ceiling while a Senator (the raise would be a “leadership failure”) with his current refusal, as President, to negotiate his demanded raise of the debt ceiling:

And, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that we have never seen the debt ceiling used in this fashion, where the notion was, you know what, we might default unless we get 100 percent of what we want. That hasn’t happened.

Actually, we’ve seen this repeatedly in the recent past.  Under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, for instance, spending cuts (or what passed for them—reductions in the rate of growth of spending) were explicit parts of the deal to raise the ceiling.

Obama then added this:

Now, as I indicated before, I’m happy to have a conversation about how we reduce our deficits further….

There are a couple of things about this one.  One is that bit about being “happy to have a conversation.”  A conversation is an “exchange of thoughts and feelings.”  It’s not a negotiation.  Obama is willing only to engage in idle chit-chat on this subject; he’s not willing to enter into serious negotiation.

The other thing is that nonsense, “reduce our deficits further.”  As a man of Obama’s learned education knows—as his economic advisors in the White House and in his Cabinet know—a reduced deficit is still a deficit, and so it still grows our nation’s debt.  Once again, Obama is unwilling to take our debt seriously.

Obama then concluded his evasion of the original question (he never did address Garrett’s question of how Obama reconciles his Senatorial “No” with his Presidential “Raise it now” demand on the debt ceiling) with this:

But what you’ve never seen is the notion that has been presented so far at least by the Republicans that deficit reduction will only count spending cuts, that we will raise the deficit—or the debt ceiling dollar for dollar on spending cuts.  …what we’re not going to do is put ourselves in a position where in order to pay for spending that we’ve already incurred, that our two options are; we’re either going to profoundly hurt the economy, and hurt middle-class families, and hurt seniors, and hurt kids who are trying to go to college, or alternatively we’re going to blow up the economy.

The first part of that is true.  Having seen the failure of tying reduced spending growth rates to raising the debt limit, the House Republicans now are tying actual spending cuts to raising the debt ceiling.

The rest, though, is exactly what Obama is threatening.  He’s holding out for “100% of what [he] want[s],”  or he’ll blow up our economy.  He’s the one demanding a debt ceiling raise with no strings attached (he’s even called for ceding borrowing authority to him) and refusing to discuss any alternative.  He’s the one who’s said he won’t negotiate at all on the debt ceiling.

Yet, it’s his demand for continued borrowing, for continued expansion of our debt, that is profoundly hurting the economy, the middle class, seniors, the poor (who are notably absent in his “concern” for the welfare of others).   The opposition has already agreed to raise the borrowing limit.  They just want real spending cuts, also, so as to break the DC addiction to spending, and so as to reduce—or even eliminate—the need to borrow more.

What Are They Prepared to Do?

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Kimberly Strassel asked this, and three specific questions, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week.

Her questions:

Question one: Do they mean it?  In the abstract, the debt ceiling is a powerful tool for forcing the president to give in to spending cuts. …

In the non-abstract, failure to raise government borrowing limits means US default—and with it potential credit downgrades, market panic and resulting economic distress.  Is the GOP willing to inflict that on the economy?  If Republican members instead run for cover, as they did with the cliff, the GOP will have been exposed as bluffers, and the administration will never again have to fear the debt ceiling.

Then,

Question two: What do they want?  Throughout the fiscal-cliff negotiations…the GOP shrunk from laying out its specific demands on Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.

Do House Republicans have the courage to lay out big demands (say, premium support for Medicare or block grants for Medicaid), send a bill to the Senate, and sell entitlement reform to the public?  If they can’t face the demagoguery that Democrats will use against them for making substantive proposals on entitlements….

Finally,

Question three: What other hostages are Republicans willing to see shot?  Knowing he has lost his tax trump card, Mr Obama seamlessly moved on this week to the defense budget.  …Mr Obama intends to make further tax hikes the price….

Are the GOP’s defense hawks willing to stomach those cuts as a price for entitlement reform?  Having publicly campaigned against this slashing of the military, can the party stare down the president with a unified position?  Mr Obama is betting they can’t….

It’s pretty clear from the Republicans’ past performances in showdowns with Obama that all they’ll do is run for cover—too much of the party consists only of bluffers.  During the just concluded tax cliff matter, hey could have put up big demands concerning tax structure and tax rate reductions—just putting forward the Romney tax plan would have sufficed—but they quailed at the thought and shrank from their duty.  They also could have put up big demands concerning spending cuts—just putting forward the Ryan plan would have sufficed on entitlements—and big demands concerning so-called discretionary spending (so-called because all government spending is at the discretion of the Congress).  After all, Obama was publicly willing to conclude such a “grand bargain;” the Republicans should have held him to his word.  But they failed here, also.

On the matter of selling their position to the public, it’s pretty clear the Republicans have no capability for that, even if they had an actual position to sell.  They’re still not talking to us.

Vernon Pinkley, on walking the Republican halls of the House (or of the Senate), might ask, “Very pretty, Speaker/Minority Leader. Very pretty.  But, can they fight?”  The answer is, “No.”

I pointed out nearby the necessary and encouraging words of a rookie Republican Senator from Texas.  Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe there are enough more Republicans like him to accomplish much of anything.