Tag Archives: government

Fixing Itself

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A question arises: can France fix itself so it can fix its economy so it can get its debt under control and on a downward path to a sensible level?

That answer depends on whether it can fix its national method for settling questions and the disputes that give rise to those questions.

A free democracy has one primary method for settling national questions and disputes: debate, argument, and then voting for one or another of the politicians the people want to represent them and to lead the government, or voting against another or one of those politicians.

France is unique in that it has a second method of settling national questions and disputes. This method has been in prominent use since the months and days leading into the Revolution of 1793: rioting in the streets, destroying businesses, attacking police personnel. Over the course of the Fifth Republic, extant since the 1950s, the technique of rioting and destruction has become elevated to the same level as voting. That elevation has resulted from the French government’s inability to quell the rioting and to restore order—an inability that results, not from a true lack of capacity, but from utter cowardice on the part of the men and women in charge of the government, especially the President, Prime Minister, and members of the National Assembly and the Senate.

So far, the rioters have succeeded in intimidating the government personnel into backing down and giving them what they demand, however bad for the nation as a whole over any timeframe beyond tomorrow. See the Yellow Vests riots of 2020 and the current “student” and “teacher” riots today.

Macron’s government men and women, including Macon himself, were intimidated into significant watering down of economic reforms that Yellow Vesters disapproved, and his government today is on the verge of giving prima donna pupils and (union) teachers whatever they want.

The answer to the question, then, at least for what France is confronting for its future, is…No.

A Misreading

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Matthew Hennessey has misread what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants when it gains majorities in the House and the Senate.

There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

That’s not entirely accurate. There are those fears, which Party is fomenting in lieu of specifics regarding economic and foreign policy goals: fear of artificial intelligence, fear of data centers, fear of Donald Trump, and fear of MAGA.

Those, though, are just tools Party is using in pursuit of its major proposals. Hennessey is right, though, to the extent its major proposals are not up for debate.

The Progressive-Democrats have promised to eliminate the filibuster, reducing our republican democracy to a popular democracy and reducing our Senate to just another House, this time whose members have State-wide districts. They’ve also promised to stack the Supreme Court, reducing it from a Court upholding and applying our Constitution as it’s written to an activist court for whom our Constitution is just a collection of suggestions, if not entirely irrelevant, and which is malleable to Party demands.

Naïve or Ignorant?

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Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R) and Donald Boudreaux, an econ prof at George Mason University, centered their op-ed in Monday’s WSJ on the premise that if the Republican party gets suitably drubbed this fall, the remnants will revolt against President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs and revert to Reagan-esque free trade economics. On regaining majorities in the House and Senate, there will be a Republican backlash against Mr Trump’s tariff policies and those policies suitably altered or rescinded.

I’m hard pressed to determine whether these two, who should know better, are really that naïve or they’re that ignorant.

An ascendant Progressive-Democratic Party, whose leadership has sworn to fundamentally change our nation and our economy will set about doing exactly that. Beginning with their elimination of the Senate’s filibuster, they will transform our nation’s republican democracy structure, a structure that protects minority party rights and authorities, into a popular democracy, a one-party structure that ignores minority party imperatives. Popular democracies in this way are indistinguishable from authoritarian- or tyranny-run nations. They will continue their “transformation” with packing the Supreme Court, installing a majority of activist Justices instead of Justices sworn to defend our Constitution and to apply it and any statutes before them as they are written rather than as the newly installed activists, or their Party masters, want them to be written. Party has long opposed election laws that limit the franchise to citizens; once they’re in control this time around, they’ll not only control voting laws, they’ll also control vote counting process.

Party has already begun its promised transformation, beginning with that filibuster elimination commitment. It’s continuing with its open clasping of the Democratic Socialists of America to its bosom. The DSA is committed to centralized government control of our private economy, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) fundamental economic transformation. DSA, and so Party, are committed to subordinating our Court system to Congress, although this would be redundant with the packed Court. More long-term, they’re committed to eliminating the Senate altogether, although this may prove unnecessary: with the elimination of the filibuster, the Senate would be indistinguishable from the House—each State would simply have two legislators elected at large along with those elected district by district. This is ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dream of changing our nation.

With Party control of government, there may well be no further Republican majorities in either house of Congress.

That Time Has Long Since Come

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The Trump administration wants a new rule that would achieve two ends governing how the 2030 census counts persons present in the US and how those counts are used.

The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, proposed not to count most immigrants toward the population used to apportion seats for the House, unless they have become citizens or hold permanent resident status. The proposed new calculation would exclude immigrants in the country illegally, which various analyses estimate total about 15 million.

And

In addition, the proposed rule would prohibit the Census Bureau from including race or ethnicity questions on the census form sent to all households, saying such data is “immaterial” to the constitutional mandate to conduct an actual population count. That would eliminate the most complete counts of the country’s Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American populations, ending a key source of information used in civil and voting rights enforcement.

The time for this rule has long since come, and it needs to be enacted promptly, with no further delay.

Illegal aliens have no business voting in American elections—they are not Americans, and as they’ve demonstrated by their illegal entry and subsequent insistent dodging of immigration authorities, they have no intention of becoming citizens or even legal residency. This is especially the case since for years, they’ve been able to voluntarily leave for their home contracts, collect a significant cash stipend on arrival, and then return to the US and enter legally.

It’s also plainly obvious that race or ethnicity have no place in our voting rules. This is borne out by our 14th Amendment and Supreme Court rulings explicitly eliminating race and ethnicity from voting special treatments. In the end, too, the only ethnicity that matters in eligibility for voting is American ethnicity. Beyond that, all American voters are the same under our Constitution and our statutes. Segregating us into groups for voting district construction would be irrelevant were the segregation not openly racist.

At The Core of Progressive-Democratic Party Ideology

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It was stated in so many words by socialist (though he risibly denies it) and Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for US Senator from Michigan, Abdul el-Sayed:

…if we took seriously the idea that all of our kids were all of our kids. If we started with that idea that every child is our child….

Too many people on the right are writing this off as just so much Kamala Harris-esque word salad, and that’s dangerously failing to hear what he’s saying, what Party and its Democratic Socialist of America members have in mind for our republic.

El-Sayed is clear here. Children don’t belong to the parents; they aren’t the responsibility of the parents. Children are the responsibility of the community, of the state. Children are the state’s property.