Tag Archives: government

WaPo Contempt

Posted on by
Reply

The Washington Post is at it again. Abolish the electoral college, its editors demand. And they thereby display the same contempt for ordinary Americans, our Constitution, and our federal republic structure as did Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and more recently Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, among a long list of today’s Leftists and Progressive-Democrats.

The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.

After all,

Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.

You bet. That’s right there in that pesky Constitution, because federation. That’s where the individual States, by design, are nearly on a par with the central government. That’s so a far away, remote government cannot rule the roost with its one-size-fits-all diktats. Those pesky States just keep getting in the way of Progressive-Democrats’ need to implement their Know Better policies. Absolute control from the center would make that so much more convenient. Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the need for a Progressive-Democrat majority, reigning from DC:

[Jake Tapper, interviewing Ocasio-Cortez]: Are you going to work with more moderate Senate Republicans to try to pass something in the House that can get through the Senate?
[Ocasio-Cortez]: Well, I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support…that we secure a Democratic Senate majority, so that we don’t have to negotiate in that way[.]

Back to WaPo‘s need to clear away the obstacles to Leftist control of the promise of American life.

Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million.

With the Electoral College having far more popular representation than the Senate, surely, these wondrous exemplars of what passes for journalism will be demanding proportional representation in the Senate, too. Truly equal representation gives the dinky States, those locales too small to be worthy of notice, ‘way too much representation.

Some Editors Don’t Get It

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board, in its Friday edition, ran a piece strongly decrying the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s shrill attacks on Justice Sam Alito for his effrontery in decrying their attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In those personages’ eyes, Alito behaved despicably in two ways: defending those two freedoms, and any others, is far too political a thing for any mere Justice to do. And he did it in front of that dastardly bastion of individual liberty, the Federalist Society.

Then the editors deprecated their otherwise excellent piece with this, near the end of their editorial:

The American judiciary, in its best tradition, balances majoritarian demands with the constitutional rights of weaker and less politically powerful groups, whether they are socialist or conservative.

This is a very large misunderstanding. The American judiciary, in its best tradition—if only rarely honored—doesn’t balance anything. It acts on the text of the Constitution and the statute(s) before it in a case.

Any balancing is a political action legitimately carried out only by the political branches of our American government, the members of which are elected—and replaced—by our nation’s sovereign political aggregation, We the People.

Misunderstanding the Court’s Role

Posted on by
Reply

Here, the misunderstanding is of the role our court system, including our Supreme Court, plays in our elections.

Recall that President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyers have filed a number of lawsuits challenging various States’ vote counting procedures. In particular, the lawyers have filed, in Federal court, alleging that

some of the state’s [Pennsylvania’s] actions, and particularly the exclusion of Republican poll-watchers during the counting of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, violated federal constitutional requirements.

The complaint can be read here. (Aside: this is a separate complaint from one also filed that Pennsylvania’s Executive Branch officials altered the State’s vote handling procedures in violation of our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, and, from that, in violation of established Pennsylvania election law (including an explicit decision last summer by Pennsylvania’s legislature to make no changes to the State’s election law).)

American Thinker‘s James DeLong, at the link, provided a sound analysis of the legal strategy underlying the lawyers’ move. But DeLong went off the rails at the end of his piece.

Everyone in the legal world assumes that the justices, bruised by the excoriation the Court has received over Bush v Gore (even though the result was right), would never put itself in the position of reversing the apparent results of a presidential election.  This assumption is the reason for the Democrats’ efforts to create an irresistible bandwagon effect, but the president’s lawyers may have out-maneuvered them.  The justices may have no choice except to decide the election, one way or the other, and to be put to the choice of reversing the media-claimed results or ratifying massive fraud.

No, the Bush Court most assuredly did not revers[e] the apparent results of the Bush-Gore election contest. That Court merely upheld the choice of the citizens of Florida, which citizens decided for themselves and joined with the decision of the aggregated citizens of the nation, who our President would be.

Similarly, our courts, including most likely our Supreme Court, will not be deciding the current election with their rulings on the Pennsylvania case or any other cases that come before them.

On the contrary, our courts—including our Supreme Court—will only be upholding and enforcing the decision of us American citizens.

An Electoral College Thought

Posted on by
Reply

Spitballing here.

The Left worries that the Electoral College abolished, because its use renders the popular vote for President/Vice President irrelevant. The Right argues that that preserves representation of the States qua States in the election of our President and Vice President. That was the intent of our Founders when they wrote our Constitution, and the intent of We the People when we ratified it.

Under our current Electoral College setup, each State gets a number of President/Vice President electors equal to the sum of the number of Representatives it’s allowed in the House and the two Senate seats it has in the Senate.

Here’s a thought that emphasizes both the popular vote and the States’ equal representation in the selection of President/Vice President.

Do away with the Electoral College as it stands, and replace it with a one State, one President/Vice President vote, and that vote is determined by that State’s popular vote. If a State’s popular vote favors one candidate, that State’s Electoral vote goes to that Presidential/Vice Presidential candidate.

That provides truly equal State representation in the election—just as each State has, by design, equal representation in the Federal Senate—while that representation is determined by that State’s popular vote.

Of course this would require a Constitutional amendment.

Labor Rights

Posted on by
Reply

Whose rights are they, anyway?

Last Thursday, a California First Appellate District court upheld a State district court’s order that Uber and Lyft must reclassify their gig drivers as actual employees and so must add to their labor costs with benefits, paid leave of various sorts, payroll taxes, and so on. Never mind that this will reduce gig-oriented companies’ ability to recover from the State’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns and cost thousands of Californians access to additional income.

The time is fast approaching when it’ll be most useful for Uber, Lyft, and other gig-oriented businesses to leave California altogether.

It gets worse. As Uber noted in part,

…rideshare drivers will be prevented from continuing to work as independent contractors….

Indeed. The California court’s order (and AB5, the State statute that originally levied the classification requirement) go far beyond restricting gig-oriented businesses.

They’re attacks on gig workers themselves by denying them control over their own labor and the price and other parameters under which they’re willing to market their labor. The ruling and the statute convert those who wish to work in California into labor wards of the State’s government.

Almost like they’re State plantation laborers. But it’s all good, though; it’s for the workers’ own good.

The court’s opinion can be read here.