Tag Archives: government

Power

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The Progressives’ naked grab for it in the Senate: Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, UT) intends to do away with the filibuster so that he and his fellows can ram through whatever they feel like, without regard for anything the minority party—or the American people whom these represent—might have to say.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell understands the travesty of Reid’s move:

[He] called Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to end filibusters on motions to proceed a “naked power grab” and an “affront to the American people” Monday.  He encouraged members “on both sides” to oppose Reid’s proposal “strenuously and loudly.”

Here’s what Senator Reid and then-Senator Barack Obama had to say on the matter in 2005, during the Bush the Younger administration:

Harry Reid: [T]he filibuster is not a scheme.  And it is not new.  The filibuster is far from a “procedural gimmick.”  It is part of the fabric of this institution.  It was well known in colonial legislatures, and it is an integral part of our country’s 217 years of history.

…

It also separates us from the House of Representatives—where the majority rules.  And it is very much in keeping with the spirit of the government established by the Framers of our Constitution: Limited Government…Separation of Powers…Checks and Balances.

And the gentleman from Illinois:

Barack Obama, in an emailed response to a constituent: I recognize that the filibuster can be used for unfortunate purposes. However, I am also aware that the Founding Fathers established the filibuster as a means of protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority — and that protection, with some changes, has been in place for over 200 years.  [Never mind Obama’s historical error; it’s well established he’s a mediocre student of history.]

Here he is, again, this time speaking to the National Press Club in April of that year about getting rid of the filibuster:

I remember what it was like the first several years that I was in the minority.  You couldn’t attach an amendment.  You could not get a thing done.  If you were in the minority, you might as well not have even showed up.  And then there was redistricting, and a few years later, the Democrats are in charge, and now the Republicans cannot get a thing done.  And the Democrats don’t have to pay them any attention whatsoever.

And what I worry about would be you essentially have still two chambers—the House and the Senate—but you have simply majoritarian absolute power on either side, and that’s just not what the founders intended[.]

Hmm….

Sovereignty

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Who is sovereign in our country, government or We the People who employ that government?

Progressives like Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) seem to think that it’s government.

It’s [having referendums] probably been made a little too easy.  There was a requirement that required 50,000 actual physical signatures.  Because of the Internet that has been so easy to do electronically, that the legislature probably needs to revisit that.

Maryland radio station WBAL chimes in, reporting that:

Critics of the process say that a group of opponents can use the referendum process to overturn legislation they don’t like[.]

Yeah—it’s terrible that a questionable government act should be put to the government’s employer for approval or rejection.  Remember, while it may take a small minority to force the government to submit to the will of its employer, it still takes a majority of that employer to overrule their employee.  And if that majority does so, it’s an entirely appropriate exercise of the People’s sovereign authority.

This Is Entirely Appropriate

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This is the response of Staten Islanders to Sandy and the nor-easter.

A lifelong Staten Island resident, Gennaro, is recruiting volunteers for the local Brown Cross and the Gateway Rotary Foundation to organize supply posts and dispatches along the island.  So far, they have an estimated 2,000 volunteers, many contractors, who are taking matters into their own hands by fixing homes, draining basements, and clearing debris.

Gennaro adds

We are not leaving our properties for other people to rebuild.  There is nowhere for these people to go.  You have to rebuild quickly.  We got to get back up.

This is private citizens and private enterprise acting first.  Government has a role, but it must come second.

Indeed, the promised Federal and state help has been notably absent from Staten Island—even that second-place role is going unfulfilled.  Without making judgments on the Federal or state agencies, they will always be late to the crisis relief and recovery effort.  Government performance on Staten Island simply emphasizes the necessity, as well as the morality, of local community response first and promptly.  Only those on the scene can act quickly.

These folks could still use lots of help, though.

Gennaro says they are in need of building supplies—not food—and private donations that can go directly to families.  He guarantees 90% will go directly to buying warehouse and building materials.  Things like electrical panels, circuit breakers, sheet rock, roofing, boilers, etc.

You can contribute here:

The Outcome

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According to Fox News‘ exit polling and a Fox News interview (sorry about the lead-in ad) with Dick Morris (who had, the day prior to the election, predicted a Romney win at 9:1 odds), the American electorate has changed.  Morris had based his prediction on the electorate makeup of 2008 being an aberration; Tuesday’s results strongly imply that this is now the makeup of our electorate—2012 is not materially different from 2008.

In fact, the changes aren’t great in absolute terms; the black vote was 11% of the electorate in 2004, and the Hispanic vote roughly 8% then.  Those small changes, though, were enough to put Obama over the top, 51%-49% in the popular vote (the Electoral College outcome is a function of the discrete state by state allocation of those votes, despite the fundamental closeness of the popular votes in several states with large Electoral College contingents).

Here are the ethnic group numbers from that exit poll [the last column and row are added by me; numbers don’t sum to 100% due to rounding and because I omitted the 2% “Other” category]:

Are you:

Total

Obama

Romney

 % Total Electorate Voting Obama/Romney

White

72%

39%

59%

28%/42%

Black

13%

93%

6%

12%/2%

Hispanic/Latino

10%

71%

27%

7%/3%

Asian

3%

73%

26%

2%/<1%

Total Non-White % Voting Obama/Romney

21%/5%

 

With this breakout, the Democrats start out with a 4:1 advantage in the non-white demographic.  Even accounting for the black break-out being accentuated by the presence of a black candidate, it seems clear to me that the advantage is strongly for the Democratic Party—still nearly 4:1.

Morris suggests that the Republican Party needs to “change its positions” in order to reach these other folks; otherwise they’ll never win another election.

I disagree.  The conservative Republicans’ positions are sound.  What they need to do is a better job of communicating, a Republican weakness of long-standing.  They need actually to approach these groups and talk directly to them in their neighborhoods.  This is what the Democrats have been doing for years.

Mitt Romney made a speech to the NAACP, but neither he nor his representatives ever went into the local neighborhoods where blacks live.  He never talked directly to blacks.

Mitt Romney’s Spanish-speaking son made a few speeches to Hispanic organizations in Florida, but no one went into the neighborhoods there—or in Texas (which as a state went for Romney, but not the Hispanic population), or in Illinois, or in New York, or in California, or in…—to talk directly to Hispanics where they live.

Mitt Romney didn’t even pay lip service to the Asian demographic.

As I said, Republicans need to improve their communications skills, not alter what they stand for.  Those are sound principles, and they’ll draw all Americans, not just a select few.  Medicare, for instance, was painted as a huge vulnerability for the Republicans—their view that Medicare needed to be sharply revised in order to survive and their specific plan for achieving that revision were supposed to be Republicans’ undoing.  A look at the exit polling at the above link, though, shows the soundness of the Republican position: voters 65 and older went for Romney 56%-44%, and those 45-64—the group beginning to think about and to get serious about planning for retirement—went for Romney 51%-47%.

What are the Republican principles?  Christian Whiton offers a useful summary in a piece that also centers on communications:

…a society that wants to survive must not punish those who play by the rules or are successful.

…a private market allocates resources better than even smart Ivy Leaguers working for a government bureaucracy.

…the American century only ends when we decide we’re no longer exceptional in mankind’s history, and choose the European model of decadent decline over a destiny of freedom and self-reliance.

The principles are worth fighting for (or the United States is no longer that self-reliant, personally responsible, free market nation that it has been heretofore); the message needs to be brought to all of us, not just some.

Disaster Relief

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Government can’t do it.  This isn’t the fault of liberal government or conservative government—government can’t do it.  Only private enterprise and the community of individual volunteers can.

Look at the failures of government response to Katrina, including the failures of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans to do anything at all other than to cry out for Federal relief—and in the case of Governor Kathleen Blanco, a failure to do even that until it was too late for the Feds to be even a little useful.  Then there’s the failure of the Federal relief efforts.  There remain temporary homes in Louisiana depots unused because of bureaucratic failure to get them emplaced and allocated, just as one example.

Private enterprise—Wal*Mart (food, clothing donations, delivery truck capacity), Home Depot (support centers for providing reconstruction materials), Ford Motor (160 used trucks, vans and SUVs for use in the relief effort)—arrived promptly with its own relief effort in progress by the time the Feds arrived.

Private charity and NGO—The American Red Cross, Feeding America (then America’s Second Harvest), Southern Baptist Convention, Salvation Army, Oxfam, Common Ground Collective, Emergency Communities, Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities, Service International, “A River of Hope”, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and many others charitable organizations had major roles in the relief effort.

Individual volunteers with expertise—electrical power restoral, flood relief and water damage repair—flowed in from out of the disaster area.

Look at the manifest failures of the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City, and the Federal government with Sandy.  There are lots of photo ops, many tours of the disaster areas, an initial attempt to divert massive police, sanitation, etc resources from relief effort and residential neighborhood security to support a marathon race.  And millions of Americans in New York and New Jersey still are without power, heat, clear roads, fuel for their transportation, even homes.

On the other hand, Verizon, for instance, had 95% of its cell service back up and running within 24 hours of Sandy’s landfall in the affected areas.  AT&T, et al., weren’t far behind.  Home Depot (those guys again) has activated its Disaster Response Command Center and is coordinating merchandise movement and working with the Red Cross (those guys again) for relief effort.  Wal*Mart, by last weekend alone, had donated 60 pallets of dry food and beverages and nearly 6,000 cases of cleaning supplies.

Private charity and NGO—all those listed above—are active in their own roles.

Volunteer utility workers have flowed in to help with power restoral, marathon runners, with their contest cancelled, switched to doing their own resupply efforts to beleaguered neighborhoods, relying on shank’s mare to get supplies in where motorized delivery couldn’t go.

William McGurn, writing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, argues that these failures demonstrate the failures of liberal government.  From this conservative’s perspective, McGurn makes some good points:

…the great vulnerability of 21st-century American liberalism: an inability to set the priorities necessary for good government.  As a result, government grows both bigger and less capable, especially for people who do not have the resources to fund other options.

He’s right as far as he goes, but as I opened this post, this isn’t a failure of liberal government alone—it’s a failure of government.  This isn’t because the wrong people have the wrong ideas, but because the idea is wrong.  Government cannot do disaster recovery.

Government has an important role to play in disaster recovery, but that role is coordination; assistance in allocation of effort and resources; short-term, stop-gap, hand up funding.  It is not the doing itself.  As I wrote here,

Government didn’t build anything; it just acted as middle man for a small part of all that private building.

Disaster relief is just a subset of that building.