Tag Archives: government

The Danger of Accepting Federal Money

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…made manifest.

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez…threatened to cashier federal grants for 83 local transit agencies because he claimed California’s pension reforms violate the Federal Transit Act, which requires the Labor Department to certify that “protective” arrangements are made for workers (i.e., the Teamsters) before the feds dole out dough.  Nearly $2 billion in federal funds are at stake this year alone.

And there’s this:

In July, HUD published…”Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” in the Federal Register…a sweeping set of land-use regulations…. The agency wants the power to dismantle local zoning so communities have what it considers the right mix of economic, racial and ethnic diversity.  A finding of discriminatory behavior, or allegations of discrimination, would no longer be necessary.  HUD will supply “nationally uniform data” of what it thinks 1,200 communities should look like.

Local governments will have to “take meaningful actions to further the goals identified.”  If they fail to comply, HUD can cut federal funding.

Of course, if the States weren’t addicted to Federal handouts, the Feds’ pushers wouldn’t be able to make such threats, much less have this control over a State’s internal affairs.

Of Gas and Men

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From historian Andrew Roberts, in The Wall Street Journal, comes this:

There is a long and honorable history of the civilized world treating those dictators who use poison gas as qualitatively different from the normal ruck of tyrants whose careers have so stained the 20th and 21st centuries.

President Obama, who talks endlessly of the importance of civilized values, must now uphold this one.

What he said.  RTWT.

What Do Progressives

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…have against equal opportunity?

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

Because, you know, helping students actually to do better so that they can be effectively integrated with their age peers is a Bad Thing.

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

After all, parents of underperforming students might wind up aggregating them into schools that actually teach and get academic results in their students.  Since most of the underperforming students in Louisiana tend to be minority children, especially black children, this might tend to aggregate black children into those successful voucher schools rather than leave them trapped in Louisiana’s failing public school system.

Eric Holder’s DoJ made their argument with a straight face.  Consummate actors, they are.

Let’s look at that “minority” status in the Louisiana schools, though.

The New Orleans public school system is 88% African-American.  Now, how could allowing 570 kids to flee the public school system possibly “create a racial imbalance”?

Oh, it’s those minority white students, who would become even more concentrated, that Holder is worrying about.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ll go with that.

Jindal had this about Holder’s move:

After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right.  Shame on them.  Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.

Can you say disparate impact?  This is the racist outcome—intended or not—of using this meme, even sotto voce.

Immigration and Border Security

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The Senate’s bill on immigration reform purports to include a requirement for border security that must be met before a citizenship path for existing illegal aliens can begin.

Regardless of what we might think about the strength of that requirement, it demands data on current and trigger border security levels.  Those data may not be available:

[CRS and GAO] reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service show the Department of Homeland Security lacks an accurate barometer to measure the success of ramped-up efforts to curtail illegal crossings.
…
…[they have the] number of apprehensions of people coming in illegally….  But those numbers…don’t necessarily show whether an increase or decrease is due to immigration trends, economic shifts, enforcement policies or all of the above.

Because

Apprehensions data…exclude two important groups when it comes to unauthorized migration: aliens who successfully enter and remain in the United States…and aliens who are deterred from entering the United States[.]

That these data are hard to collect (the deterrence factor may be impossible to assess) in no way increases the reliability of apprehensions as a measure of security.

The GAO’s beef also includes a lack of data availability for the several immigration-involved agencies that would benefit from them: “a lack of interagency coordination and information sharing” and “inconsistency in data collection.”

This is just one more example of the lack of reliability of what this government tells us, and in this case it has—or should have—a direct impact on this government’s ability to achieve immigration reform, which is badly needed in any event.

Progressive Law

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President Barack Obama has sent his chief cleric on this subject, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, to the press to insist that Obamacare is “the law of the land,” and that we should all just shut up about it.  Over at Reason.com, Peter Suderman showed us what “the law” is to Progressives in an article last Wednesday (and no, that’s not one of Obama’s cigarettes in Sebelius’ hand in the lead image.  Look more closely: it’s a pen).

  • selectively enforced provisions
    • delayed employer mandate, threatening to veto legislative authority to delay it—and the Individual Mandate
    • delayed out of pocket cost caps—stealthily, the announcement buried last winter in a plethora of rules documentation
    • delayed verification requirements concerning income and health status for state-based exchanges
  • lobbied OPM to rule that Congressional employees could use Federal employer health benefit contributions to purchase of exchange-based coverage, knowing OPM has no such authority.  (In truth, Congress—both parties—are complicit in this particular lawlessness.)
  • supported IRS ruling that insurance subsidies—available by the law-as-passed only in state-created exchanges—are to be allowed in the 34 exchanges run by the Federal government.

Can we afford three more years of Progressive law, after this and the preceding five, or so, years of it?  Can we afford even one more year?  Primaries and the mid-terms approach.