Tag Archives: government

A Thought on Gun Rights

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The city of Lowell, MA, and its police chief have one. It’s dead wrong, too. The city’s new law, pushed by its Police Superintendent, William Taylor,

requires residents applying for a license to carry handguns to write “an essay” and pay upwards of $1,100 for training.

Aside from the outlandish cost being just another means of denying licenses to American citizens (training required in Texas, for instance, costs around $300), there’s this, from police department spokesman, Captain Timothy Crowley:

If you want a license to carry a firearm unrestricted wherever you want and whenever you want, the superintendent is just looking for some documentation as to why. That is not unreasonable to most people.

Yes, it is unreasonable to most people. It’s also wholly and cynically unconstitutional. Here’s what the 2nd Amendment says on the matter:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Notice that. There’s nothing in there that says, “Shall not be infringed unless Government disapproves the man’s reason.” There’s nothing in there that even grants Government a right to ask, much less to know, a citizen’s reason to keep and bear his Arms. Just for clarity’s sake, too, the Supreme Court has ruled that this is entirely an individual right, and not a collective one.

No. The only legitimate way to require licenses to keep and bear is, after training, on a will issue basis.

Full stop.

It Must Be Dissolved

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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that is. Consider this example of its egregious behavior. When one of CFPB’s internal judges decided that

a New Jersey lender [PHH Corp] took illegal “kickbacks” from mortgage insurers, boosting costs for borrowers[,]

he fined the company $6 million. PHH appealed.

Richard Cordray, Director of the CFPB, took personal charge of the case and raised the penalty to $109 million. How dare a private company dispute with the CFPB!?

This abuse of power, even a power that the Democratic Party-controlled House and Senate conferred on the CFPB, together with a budget consisting of a blank check drawn on the Federal Reserve Bank System, when they created this thing six years ago, is a clear demonstration of the need to get rid of the CFPB and everything and everyone associated with it.

PHH’s case has been appealed to the DC Circuit, but there’s no need to wait. Get rid of this abusive, unaccountable board. Put this abusive, unaccountable Boyar out of a job.

Delays, Delays

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Stalls, stalls. That’s what State is doing over the Clinton email national security disaster with its latest request to be “late” delivering the court-ordered documents.

“The Clinton email team must perform its work on site. … This storm will disrupt the Clinton email team’s current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016,” agency lawyers wrote in their request.

No. State has been stalling and outright obstructing this release for years—that’s why the matter is before a Federal court and under that court’s order and nominal supervision to deliver on a set schedule in the first place. All through that ordered schedule, too, State has continued to delay, stall, obstruct, release at less than the court-ordered rate. The latest such stall was when State whined that the Christmas holiday schedule for their precious email sorters was more important than complying with the Court’s order and the people’s right to know what Democratic Party Presidential candidate was doing with her private, unprotected email server while she was Secretary of State. This storm would be irrelevant if State had complied with the original requests in the first place, or had complied with the court’s order in the second place.

No. State plainly is now in contempt of court. The Federal judge needs to hold, promptly, a hearing wherein State supervisory personnel should show cause why they shouldn’t be jailed for their contempt until the emails have been delivered and the contempt condition resolved.

Right Idea, Wrong Answer

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Congressman David Jolly (R, FL) had a piece on Fox News in which he lamented the amount of time Congressmen spend raising money for their future campaigns for Congress.

He’s right. Congressmen do spend too much time doing this.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently greeted an incoming crop of freshmen with a prescribed schedule that highlighted fundraising “Call Time” of four hours a day as the chief priority for any new member of Congress. The actual time they suggested working in Congress each day: just two hours!

It’s not just Democrats, though; Republicans do this, too.

However.

I’m introducing legislation called “The Stop Act.” It simply says that that no member of Congress may personally ask you for money.

This does not mean that you as a citizen cannot choose to contribute to a candidate. It is your constitutional right of political speech to do so.

And

We can’t have a part‐time Congress in a full‐time world.

He’s mistaken here. Congressmen don’t need to be banned from personally asking me for money. If they were, each Congressman would only hire a staffer to do it for him—driving up the need for money. What does need to be addressed, and not necessarily with a new law, is the incentive to raise money.

Why is it so expensive to be a Congressman? A couple reasons, far from the only ones (I’m eliding inflated campaigning costs), are the high cost of living in DC and the surrounding area, and the cost of travel. Modern communications technology, though, greatly reduces (though it does not eliminate) the need for Congressmen to be personally present all the time.

Another reason is the existence of a full-time Congress. We don’t need a full-time Congress, even in a full-time world, though Congressmen do need to be fully present and fully focused during part-time Congresses. Congressmen think the only way to measure how much they’re doing for their constituents is by the number of laws they get passed. A full-time Congress simply emphasizes that pressure.

In fact, though, the best measure of what they’re doing for their constituents is how many law proposals they successfully block. The best measure is how effectively they’re keeping government out of the lives of their constituents, not how successfully they’re injecting government into those lives via another law. Changing their mindset would greatly reduce the incentive to raise money.

This proposed law is an example of misplaced incentive.

Malfeasance

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It’s rampant at the Veterans Administration. And “leadership” there and in the White House plainly don’t care, as their decision to be inactive demonstrates. Here are some examples, from The Wall Street Journal.

  • After the biggest scandal in VA history, in which 110 VA medical facilities across the country maintained secret lists to hide long waits for care, only three low-level VA employees have been fired for wait-time manipulation.
  • In September the VA’s Office of Inspector General revealed that two VA senior executives inappropriately used their authority to game the agency’s hiring system, allowing them to benefit from more than $400,000 in taxpayer-funded relocation expenses. [The VA reassigned them at their existing salary rather than terminating them for cause.]
  • In December the public learned of two internal VA investigations that found whistleblowers at the Phoenix VA Hospital were retaliated against by two senior managers…. More than a year after…the VA has refused to hold them accountable.

Robert McDonald, VA Secretary, promised to fix this sort of thing when he was handed the job 16 months ago. These failures are demonstrations of his decision not to rock the boat. That his decisions have been allowed to stand unchallenged are clear demonstrations of President Barrack Obama’s lack of concern for the welfare of our veterans.

veteranos administratio delende est