Tag Archives: freedom

A No-Filibuster Senate

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The Wall Street Journal editors worry about Arizona’s Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision not to run for reelection, coupled with West Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement, and how those decisions will affect the Senate filibuster. The editors correctly predict the end of the filibuster if the Progressive-Democrats maintain their Senate majority after the coming elections, and they suggest the ravages of the resulting one-party rule:

  • doubling the national minimum wage
  • mandating a British NIH-style national health care program—Medicare for All—and damn the cost or reduction in quality of health care
  • enacting national “right” to abortion
  • a 35% corporate tax
  • union favoritism
  • enacting nationwide mail voting

The editors then, with breathtaking innocence, suggest that the next time Republicans were to control Congress and the White House, they could abolish all of these. However, once the Progressive-Democrats get control of our Federal government is so sweeping, filibusterless way, on what basis do these editors think any opposition party could ever win a national election again?

For all of those risks, though, the editors missed the one that would impact the last bastion of our republican form of government. With no filibuster, Party could easily stack the Supreme Court and install their activist Justices, who would then issue rulings entirely consistent with Party’s disdain for our Constitution. That would be the end of the Supreme Court, and of so much more.

The stakes for our republic are that high.

Not All It Can Do

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Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams’ New York City government has a new way to spy on American citizens resident in that city, or even just visiting.

New York City drivers buckle up because Big Brother (aka the MTA) is keeping a watchful eye on you by installing cameras along New York City streets to track you. But why? Well, it all boils down to money, of course. The MTA is rolling out a controversial $15 per day congestion fee for all drivers venturing south of 60th Street. They’ve even given this area of Manhattan a snazzy name: the toll congestion zone.

That’s its publicly stated—look, a squirrel—purpose.

Another purpose, one Adams and his city government don’t want to mention, is to track those drivers to see where they go; where they park and shut down, presumably getting out of their cars; what shops they go to, at least identifying the shops within walking distance; and how long they’re there.

Because inquiring Government minds want to know.

A Letter Writer Asks

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In Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal, a correspondent asked What Does Democracy Mean to the Lincoln Project?

He then offered three examples of the Lincoln Project‘s apparent ideology that underlie his question:

  1. It has been acceptable throughout American history for advocates outside the two-party system to obtain qualifying voter signatures to get on the ballot. But for No Labels to employ that method now should offend our sense of fairness.
  2. Even though the two parties have arcane rules for candidate selection that restrict voter autonomy, adding qualified competitors to the general-election ballot will limit voter choice.
  3. Anyone with the temerity to view Presidents Biden and Trump as sufficiently inadequate choices to propose a third option is a “threat to American democracy” and beneath contempt.

For that, I suggest an answer: All within the Project, nothing outside the Project, nothing against the Project.

A Critical Item

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on the right track. In his Christmas Wall Street Journal op-ed, he laid out Israel’s three criteria for achieving real peace in the Gaza Strip:

Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized. These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.

Netanyahu is well down the right track, but I disagree with him to a slight extent.

The destruction of Hamas (and of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, I add) is the Critical Item in this trio, and so it is the sole prerequisite to peace in and with the Gaza Strip. Without this, the other two, necessary as they also are, become irrelevant.

Gaza will never be demilitarized so long as the terrorist organizations exist.

It is possible to deradicalize Palestinian society, but that at best will be a multi-generational task—and the Palestinians themselves must be willing, beginning with their letting go of their deeply emotional hatred of all things Jewish.

Search Warrants and Sect 702

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The Wall Street Journal editors are worried about a House Judiciary Committee proposal to reform Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702 (the proposal has subsequently been withdrawn for unrelated reasons). Their plaint centers on the Committee’s proposal to require search warrants to look at emails already lawfully collected.

The House Judiciary Committee…bill would require a warrant for queries of US persons, even though the information was already lawfully collected.

Contra the worthies at the WSJ, the Judiciary bill is well down the right track. The information about which the editors worry was, indeed, lawfully collected, but only as a side effect of the collection run against a foreign entity. To explicitly look at—to read—those accidentally collected emails, to make those emails explicit targets of a search, that absolutely should require 4th Amendment search warrants.

Further, those warrants should be issuable only by an Art III judge or a magistrate directly subordinate to an Art III judge, and the FISA court should be removed completely.