Tag Archives: government

Senate Workings

Posted on by
2

Senator Jim Lankford (R, OK) had some thoughts on this in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  In the main, he was pushing back against the desire of some to get rid of the filibuster, and he offered instead some other corrective actions that are worth considering.  In the main, I agree with him on the filibuster; although I believe that the Progressive-Democrats, when (not if) they next become the majority party in the Senate, will get rid of the filibuster altogether, and for the same reason they got rid of the filibuster on judge nominations other than for the Supreme Court: to stop those uppity Republicans from getting in the way.

In the main, I agree with his rules change suggestions, too, but I don’t think they go far enough.  As you readers might guess, I have a couple of ideas of my own.

  1. Get rid of the rule that limits hearings to two hours on days when the Senate has other business to conduct, also. Surely members of the greatest deliberative body can do more than one thing simultaneously.
  2. Get rid of the filibuster on matters relating to spending and taxing.

That last isn’t to keep the obstructionist Progressive-Democratic Party from getting in the way, even though the present incumbents of that Party have plainly said they won’t work with Republicans on budgeting, debt, funds allocations and spending, or on taxing unless the Republicans agree to do things the Progressive-Democrat way.  No, it’s to allow actual budgets and tax programs to be enacted and the debt actually addressed.

There’s a reason American voters chose the majority party to have that majority, and the most important task Congress has is the purse strings of the Federal government.  Everything else—everything—flows from that imperative, and if that one isn’t satisfied, nothing else that Congress does that’s more serious than naming a building after someone will matter.

It’s Murder

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what one of the signs held by a protestor says in the lead image of the Wall Street Journal piece on the soon-to-be-fatal plight of baby Charlie Gard.  The baby suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder that usually is fatal.  The baby’s doctors insisted this case can only be fatal, and a British court (and a European Union court!  Is there any stronger argument for the Brits taking themselves out of the EU?)—because in Great Britain Government gets the final word on babies, not parents—agreed and agreed with the doctors’ further demand that baby Charlie be taken off life support to die.

But.

An American doctor has treated babies with this mitochondrial disease, and he has had some success with his treatment.  He indicated he had a 10% chance of helping Charlie.

However.

Charlie Gard’s parents’ legal fight to keep him on a ventilator and take him abroad for experimental therapy, against the opinion of his doctors, ended Monday when they dropped the case, saying his muscular damage was worse than feared and the treatment wouldn’t help.

Charlie’s parents struggled for months (months!) to get their baby out of gaol so they could take him somewhere to get treatment, however long-shot.  Now the doctors claiming to treat him and the court that said “No further effort to treat is allowed” must explain the impact those months of interference and delay had on baby Charlie’s chances.

This is what Brits can look forward to, now that their government and its death panels have asserted their absolute control over the fate of British children.  The sign isn’t far wrong.

Charlie Gard and the British Government

Posted on by
Reply

Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.

Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon.  The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.

The British government has chosen to not allow any of this: the baby must die in the hospital.  The EU’s Court of Human Rights, in a breathtaking repudiation of its mission, has sided with the British government.  Understand: that the Brit government and the EU in their ruling have sided with the hospital in which Charlie is being held is neither here nor there.  Both the Brit government and the EU Court could have sided with the baby’s parents, and each chose not to.

Which, as The Wall Street Journal put it in their op-ed at the link, raises a question:

Whose baby is Charlie, anyway—his parents’ or the state’s? In this delicate case, Britain’s national care system has elevated technical expertise over parental love.

In this, the WSJ has misunderstood.  It’s the Brit government that has decided, not the bureaucrats of the NHS.  It is the government of the home of 1984 that has claimed this baby, poor Charlie Gard, as its ward.

With the British government’s ruling, it has made parents irrelevant and claimed all children to be wards of the state.  By extension, the British government has made all citizens of Great Britain, raised from early childhood as wards of the state, themselves wards of the state.

The citizens of Great Britain are not sovereign in their own nation.  Only Government is sovereign.

The Mueller Investigation

Posted on by
2

Is Robert Mueller running a legitimate investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign or officials in it and Russia?

Robert Mueller hasn’t decided whether to actually investigate Trump: Report

Special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, officials say

Mueller Seeks to Talk to Intelligence Officials, Hinting at Inquiry of Trump

Special counsel is investigating Jared Kushner’s business dealings

It isn’t possible for the Mueller investigation to be legitimate with all of these leaks about his investigation and its status and findings that he’s permitting to occur.  Or that, Comey-esque, he’s doing himself.

He’s plainly not investigating his leaks, else that would have been leaked, too.

On Whose Side Are These Guys?

Posted on by
Reply

There is a move afoot in Congress to “overhaul” Dodd-Frank, at least to the point of adjusting the threshold size that banks would need to exceed in order to become subject to strict rules on “the capital, mergers, and other business” in which Government will permit these otherwise private enterprises to engage.  Under the present threshold of $50 billion or more in assets, some 37 financial institutions are subject to such Government diktat.

The trick will be reaching a compromise on what should come next.

Republicans tend to favor either setting a threshold of between $250 billion and $500 billion, or basing the designation on a bank’s riskiness rather than on its size. That new range would leave around a dozen or as few as a half-dozen banks facing stricter regulation.

No, there must be no compromise. Strict elimination of Dodd-Frank should come next.

Worse, raising the threshold would, indeed, shrink the number of institutions subject to Government regulation. That, though, would make it easier for Government to expand to completion its control over these institutions.

That’s the stuff of corporate fascism: Government control over what a putatively private enterprise will be allowed to produce and how much of it that enterprise will be allowed.  It’s dismaying that Republicans would propose such an affront to free enterprise and limited government.