Tag Archives: ethics

Always Someone Else’s Fault

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party President candidate Kamala Harris is blaming Congress for her and Biden’s administration’s failure to control our border. 60 Minutes interviewer Bill Whitaker asked a question of Harris:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Harris’ answer, in part:

Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill.

She omitted to mention that for all that Senator James Lankford (R, OK), the “most conservative” Senator in question, was part of that deal, it would have codified the entry of more than 1.4 million unvetted illegal aliens into our nation. Lankford was hoodwinked in that deal.

Harris also omitted to say, and Whitaker chose not to note in his question, that the right answer now was Joe Biden’s Executive Order, that he could have issued years ago.

Whitaker followed up:

“[T]here was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,” and that “arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump.”
He then asked her: “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”

Harris’ answer, in part:

It’s a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

She omitted to mention, and Whitaker omitted to ask, how then-President Donald Trump (R) was able to implement the restrictions that so thoroughly limited illegal alien influx, restrictions that were so thoroughly loosened. Trump inveighed Congress to act on immigration law, but he didn’t wait—he delivered Executive Orders that achieved the tight restrictions. It’s true enough that Congress is needed to codify those EOs, or something like them, but the EOs, for their duration, worked.

Nothing kept Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden from issuing the EO that he did, or issuing other EOs, to tighten the border as long ago as January 2021 (or leave the Trump EOs in place), and nothing kept his Vice President from pushing him to do any of that. Instead, Harris actively supported the the rescission of the Trump EOs and the resultant loosening of our border control.

But all that is Congress’ fault. With Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it’s always somebody else’s fault; Party is never the cause of any failure.

Harris’ Position on Israel

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was asked in a Sunday 60 Minutes interview whether the US has any “sway” over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war against Hamas continues. The show’s host asked about Netanyahu not listening to Harris’ and Biden’s administration demands.

Harris’ answer, in part:

Now the work we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and create a cease-fire. And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.

Except for a couple of things: the Biden-Harris administration (or the Harris-Biden administration, as Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden occasionally puts it) has put no pressure at all on the Arab terrorist entities Hamas and Hezbollah, and they’ve wholly ignored non-Arab Iran, except in one way noted below. The Biden-Harris administration has put tremendous pressure on Israel—Netanyahu—to agree a cease-fire.

Another thing is that a cease-fire would benefit only the terrorists by giving them time to reconstitute, refit, rearm, and attack again, while giving Israel no respite at all, and yielding only minimal—at best—kidnap release.

Aside from that, keep in mind that Kamala Harris is a very intelligent, very committed woman and would make a wonderful President, according to her Progressive-Democratic Party compatriots. That makes her seeming word salad response not empty-calorie rhetoric at all but a deliberate obfuscation of her disdain for Israel and her sub rosa support for terrorist Hamas and Hezbollah, and it puts her in league with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s overt protection of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

ILA Featherbedding

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Railroad unions are pikers here.

[T]here were 50,000 or so ILA strikers but only 25,000 or so port jobs. That’s right, only about half of the union’s members are obliged to show up to work each day. The rest sit at home collecting “container royalties” negotiated in previous ILA contracts intended to protect against job losses that result from innovation.

This ILA monopoly abuse is aided and abetted by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden. Biden, far from invoking Taft-Hartley, which he doesn’t believe in, openly made his own extortionate threats against management:

President Biden had threatened the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) with legal action this week if it didn’t give in further to union demands. “My Administration will be monitoring for any price gouging activity that benefits foreign ocean carriers, including those on the USMX board,” he said in a statement. This was a direct threat to Maersk and other ocean carriers if they added a surcharge because of the disruptions from the ILA strike.

Keep in mind, too, that this was just for the precondition the ILA demanded in order for the union to agree to negotiate at all. The union will be back with its still-open strike threat on 15 January. And to hell with the rest of us Americans:

Mr Daggett [the ILA MFWIC] was happy to put countless truck drivers, warehouse employees, retail clerks, and auto workers out of work so he and his “connected” members can buy another yacht.

This is what a Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Federal government will do to all of our economy and to us American citizens’ right to work and to choose for ourselves whether to join a union or not—and to keep all of our paycheck if we choose to not join a union.

“I Don’t Believe in Taft-Hartley”

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Those were Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s words when a reporter asked him if he’d intervene in the now in progress International Longshoremen’s Association strike against East and Gulf Coast ports.

Q    Mr. President, will you intervene in the dockworkers strike if they go on strike on Tuesday?
THE PRESIDENT:  No.
Q    Why not?
THE PRESIDENT:  Because there’s collective bargaining, and I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.

Taft-Hartley authorizes a President to intervene in strikes that create a national emergency—such as, for instance, a strike that shuts down all of our ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, a strike that thereby cuts imports of food, vehicles, heavy machinery, construction materials, [and] chemicals as well as cutting off critical supply chain imports needed for those and for other products all across our economy, which is still in a fragile state, for all the headline numbers. The strike also cuts off all our exports to trading partners, friends, and allies that would leave from those ports. Those exports include products like oil and LNG destined for Europe, whose economies are in a fragile state from the reduced energy availability due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This is Biden is proclaiming his disdain for a law he’s sworn to enforce. That disdain is consistent with his disdain for immigration and border control laws and, by extension, for our laws in general.

This is the Party that wants to reign over us for the next four, and more, years.

There Is a Solution

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Department of Education Miguel Cardona continues to interfere with—to obstruct—House investigations. This time, he’s interfering with subpoenas the House’s Committee on Education & the Workforce has sent to five separate student loan servicers (Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority; Nelnet Servicing, LLC; Maximus dba Aidvantage; Edfinancial Services; and Central Research, Inc) to compel their testimony regarding…student loans. Cardona is trying to block their appearance under the risible fiction that his Department has legal authority to review and approve materials before they are sent to the committee, including documents sent by the servicers and held by DoEd personnel.

There is a solution to this, and I’ve written about it before.

The House can use the Jurney v MacCracken case to arrest Miguel Cardona; his Department legal counsel, Lisa Brown; and her unnamed Department contract officer and haul them before the relevant House committees to testify under oath regarding their obstruction. Applying Jurney to sitting government officials may be a stretch, though.

On the other hand, Jurney is directly applicable to those five student loan servicers, and that would emphasize the criminal nature of Cardona’s obstruction as well as force the servicer personages to testify regardless of Cardona’s obstruction.

There are statutes barring obstruction of Congressional investigations by individuals, including government officials. There also are contempt of Congress statutes, applicable even to government officials. Unfortunately, they depend on enforcement by the Biden-Garland DoJ, and that’s entirely too questionable.

Jurney, however, would allow to House to skip over Garland’s lack of performance, to ignore his DoJ altogether: under that Supreme Court ruling (in a Senae case, but it would apply to both houses of Congress), the Speaker can send the Sergeant at Arms and sufficient Capital Police to go get the managers of the five loan servicers, under arrest if necessary, and detain them in House facilities until they’ve testified, and produced originals of the documents currently held up by Cardona’s DoEd.