Tag Archives: government

A Victory

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Last Tuesday is shaping up to become a solid Republican electoral victory.

Former Republican President Donald Trump has won a solid Electoral College and popular vote win, and the Electoral College win may grow, with Arizona and Nevada still uncalled as I write Wednesday afternoon. If Trump gets them all, he’d have 312 Electoral College votes. His popular vote lead, 51% to 47.6%, or 4.8M votes, is unlikely to change much.

The Republicans have taken the majority in the Senate, with Senate races having been called for 52 Republicans. That margin could grow with 4 Senate races yet to be called. It’s unlikely to expand to 56 Republican Senators, though, as only 2 of the uncalled races currently have Republicans leading. Even so, the shift to the current solid majority is a major victory; a shift to 54 would be even more so.

The Republicans can still retain their House majority, given the number of uncalled races; however, it’ll remain a slim majority, which will allow the Republican Chaos Caucus to retain their outsized power. On the other hand, the Republicans are on the threshold of losing their majority to the Progressive-Democrats, which would render the Chaos Caucus irrelevant.

More importantly than a Republican victory, though, this is a victory for our nation. That’s not because the Republicans won or the Progressive-Democrats lost; rather it’s the solidity of the victory that creates the national victory. With that broad mandate—especially if the voters choose to keep the Republicans in the House majority—there now comes the possibility of putting the divisiveness of the last 16 years behind us. There now exists the possibility of our nation coming back together as a nation, and a culture, of Americans.

That possibility depends on how effectively the Republicans govern. It also depends on the Progressive-Democratic Party’s willingness to accept its defeat and work with Republicans on getting some things done and other things undone rather than being the knee-jerk obstructionist, anti anything Republican Party they have been (that the Republicans need to stop being similarly obstructionist is a part of their ability to govern objectively).

It also depends on the intrinsically mendacious press recognizing its own failures of the last several decades, made overtly manifest in the last couple of decades, and taking publicly and concretely measurable steps to rid itself of its dishonesty and return to its Fourth Estate role of objectively reporting all the news in its stories and all of the stories, while keeping its opinions out of that news reporting and in its opinion pages.

There’s Deportation…

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…and there’s deportation. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) has a plan for a serious “deportation.” It’s

an ambitious plan to reshape and shrink federal government if [Republicans] win the election. That vision includes a plan to deport tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America.

Johnson went on in his Just the News interview:

“The idea is, if you move the agency to, you know, northern Kansas or southwest New Mexico, or wherever it is around the country, then some of the swamp dwellers they will not desire to follow the job to the new, less desirable location,” he added. “They love the swamp. You know they want to stay. They’ll turn them into lobbyist or something to stay in DC.” The mass transfer and departure of bureaucrats then leads to a “business reorganization proposition” for federal government, he said.
“You’ve got agencies that you can scale down because you have empty cubicles and…almost all the agencies are bloated and inefficient,” he said. “So you can scale that down. And then in the cubicles that you do need to fill, we’ve had America First Policy Institute and some of our other think tanks that have been working to develop a notebook full of highly qualified, previously vetted, limited government conservatives who have expertise in these areas.

A very profitable twofer: move get Federal bureaucrats into the hinterland/middle America/flyover country among us citizens whose lives bureaucrat shenanigans so severely impact, and shrink the manpower size of the Federal government since those bureaucrats who would refuse to move would be selecting themselves for termination from Federal employ.

Win-win.

Fundamentally Transform America

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That’s what ex-President Barack Obama (D) bragged was about to occur shortly before his 2008 election victory. He got a major step of that transformation when he nationalized roughly one-sixth of our economy with his nationalization of our health care coverage industry with his Obamacare.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party is on the verge of finishing the transformation as they sit on the knife’s edge of a sweeping election victory next week. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial headline lays it out:

[Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala] Harris has already endorsed President Biden’s plan to impose “ethics” rules on the Justices that would invite political harassment and compromise judicial independence. Now she won’t disavow packing the Court. She has called for Democrats, if they keep the Senate in November, to bypass the 60-vote filibuster rule, letting them enact such bills without even a modicum of compromise.

Those would be the final two straws in the destruction of our federated republican democracy form of government. It would be the institution of one-party rule, with the minority party not even a loyal opposition but merely irrelevant, and the conversion of our Supreme Court and of our Federal judiciary in general from its current status as an independent, coequal check on the power of the central government into a rubber stamp of Party decisions.

The WSJ editors aren’t given to hyperbole, and they’re not being hyperbolic in their closing paragraph.

Democrats are serious. They say Mr Trump is a threat to democracy and US institutions, while they’re pledging to restructure the judiciary wholesale. Do they notice the cognitive dissonance? Apparently not. But voters might.

That’s what’s at stake next week.

A Question of Border Security

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This question has been rattling around, sub rosa, in my pea brain for some time, and it’s finally percolated to the surface. Texas, in particular, has spent some billions of dollars on its own direct effort to seal its southern border against the flood of illegal aliens allowed in by the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration. Several other States have spent significant dollars sending units of their respective National Guards to Texas and Texas’ southern border to support Texas’ efforts. Florida and South Dakota come particularly to mind, although those are far from the only States to send Guard units. Those units, too, serve to improve the sending States’ own security.

The proximate question is this: should the Federal government reimburse those States for their expenses in guarding our national southern border, expenses necessarily incurred as a result of the present administration’s decision to abrogate its security responsibility?

That raises an overarching question: precisely who is responsible for maintaining the security of our national borders?

Were the Federal government to reimburse, that would be tantamount to asserting a strictly Federal responsibility for border security. Texas’ Governor Greg Abbott (R) has a valid point too, though: Texas has a responsibility to see to the security of its borders, particularly that portion that coincides with the national border with Mexico.

Given the flow of illegal aliens throughout our nation, much of that flow actively and deliberately abetted [sic] by the Biden-Harris administration in transporting illegal aliens from the locations where they’re caught and temporarily detained to a variety of destinations in our interior (along with the flow of gotaways and of an unknown number of undetecteds), by extension of Abbott’s point, all 50 of our States have a responsibility to see to the security of their borders—and their interior—with respect to the illegal aliens in their midst.

The answer, it seems to me, is that border security in our republican federal democracy is a responsibility shared between the central, Federal, government and our several State governments. That leads me to lean toward no Federal reimbursement, per se. However, it may be appropriate for our national defense budget—not any part of a Department of Homeland Security budget—to allocate some border security funds explicitly to the States to defray, not reimburse, some of the States’ costs in securing their own borders.

Has FEMA Gone Racist and Sexist?

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The Biden-Harris’ Federal Emergency Management Agency has gone from aiding Americans in regional emergencies to emphasizing Americans who happen to be black or female for such aid before it gets around to helping other Americans in the same emergency region.

[A] closer look at FEMA’s recent internal documents, spending, and public actions shows that FEMA has broadened its focus to handling the flow of migrants into the US and attempting to double down on DEI initiatives on gender, sexuality, and race.

FEMA’s strategic “plan” for the period 2022-2026—we have far too long yet to go under this piece of work—makes the agency’s bigotry clear:

In its first goal, the plan promised to “Instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.”
Its second named priority is to “lead whole of Community in climate resilience.”
FEMA’s “readiness” comes in as the third goal in the plan.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion cannot be optional; they must be core components of how the agency conducts itself internally and executes its mission[.]”

This is an agency that badly wants a complete revamp, with wholly new personnel in supervisory positions. The bigotry of those managers has gone entirely too far, and their redemption isn’t possible from within government positions.