Tag Archives: ethics

How Does the Reverse Play?

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The Democrats are once again complaining of Republican obstructionism.  Let’s see how their arguments play from the other side of the question.

Here’s the Democrats’ plaint:

Reid blasted Republicans for bogging down the payroll tax conversation Thursday morning with a debate about Boiler MACT rules, regulations designed to rein in toxic emissions from boilers that the GOP and some Democrats say are overly-burdensome on small businesses and could kill thousands of American jobs as currently written.

Here’s another view of that:

Republicans objected to Democrats bogging down the payroll tax conversation Thursday by spending time arguing against Boiler MACT rules, regulations designed to rein in toxic emissions from boilers that the GOP and some Democrats say are overly-burdensome on small businesses and could kill thousands of American jobs as currently written.

Reid again:

I want everyone put on notice – we’re not going to walk away without some tough votes. If they can’t do something, we’ll do it[.]

Another view, putting words into Mitch McConnell’s (R, KY) mouth:

I want everyone put on notice – we’re not going to walk away without some tough votes. If they can’t do something, we’ll do it[.]

Oh, wait—the House already is, as they’ve done for over a year, only to have Harry Reid (D, NV) actively block those bills from even getting a debate in Senate committees, much less public discussion on the Senate floor.

Sander Levin (D, MI) said

Families cannot afford a repeat trip toward the brink that House Republicans took them to in December and over and over again last year.

Another view:

Families cannot afford a repeat trip toward the brink that Senate Democrats took them to in December and over and over again last year.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) weighed in.  She still thinks, in all seriousness, that the payroll tax holiday extension that’s the proximate subject of the present discussion even needs to be paid for.  Uncle Sugar can just borrow more.  (As an aside, I have to wonder whether this profligate borrowing is really just the Dems’ saying they have no intention of paying for anything—our grandchildren, who are being stuck with this exploding bar tab, can just borrow in their time.)

Hmm….

Two Mandates

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We’re well aware of the Individual Mandate that is the core of Obamacare.  We’re well aware of that “requirement’s” immorality and of its unconstitutionality.  We’re well aware of the naked power grab that this “requirement” represents for the present administration.  But it’s only background.

Here’s another naked power grab, as the present administration seeks to dismantle our Constitution and replace it with an unfettered government populated by Progressive Know Betters.

We have another mandate, a set of Obamacare regulations that deliberately attack, not the Commerce Clause that is the target of the Individual Mandate, nor the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, but the immediately following Free Exercise Clause: “nor prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].”

The Obama administration has just implemented new rules under his Obamacare that force

Catholic universities, hospitals, and charities to provide insurance for their employees covering contraception — even though that violates church teachings.

Moreover, these new rules expand “required” coverage to include the “morning after pill” and potentially sterilization and abortion.  Having tried once to dictate to a religious group who will be permitted to speak for them, now this administration is attempting to dictate to all religious groups what they will be permitted to believe, and how they will be permitted to act on those beliefs.  So much for free exercise.

The stakes are clearly understood.  Timothy Dolan, New York Cardinal-designate, describes the stark nature of this Progressive assault.

Never before has the government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience.  This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.

But this isn’t just a Catholic issue.  President of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, said he’s been contacted by Protestants, Mormons, Jews, and others who want to join forces with the Catholic League and with the bishops to overturn the new rules.

I’ve never seen anything like it.  They are lining up single file.

President Obama’s reaction to the objections is breathtaking in the cynicism he displays.  At his daily press conference, where Press Secretary Jay Carney recites Obama’s words, he insisted that he still offers

strong support for existing conscience protections, including those relating to health care providers….

and he went on to claim that the new rules don’t change that.  Then Obama, again speaking through Carney, dismissed the objections.

We understand that not everyone agrees with [the new rules].  All I can tell you is it was made after very careful consideration based on the need to balance…[religious rights and] the necessity to provide access to preventive services for women was an important consideration.

But Obama and his rule writers didn’t consider very carefully.  Hospitals can only invoke the “conscience clause,” and get an exemption from these new rules, if they turn away patients of other faiths, something that also is anathema to men of faith.  Theodore McCarrick, a retired Cardinal, points out the fallacy of Obama’s “rationale.”

That means we can’t say what we’ve been saying for 200 years, “Are you hungry?”  We have to say, “Are you Catholic?” We don’t do that.

But this latest move isn’t even just about religious freedom.  It’s about individual freedom, generally.  Government incumbents who will attempt these two pütschen will assault our freedoms everywhere.

Remember this in the fall.

Progressives, Occupiers, and Free Speech

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Recall the eagerness with which President Obama and his fellow Progressives in our Federal government embraced the Occupier movement.

The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side[.]

And Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D, NY), among others, had this to say:

The city’s actions to shut down OWS last [November] raise a number of serious civil-liberties questions that must be answered….

Now observe the Occupiers’ current behavior (I won’t recount the litany of murders, rapes, child abuse, and so on that went on in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere last fall).  In their Oakland riot earlier this week, police officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices, and burning flares.  These Occupiers also broke into Oakland’s City Hall, where among other activities they broke an electrical box and damaged several art structures, including an art exhibit created by children and made from recycled materials.

On the other side of the country, the Occupiers behaved little differently.  The Executive Director of the Rhode Island Right to Life organization, Barth Bracy, said a Right to Life rally inside the Rhode Island state capital building had to be cut short as a result of Occupiers deliberately breaking up their rally.  These protestors “began screaming and refused to allow a…priest to deliver a prayer.”  Bracy noted further,

This is their idea of civil speech but we believe it’s an outrage.  They started heckling, chanting and blowing whistles.

The misbehavior deepened when an Occupier purposefully climbed onto a third floor balcony and dumped a box of condoms onto girls from a Catholic school.  These worthies even attacked a State Representative who was present for the original rally.

At one point they even attacked State. Rep. Doreen Costa. …  Costa said a female Occupier hit her on the head with a sign….

These aren’t isolated occurrences.  They’ve been getting increasingly violent since last fall, when it became clear the Occupiers weren’t going to get their way instantaneously.  And plainly, free speech, freedom to protest, means Occupiers get to speak, Occupiers get to protest, but no one else does.  An American’s speech is dependent on what the Occupier movement will permit, and nothing else.

Here is what Obama and his fellow Progressives have to say today about their allies, now that the Occupiers have shown their true colors.

…

These Progressives seem to share the Occupiers’ view of our free speech and our property rights.  Still.

The Obama Economy

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We have a choice of two paths, both the Republicans and the Democrats say.  But in order to decide which of two paths we want our country to take—even accepting Obama’s characterization of the two paths—we have to look at the record away from which Obama is running so hard.  It is that record that demonstrates the value of his path, and it is that record that is a subject he is so desperate to avoid with his non sequitor of paths.  It is that record that must inform Republican reasoning of why their path is better.

As Obama himself said at Harlem’s Apollo theater on the 19th,

We have not seen a choice this stark in years.  The contrast this year could not be sharper. So the question is not whether people are still hurting; people are still hurting profoundly.  A lot of folks out there still out of work looking for work.  The question is, what do we do about it?

The Republican candidates agree that we have a choice to make, and it’s substantially the same one that Obama offers.  Newt Gingrich described the choices this way:

The debate we’re going to have with President Obama over the next eight or nine months [involves] the outlining of the two Americas.

The America of the Declaration of Independence; the America of Saul Alinsky. The America of paychecks; the America of food stamps. The America of independence; the America of dependence. The America of strength in foreign policy; the America of weakness in foreign policy.

Those two choices, I believe, will give the American people a chance to decide permanently whether we want to remain the historic America that has provided opportunity for more people of more backgrounds than any country in history, or whether in fact, we prefer to become a brand new secular, European-style bureaucratic socialist system.

What has Obama done about his just above acknowledged performance, so far?  His record actually is pretty clear from the fact that he’s still saying those things three years into his term.   Here is the path down which he wants us to continue, as demonstrated by his record.

Joblessness remains high at historic highs, for an historic duration: 8.5 percent unemployment only last month, and even higher unemployment for most of the Obama three years.  Millions of Americans out of work for a year or more—for a third of Obama’s term so far.

Repeated claims of millions of jobs saved (not so much anymore of jobs created, even though job creation actually has been ticking up slightly).  But with these claims, the Obama administration stubbornly declines to offer any evidence that this improvement—such as it is—is due to his profligate spending policies and not due to an ordinary cyclic economic recovery, one that has been depressed these last three years by that same spending and his extreme regulatory policies.

Democratic party has refusal—for 1,000 days—to offer a budget in the Senate, and its refusal to allow the Senate take up the House-passed budget bill for FY2012, passed in Jan 2011.  Absent a budget, the Progressives have run up deficits that require the government to borrow 36 cents of every dollar spent.  Beyond that, Obama now is delaying for a week the release of his budget proposal for the 2013 fiscal year.  House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R, WI) points out that

This will mark the third time in four years the president has missed his statutory requirement to present a budget on time, while trillion-dollar budget deficits continue to mount.  As the president announces another missed deadline, tomorrow marks the 1,000th day Senate Democrats have gone without any budget at all.

Democratic party refusal to allow the Senate take up more than 20 House-passed jobs bills.

Active destruction of jobs and job opportunities, such as his willful cancelation of the Keystone XL pipeline with all those prompt jobs and even greater numbers of longer-term follow-on jobs; and his EPA regulations that are closing down coal-fired electricity generating plants, with the loss of jobs at those plants, and the potential loss of vastly more jobs from closing of businesses that depended on that power.

Further active interference in the energy sector of our energy economy.  Tom Steyer and John Podesta write, in all seriousness

…the Production Tax Credit, first passed in 1992, has generated massive amounts of new growth in the wind industry, a sector employing 85,000 Americans.  But each time Congress allows this credit to expire after a mere two years, investment grinds to a halt….

Notice that: since 1992, a whole 85,000 jobs, out of 14 million Americans currently out of work.  Notice further: this “green” industry cannot survive—it is not economically viable—without massive investments of your money.  Sort of like Solyndra, Beacon, Evergreen Solar, AES Eastern Energy LP, et al.

Class warfare, and the politics of rank envy.  Obama has chosen to frame his campaign as a fight for fairness for those who are struggling to keep a job, a home or college savings and losing faith in how the country works.  And yet his policies actively interfere with growing our economy so that Americans can actually get jobs, much less won’t need to “struggle to keep a job,” and so that savings for a home or an education become possible.  Instead, Obama simply promotes jealousy of those who have on the part of those whom he wants to buy with his wealth redistribution, funded by selective taxes.  This is Obama’s nation of “You have, and I want,” not the nation of “haves and soon to haves,” as Governor Mitch Daniel described.

That class warfare now has the IRS implementing new rules that will require employers to calculate and report the cost of health insurance provided to employees on each W-2 beginning in 2013, for the 2012 tax year.  Since this benefit is not taxable, what possible reason could the Obama administration have for demanding the data—except that they plan to tax these, too.

In the end, as Ryan put it,

We deserve better than a president unwilling to meet his legal and moral obligation to tackle our nation’s most pressing challenges.  We deserve better than the President’s path to debt, doubt and decline.

And in a statement released jointly with Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL), Ryan added this:

The President and his party’s leaders have yet to detail a credible budget plan to prevent the fiscal crisis that awaits us should we continue down the current path to debt, doubt, and decline.  Such a crisis would threaten the economic security, health security, and retirement security of every American.  If the President wishes to begin a genuine dialogue with the American people…then he must hold his own party accountable for its dogged refusal to produce a plan to prevent this crisis and lift this cloud of uncertainty from the economy.  The President must also deliver what he has so far refused: serious reforms to change our debt course and prevent fiscal disaster.

It is a choice of two paths: Obama’s performance record or a path of American resurgence in freedom, reduced government interference, economic growth.  The danger for the Republicans is they’ll let Obama stick to a debate of choices and not keep Obama tied to, and having to explain, his record as the demonstration of where his path leads us.

Project 100,000

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In a throwback to the ’60s, and to a similar program, it seems that the present administration really is serious about helping those who are incapable of helping themselves.  Where that prior program centered on helping those who lacked the capacity for measuring up to the rigors of a military life, though, the present incarnation is centered on helping those who lack the capacity to measure up to the rigors of paying their taxes.

The present administration’s program began with the hiring of Timothy Geithner to be the man in charge of the national treasury, bringing him over from the IMF, where he had shown his inability to pay his self-employment taxes, despite having been repeatedly advised in writing by the IMF of the obligation.

Now we learn that 36 of Obama’s current staffers have been brought on board through the same program of outreach to the incapable.  These 36 owe nearly $1 million in back taxes for the 2010 tax year.  It’s not like they’re hurting for the money, either: Obama’s 1%, his staff of 457 aides, were paid a total of $37 million last year.

There’s more: the same IRS report that revealed the deficiencies of Obama’s staff also said that “thousands of federal employees owe,” in the aggregate, more than $3.4 billion in back taxes.  It seems none of these people are capable of understanding their tax obligations.

It’s clear, now, why Obama is so hard over on those who are better off—who are capable—being required to pay more.  Someone has to pay for Obama’s 100,000.

While this administration’s program of handouts for unfortunates is admirable, can we really trust the judgment that puts such people into such positions of power and trust?

(As an aside, Obama’s EPA performs even more poorly, both in total and on a per unfortunate basis: 413 of the EPA’s incapables owe nearly $19.5 million in back taxes.  Paying taxes is harmful to the environment?  Now there’s a rule….)