Tag Archives: government

Term Limits

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There are a number of term limits proposals on offer regarding politicians.

Then, as James Sherk pointed out in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Career employees fill almost all federal jobs. Only 4,000 of the 2.2 million federal employees are political appointees. Career federal employees consequently do almost all the work of government.

Here’s my term limits offer, this one regarding civil servants/career federal employees—and I’d apply it to Federal contract employees, also.

Term limit all of them—say 10 years—and after that term, they’d no longer be eligible for Federal employment in any guise whatsoever. That won’t actually hurt them: with the valuable experience of those 10 years of government employment under their belts, they’ll have no problem finding employment on the private economy.

One more limit: cap Federal civilian employment at one million, including individual contractors. Only the uniformed military should have no cap, but should remain sized to the threat faced.

Think, too, what that would do for us taxpayers, who are on the hook for those already enormous government pensions.

A limit on initial eligibility: a minimum of 10 years of employment in the private sector, unrelated to government work, in order to be eligible for Federal employment or contract work. Yes, that includes entry level secretaries/administrative assistants.

“Sufficient Evidence”

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Regarding the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s (R) Mar-a-Lago home,

some legal experts echoed Pelosi, arguing there had to be sufficient evidence to secure a federal search warrant against a former president.

Sounds nice in theory. In practice, it’s not so true. One has only to look at the falsified “evidence” the FBI used to gin up some FISA warrants applications and con FISA judges into granting them.

It’s hard to believe “some legal experts” are so naïve. In fact, I don’t believe those folks, who are so awesomely intelligent, for whom words are their stock in trade, and who are steeped in the mechanics of our legal system, are naïve. Not at all.

There’s this, too, from Attorney Paul Calli:

A prosecutor “can write anything she wishes to convince the court to sign the warrant,” he explained, “and the judge reviewing it has to assume the prosecutor is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Sadly, that is not always the case, and thus it is really the prosecutor who secretly controls the basis on which a warrant is issued.”

Not entirely. When the judge discovers he cannot trust the agent or prosecutor who’s presenting the material in a warrant application, he doesn’t have to sign off on the warrant. An untrustworthy agent is incapable of demonstrating probable cause. Sadly, those FISA judges, even after openly saying they couldn’t trust the FBI agents, continued issuing their Star Chamber warrants.

Judges, including magistrate judges, can be just as complicit as the agents before them in issuing…unjustified…warrants.

Progressive-Democratic Party Newspeak Dictionary

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Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) has a new entry. While using her authority to line-item veto $21 million she says was allocated for “anti-choice” programs.

Anti-choice: what she vetoed was this:

$10 million for marketing programs about adoption, $2 million in tax credits for adoptive parents, $3 million for a “maternal navigator pilot program,” $1.5 million for pregnancy resource centers and $700,000 for a nonprofit pregnancy center.

She claims her veto was based on the pregnancy crisis centers spread disinformation and withhold other information. These are plainly bogus beefs.

Instead, Whitmer is claiming that giving women options regarding their pregnancies is anti-choice.

The Uniter Says…

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…to Hell with bipartisanship. Again.

Last time, President Joe Biden (D) wanted an “exception” to the Senate’s filibuster rule so he could get passed the Progressive-Democratic Party’s voting “rights” legislation on strict party lines—no bipartisanship wanted.

This time, Biden wants an “exception” to the Senate’s filibuster rule so Party can codify Roe v Wade in the law.

If the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights, it should be we provide an exception for this[.]

The Senate’s filibuster rule forces compromise and bipartisanship—a measure of unity—in legislation by requiring at least 10 members of the minority party to agree to the legislation.

To Hell with bipartisanship, Biden says. Pass Party’s legislation. Unification means everyone does it Party’s way.

“Rights” and Precedent

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There is considerable discussion concerning whether a constitutional right to an abortion existed and was taken away by the Supreme Court’s just released ruling on Dobbs or whether, as Justice Alito emphasized in his Dobbs opinion for the Court that such a right never existed, it was merely the creation of Roe and then claimed again in Casey.

And therein lies the point of this post.

There is no right to an abortion contained in our Constitution, whether couched in the 14th Amendment or in any other part of the document—not literally, not figuratively, not encompassed in any penumbra.

Nevertheless, the claimed right has been, and rightly so, the law of the land since the 1973 Roe ruling, as are all Supreme Court rulings the law of the land from the moment of publication of the ruling. But it’s not a very durable law.

That’s a problem with Court rulings, a problem closely analogous with Presidential executive actions: Executive Orders and the like. Any “right” created by a Court ruling can be withdrawn by a subsequent Court ruling, just as any Presidential executive action can be withdrawn by a subsequent President.

The rights acknowledged in our Constitution, in contrast, can only be undone by a supermajority of us American citizens, through a supermajority of our States.

A Supreme Court precedent should be deeply respected. However, as Justice Clarence noted in his Gamble v United States concurrence,

In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions [whosever view of erroneous, I add]…over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.

And [emphasis added]

This view of stare decisis follows directly from the Constitution’s supremacy over other sources of law—including our own precedents.

By their nature, no precedent can be the final word, else we’d have neither Brown nor Citizens United nor Janus, and we’d have only war to which to resort regarding rulings like Dred Scott and the war organizations like Ruth Sent Us and Jane’s Revenge currently threaten over Dobbs, that politicians like Chuck Schumer threatened if Court rulings didn’t go his way, that Cori Bush and Maxine Waters currently threaten, and that Federal government officials like Merrick Garland and Joe Biden indirectly threaten with their refusal to enforce Court rulings of which they personally disapprove.