Tag Archives: ethics

Republican Timidity

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Recall that ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed to individual floor votes on each of the dozen separate appropriations bills. His position, and he was right IMNSHO, was that lumping them all together into a single omnibus spending bill only led to increased Federal government spending by preventing Congressmen from debating and voting on those bills individually—omnibus made the lot of them an all or nothing proposition.

Now Republican House management (they’re not leaders) are skittering away from that commitment. Instead, under the artificial deadline of a government shutdown due to lack of funding (itself a coarse distortion, since the government would only partially shut down, and separately, there is plenty of revenue flowing in under current tax law to fund most of the present government), those Republicans look like they’re preparing to cave and give the Progressive-Democrats everything they want. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R, MN)

confirmed to Fox News Digital that passing minibuses is “on the table” and blamed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) for not working with the House on its individual spending bills.
“Due to the Schumer Senate’s inability to pass individual appropriations bills and the tight timeline we’re working with, all options are on the table including minibus appropriations bills. Thanks to Speaker Johnson’s leadership, the days of massive omnibus bills are behind us.”

No. This is excuse-making for the Republicans’ timidity. This is abject surrender to the Progressive-Democrats. There is no tight timeline—the partial shutdown won’t be a disaster, as prior shutdowns—the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that—have amply demonstrated. To the extent there is any sort of deadline, it’s on the Progressive-Democratic Party for refusing to negotiate spending cuts in any serious fashion and on Schumer for forcing through the Senate an irresponsibly spendthrift bill. And on weak Republican Senators for negotiating so poor a foreign aid and border (in)security bill in the first instance.

And this, from a Republican Congressman who was too timid, or too lacking in moral courage, or both, to allow himself to be identified:

These negotiations are less focused on getting 216 Republicans to vote for them and more on getting the majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats to vote for them, and that concern about voting on all 12 is not going to be as prominent.

This is just a sellout of those commitments.

These managers need to find the courage of the convictions their mouths utter and hold 12 individual floor votes, or they need to get out of the way. These managers currently are on track to make Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) Speaker, by a wide margin, and what a disaster that would be for our republic.

No CR

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The House Freedom Caucus wants House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) to attach a House-passed border security bill that’s sitting in the US Senate to the next spending bill that Congress must pass to avoid a government shutdown. Freedom Caucus member Bob Good (R, VA):

I think we ought to be willing to have a fight over securing the border. I think we ought to refuse to fund the government if the administration continues to be unwilling to secure the border, then we ought to tie the funding of the government to border security implementation where some funds are held back until the measurables are met, the performance metrics that demonstrate that the border is being secured. And we do it to through Sept. 30 at the FRA levels[.]

No, that’s a typically Republican timid temporization, and as such, it continues to cede the budget—and our border security and support for our friends and allies—to the not-tender mercies of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Republicans, including the apparently courage-fading Freedom Caucus, need to be willing to engage in a fight over securing the border (et al.) by not having another CR.

Let the Progressive-Democratic Party and Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden eat their government shutdown over their flat refusal to secure our border and to pay for the spending they want for Ukraine, Israel, and the Republic of China, however badly that spending is truly needed.

Of course that means Republicans need to stop being so timid when talking about government shutdowns—when they’re not actively ducking the subject—and they mustn’t hesitate to identify, by name, those Congressmen and Senators who are actively blocking the agreements necessary to conclude the bills.

What Damages?

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Stipulate, arguendo, that Republican Primary Presidential candidate Donald Trump was, indeed, guilty of civil fraud as New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled regarding the way Trump valued his properties in order to obtain loans. As a result of that civil conviction, Engoron has ordered, among other things, that Trump must pay more than $350 million in “ill-gotten profits” which are some sort of “damages.”

I have to ask: what damage? What ill-gotten profit? All the bank loans were repaid in full along with all of the associated interest accumulated over the lives of the loans. Think about that for a moment. The question of damage goes, or should go, far beyond the proximate question of whether the banks got all that was due them under the terms of those loans.

Had Trump valued his properties in line with Engoron’s claims—Mara Lago, for instance was worth only $18 million in Engoron’s judicial (not financial) estimation rather than the $420 million (at least) at which Trump valued it—the associated loans would have been far smaller, and the banks would have made far less money. What damage, indeed?

And those “ill-gotten profits” that Trump made with those loans? Those loans and associated profits allowed some of his businesses to survive and those employees to continue to have good jobs, and those loans and associated profits allowed other of his businesses to grow and those businesses to hire more employees into growth-created good jobs.

That’s One Spin

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Battery car sales seem to be falling off in California.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that Tesla sales fell significantly in the back half of 2023, declining by 10% in the final quarter alone. This sales drop came despite California’s previous pledge to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in the state by 2035.

The LA Times is busily spinning the reason for the fall-off. The outlet is claiming

“controversial pronouncements” from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

It added

There’s no survey to prove it, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest liberal-leaning California car buyers are done with Elon Musk’s abrasive personality and his stands on political issues.

No data; LAT just Knows Better.

And this:

If enough buyers here are truly fed up enough with Musk to influence their purchasing decisions, Tesla’s sales could continue to suffer.

On the other hand, Greg Bannon, AAA‘s Automotive Engineering Director, told the LAT

The government and automakers have spent billions on something consumers may not want.

Of course. Who is this Bannon guy, anyway? It couldn’t possibly be that consumers, even in California, are increasingly becoming less enamored of battery cars.

Mm, mm. Nope.

This IRS Needs to Go

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First, it was the Internal Revenue Service targeting Conservative organizations that were applying for tax-exempt status by slow-walking approvals or outright denying approval on purely political grounds. Then it was the IRS “leaking” of a plethora of Conservative and Republican Americans’ personal tax information. There were, too, a host of similar IRS failures between those and since.

Now we get the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration report that shows that this IRS misbehavior is longstanding and a feature of the agency. Here are a few of the things TIGTA found.

  • 19 contractors’ most recent background investigations were not favorable as of July 13, 2023. However, these contractors still retained their access to one or more sensitive systems because the IRS did not take action to suspend or disable the contractors from the IRS’s systems, as required
  • 279 contractors and employees no longer with the agency still had access to at least one sensitive computer system. “Actions were not always taken to timely remove users once they separated from the IRS”
  • For some sensitive systems, the IRS does not have adequate controls to detect or prevent the unauthorized removal of data by users

The IRS managers don’t even know what systems they have in operation.

  • the IRS struggled to come up with a complete list of sensitive computer systems, eventually identifying 319.
    To perform this evaluation, we [TIGTA] requested information from the IRS that identifies all sensitive systems. However, our ability to obtain a complete and reliable inventory of its sensitive systems was an ongoing challenge throughout this evaluation.

In fine, as TIGTA put it,

The fact remains that for some sensitive systems, the IRS does not have adequate controls to detect or prevent the unauthorized removal of data by users[.]

Plainly, the IRS’ managers aren’t even pretending to try to install controls.

We need a Federal Revenue facility to oversee Federal tax collection and collected revenue handling, even under a vastly simplified Federal tax code. But this agency is beyond repair. It must be disbanded entirely with its personnel returned to the private sector—most especially not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government—and replaced with a new, streamlined Federal Revenue facility.

TIGTA’s report can be read here.