Tag Archives: ethics

There’s No Voter Fraud

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Nosirree.  But there is this AP story carried by Fox News with incidents like this reported.

The voter registration form arrived in the mail last month with some key information already filled in: Rosie Charlston’s name was complete, as was her Seattle address.

Problem is, Rosie was a black lab who died in 1998.

And this

A Virginia man said similar documents arrived for his dead dog, Mozart, while a woman in the state got forms for her cat, Scampers.

The AP story notes that residents and election administrators around the country have encountered a number of questionable mailings like this addressed to animals, dead people, noncitizens and people already registered to vote.  Voter Participation Center brags about having distributed 5 million forms in the last few months, intended to get “unmarried women, blacks, Latinos, young adults,” and so on registered.

The problem with such ad hoc systems is that there is no accountability attached.  VPC itself says it relies on the recipients to toss the bad forms; it doesn’t try not to send them in the first place.  Except that Rosie isn’t around to toss her bad form, and Scampers can’t read.  VPC, though, says it’s all someone else’s fault: they use “commercially collected information.”

More seriously, as New Mexico officials note, ineligible voters who complete the documents can make it onto the rolls.  In New Mexico, for instance, noncitizens can qualify for a driver’s license by simply proving residency—not even necessarily legal residency—and state elections officials have no way of verifying the voting eligibility status of those who file registration documents.  Further, the registration forms often arrive with information already filled in and with a pre-addressed (to appropriate local elections officials) envelope enclosed.

There really are a small number of fraudulent registrations compared to the overall legitimately voting population.  But keep in mind that Senator Al Franken (D, MN) was elected in 2008 by 300 votes out of nearly 3 million cast, and President George W Bush won Florida’s Electoral College votes in 2000 by 500 votes out of some 6 million cast.

Also keep in mind that Attorney General Eric Holder opposes voter ID laws, which would protect the sanctity of Americans votes by reducing the opportunity for election stealing through voter fraud even further.

DoJ and…Racism

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Speaking to the NAACP in Houston last Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder had this to say about Texas’ attempt to protect Americans’ voting rights by implementing a voter ID law that would help ensure that only eligible voters got to vote:

Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them—and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them.  We call those poll taxes.

The racism in Holder’s remarks is apparent.  As the WSJ pointed out

The Texas law stipulates that voters can use several kinds of ID to vote, including a driver’s license, passport, a US military ID, and (this being Texas) a handgun permit.  As for the “poll tax” canard, the law says the Texas Department of Public Safety will issue a free Election Identification Card if requested.

When was the last time Holder’s Jim Crow had a poll tax of $0.00?

But this is the new Jim Crow, Eric Holder style: anyone who votes Democratic (as opposed to democratic) should be allowed to vote, regardless of eligibility.  Never mind that the Supreme Court upheld a substantially identical voter ID law in Indiana just three years ago.  But Holder can’t attack Indiana; that state isn’t under his personal thumb, courtesy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Texas is.

This is also the same Attorney General that, shortly after he assumed the position, threw out a case of New Black Panther voter intimidation of white voters that the Federal government already had won—at the end of the previous administration—and concerning which it was, literally, all over but the sentencing.  That case eventually led to the resignation of career Federal Prosecutor J Christian Adams.  This case also led to then-active Federal Prosecutor Christopher Coates’ testimony in front of the US Civil Rights Commission about the new DoJ’s policy of not seeking enforcement of voter laws when the victims weren’t people of color or when the suspected perpetrators were.

It would be interesting to hear Holder give the same speech to a more balanced audience.

Motives Followup

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I wrote about motives a bit ago.  Here’s a followup on that.  From Fox News comes two items of interest.

First, the Department of Agriculture has been even more actively pushing its food stamps onto the non-needy than I had earlier written.  The Obama administration is trying harder and harder to pull Americans into government dependency, this time with a series of advertisements—paid for with your tax dollars—aimed at getting even those who don’t need food stamps to avail themselves of the “benefit.”  These advertisements are in the form of a 10-part miniseries called “Hope Park.”

The target of these vignettes is Diana, whose husband works (!) and who doesn’t think she needs the food stamps, as she notes in the 4th vignette:

I don’t need help from anyone.  My husband makes enough to take care of us.

By the last episode, though, Diana has been hooked, and she’s singing the praises of the stamps she didn’t need—but now needs badly.

As Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) describes this program,

It has become increasingly clear that, in recent years, the mission of the food stamp program has been converted from targeted assistance for those in need into an aggressive drive to expand enrollment regardless of need. … Read as a whole, USDA’s activities suggest that the program administrators take personal offense when people who technically qualify for their largesse decline to accept—and see it as an obstacle to overcome.

The other item of interest is this.

The Department of Health and Human Services has chosen to waive the work requirement that is part of the eligibility requirement for the Federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and it carefully has done so without fanfare.  The directive through which HHS does this can be read here, and a copy can be read here.

Governor and Republican Presidential Candidate (presumably) Mitt Romney correctly noted

[T]he linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.

But as Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) said,

President Obama just tore up a basic foundation of the welfare contract….

It’s true enough that the directive insists that

Waiver requests must include an evaluation plan.  …the preferred evaluation approach is a random assignment methodology, unless the Secretary determines that an alternative approach is more appropriate….

and

The Secretary will not approve a waiver for an initiative that appears substantially likely to reduce access to assistance or employment for needy families.

But notice carefully.  What constitutes adequate evaluation by the states is carefully left unspecified, except that if HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decides she doesn’t like a state’s evaluation methodology, she’s free to substitute her own, whose criteria also are carefully left unspecified.  Moreover, “substantially unlikely” to reduce access also is left to the unspecified whims of the Secretary.

There’s more in that last phrase, too.  “[A]ppears substantially likely to reduce access to assistance or employment” clearly means that access to assistance is to be maintained independently of access to employment.  The directive doesn’t require access to assistance and employment.

Without a work requirement as an eligibility criterion for TANF assistance, though, there is only eligibility for TANF dependency.

Again, I ask: what are we to make of the motives of government officials who do these things while knowing full well the outcomes of their actions?

Dependency

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Let’s review some Federal government policy history.

During the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration instituted wage floors on labor and price floors on farm produce, which priced men out of an already depressed labor market and priced food out of reach of much of that unemployed population.  As a result, the same administration instituted food stamps to “help” the disadvantaged to obtain food.  This combination of policies made millions of Americans dependent on government for food help.  It also reduced farmers’ independence from government farm supports.

During the same Depression, the same administration instituted Social Security.  The Social Security Act was intended provide supplemental income for America’s retired, who were expected to continue to rely on their own resources and family for the rest of their income, and all Americans were (and are) required to participate.  The Act also  “encouraged” the states to institute unemployment insurance programs, which would be partially funded by the Federal government.

The Social Security side was quickly morphed by subsequent administrations into full income payments to our retired, and for increasingly longer periods of retirement.  An effect of this was to reduce the reliance of millions of Americans on their family for their retired life and to make them dependent instead on government for their subsistence.

The unemployment insurance programs increased state dependence on government for state funding, and it increased individual Americans’ dependence on government for subsistence while between jobs, at the same time commensurately reducing the ties to family local community for support.  Today, unemployment insurance is payable for 99 weeks of being unemployed, greatly extending the dependency of both individual Americans and the states.

The Johnson administration instituted Medicare and Medicaid programs to “help” Americans obtain health care services.  The effect, though, was to contribute sharply to inflation in the cost of health care by artificially expanding demand for the services: Americans are required to participate in the programs, whether we wish to or not.  From this, Medicare and Medicaid transfer payments—the former directly to participants, and the latter to the states, who are strongly “encouraged” to have Medicaid programs—were greatly increased, at taxpayer cost—and at increased dependency of individual Americans and the states on the Federal government for our health needs.

In this context, it’s useful to think about Health Savings Accounts.  HSAs were instituted during the Bush the Younger administration, ostensibly to help Americans to save before-tax money for medical expenses—those rapidly rising expenses just mentioned.  However, HSAs have annual contribution limits, so Americans cannot save overmuch, and Americans must have high deductible insurance policies in order to be eligible for the HSAs.  But those deductibles are out-of-pocket payments, so disadvantaged Americans are priced out of the accounts—they’re still dependent on government for their health care support.

The Obama administration has passed Dodd-Frank (I’ll elide Obamacare in this post; enough has been written elsewhere that the dependency created here is well understood).  This Act creates businesses as dependents on the Federal government for support should they run into market trouble and as dependents on the Federal government for management decisions they will be permitted to make.

Oil and gas company subsidies have been paid by the Federal government since shortly after WWI.  I include them here because of the oil and gas companies’ perceived dependence on them; in fact, the dependence is purely management psychology: these companies do not need the subsidies.  Green energy subsidies have been paid by the Federal government since the early ’80s for biofuels and since the mid -90s for renewables generally and for wind and solar energy in particular.  These companies truly are dependent on the government supports, since they do not have a marketable product and cannot survive in the energy industry without them.

Some illustrations of Americans’ growing dependency on government for their own welfare are these.  Nicholas Eberstadt has noted that the percentage of US households receiving means tested public benefits in general has risen from 7% in 1979 to slightly more than 30% in 2009.  It’s important to note that from 1979 until 1992, the percentage of households receiving means tested public benefits generally paralleled the unemployment rate (except the recession of 1982-83 when the unemployment rate was the slightly higher of the two).  However, by 2003 the percentage of households receiving means tested benefits had jumped to 24%, compared to the then 6% unemployment rate.  This ratio is essentially unchanged today, with the unemployment rate now above 8%.

Moreover, according to Eberstadt, the actual poverty rate fluctuated in the 9%-12+% range during the period to ’92, and since then the mismatch between means tested benefit recipients rates and poverty rates have mirrored the mismatch with unemployment rates.

Moreover, the number of people receiving federal disability benefits (vis., under the Social Security program) grew from 0.05 per person in the 18-64 age band in 1960 (pre-Medicare/Medicaid), to 0.17 in 1970, to 4.6 in 2006. This occurred despite an ever-healthier American workforce over those same 46 years—two generations of Americans.

These are clear indications of Americans’ growing dependency on government and increasing loss of personal responsibility, self-reliance, and reliance on local community resources.

Yet, the politicians in the Federal government are enormously smart people, entirely capable of clear, rational thought.  They were 80 years ago, and are today, fully capable of foreseeing the outcomes of their policies.  What are we to make of the motives of politicians who push them anyway?

Amending

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In last week’s NFIB v Sebelius Obamacare ruling, it looks a lot like the Supreme Court’s opinion rewrote the law in order to uphold it by calling the Individual Mandate’s exaction for not buying appropriate health insurance a tax.  Indeed, this was a central view of the major dissenting opinion.  Moreover, this ruling, whether it constitutes a rewrite of the law or not, seems to amend the Constitution by injecting a taxing power into the Taxing Clause that had heretofore not existed: the capacity for the Federal government to tax the inactivity of private citizens.  As a result, I thought I’d write a bit, in my hubris, about the permissible mechanisms for amending the Constitution.

The Constitution’s Article V is quite clear on this; the essentials are these (I’ve elided a couple of items that, today, are unlikely to come into question; read the whole Article to see them):

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress….

Notice that.  The people’s elected representatives in the Congress of the Federal government can propose amendments, but they can do no more than that.  The President cannot even do that much, except in his capacity as a private citizen.  None of the members of the Judicial Branch—the Supreme Court Justices, for instance—cannot even do that much, except in their capacities as private citizens.

The people of the United States, through their elected representatives in their State legislatures, or through their conventions in each of the several States, also can propose amendments to the Constitution.

Only the people of the United States, though, through their elected representatives in their State legislatures, or through their conventions in each of the several States, can ratify an amendment to the Constitution.

Amendment by the Federal Congress is not permissible.  Amendment from the judicial bench is not permissible.  The men and women who occupy Congressional and judicial positions, moreover, are sworn to uphold the Constitution as it exists, not as they might wish it to be.

Chief Justice John Roberts cited extensively from prior cases (as did Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her opinion and the Four Dissenters in theirs).  Justice David Josiah Brewer wrote in prior case not cited by any of them, South Carolina v United States:

The Constitution is a written instrument.  As such its meaning does not alter.  That which it meant when adopted, it means now.

From the Supreme Court’s perspective, the Constitution is what it says it is.  Nothing else.  Convenient reinterpretations of the plain language to achieve a convenient end is amendment from the bench: rule by law.