Tag Archives: political parties

The Quiet Part…

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…out loud, to coin a hackneyed, but cogent, phrase.

On the matter of Federal government industrial farm policy, the Biden administration has made itself crystalline. This is the backdrop:

In January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, followed by other trade pacts, which significantly increased commercial opportunities for American farmers. Those arrangements have borne great fruit: US agriculture exports stood at $196 billion in 2022, up from $62.8 billion in 1997.

President Joe Biden’s (D) National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, doesn’t like that, but in a recent speech, Sullivan went even more broad than just NAFTA, to openly disparage the general policy environment surrounding the development of that treaty. Sullivan lamented that this era of policy was one that

championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.

Because leaving more money in the hands of us ordinary citizens by taking less of it as taxes, by reducing our cost of doing business by getting regulations out of our way, is inherently bad, says this maven of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even more: public action must take precedence over private action—because, apparently, Government Knows Better than us ignorant ordinary citizens. And trade liberalization, which further reduces our costs, is a bad end in itself.

This demand that Government must control what our private enterprises produce is a well-understood and textbook…ideology…regarding the importance of government control over our lives. And it’s a central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party platform.

Misplaced Push

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Too many Republican Senators are joining their Senate Progressive-Democrat colleagues in pushing Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) to drop his blocking of President Joe Biden’s (D) military appointments and flag officer promotions.

Tuberville is holding up—not blocking—final confirmation votes on those appointments and promotion lists over SecDef’s insistence on using taxpayer funds to pay for abortion and abortion-related services used by military members and/or families.

Tuberville isn’t holding up anything; he’s merely blocking blanket moves to use unanimous consent for approval. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) readily enough could bring each of those appointments and promotion lists to the Senate floor for votes, but they refuse. Apparently, they want, instead, the spectacle of the holdup.

That’s a minor point, though. The larger point is SecDef Lloyd Austin’s stubbornness in demanding that those tax dollars be used for abortion services, Hyde Amendment be damned, on the legal front, and he just doesn’t care about those babies’ lives on the moral front.

If Austin wants his promotion lists, and if Biden wants his appointments, all they need do is remove their demand to spend our money on abortion services and on abortion.

It’s that straightforward.

A Rich Property Transfer Tax

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Chicago, already a heavily taxed city, is looking at increasing the tax it claims on the sale of properties valued at more than $1 million. It’s no tweak, either: the increase would be from the current 0.75% to 2.65%. Even so, it’s projected (more like hoped IMNSHO) to raise $163 million per year. The money ostensibly is to be explicitly earmarked for construction of (and, presumably, conversion of existing structures for) permanent supportive housing units for the homeless.

I have questions.

Chicago—Cook County—is losing population at a high rate.

Cook County lost more population than almost any other county in the nation, with the exception of Los Angeles County, from July 2021 to July 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released March 30.
The leading cause of the drop was 94,344 residents who moved out of Cook County during the year, completely driving the county’s population to shrink by 68,314 residents.

With the city undergoing such high net outmigration for greener [sic] regions, who’s going to be buying those rich properties? Not folks in the surrounding counties; those regions are losing population, also, and not into Chicago. No one in his right mind is moving into Cook and surrounding counties. Sales are going to fall off year by year, and the sales that do occur are going to be at increasingly lower prices, reducing the number of million-dollar properties that exist, much less that are up for resale.

I have a downstream question, too. What properties does the city plan to seize for the construction/conversion? What does the city plan to do with the residents who will be displaced by this construction/conversion?

Impeaching Joe Biden

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I’ll leave aside, for this post, concerns about the degree of wisdom of impeaching President Joe Biden (D) when there is no hope of the Senate seriously considering the matter during the ensuing trial, much less getting a serious vote regarding conviction or acquittal.

The question here is whether the House can impeach Biden (or any House impeach any President) for wrongs committed before he was in office as President.

House Republicans have floated launching an impeachment inquiry against President Biden amid newly surfaced allegations that suggest his involvement in the business dealings his son, Hunter. But can congressional lawmakers initiate the use of that constitutional tool for alleged treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors that transpired before holding the office of the presidency?

Alan Dershowitz says,

The answer is clear. No one knows.

I beg to differ. Here’s what Article II, Section 4, of our Constitution says:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Nowhere in that Article, nor anywhere else, does our Constitution define high Crimes and Misdemeanors. Those are whatever the House wants them to be, and more concretely, they’re whatever the Senate agrees with the House on and votes to convict.

Additionally, that lack of specificity regarding high Crimes and Misdemeanors necessarily includes lack of specificity surrounding when the behaviors occurred. Nor are there any timing constraints in Article I, Section 2 (regarding the House’s power of impeachment), or in Article I, Section 3 (regarding the Senate’s power to try impeachment cases), regarding those behaviors.

And, in any event there is no recourse for an impeachment and conviction: that outcome is unappealable.

I claim, then, that the answer is, indeed, clear. The House can impeach a President for any reason it wishes. But in the present case, such a move would be, in the words of a Senator of some years, a dumb idea.

We the People, now knowing better, shouldn’t reelect Biden. The House should move to impeach only on the basis of Biden’s current, in-office misbehaviors, and even then it should move only when there’s a serious chance that the Senate would conduct a serious trial. Impeaching absent that Senate seriousness would, at best, be a waste of time.

Conducting the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) is considering would be a very good idea. That would get the information regarding Biden’s current misbehaviors in front of We the People in time for us to consider it as we cast our votes in 16 months, even if it would be unlikely to convince Biden’s Progressive-Democratic Party Senate syndicate to take the matter seriously.

Talk About Violating Separation of Powers

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In an effort to impose costs incurred by progressive States in their efforts to build out their “green” energy infrastructure onto conservatively governed States, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) is demonstrating his allyship.

Schumer is directing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to stick red states with the bill.
Mr Schumer last week sent a letter demanding that FERC expedite a “strong transmission planning and cost allocation rule” to deliver more “clean power to Americans.”

In particular,

Mr Schumer writes that FERC should order states that “act as free riders” to pay for transmission upgrades. He also wants FERC to clarify its “backstop authority” to issue permits when states won’t. In other words, if West Virginians don’t want to pay for connecting New Jersey offshore wind farms to the grid, FERC should mandate that they pay anyway.

Quite apart from whether Schumer’s move is a good or bad idea for our energy industry or economically—it isn’t; it’s a terrible idea—this is a cynical, and I say deliberate, disregard for our Constitution’s separated powers structure for our Federal government.

In our system of governance, legislators, whether as a group or as individual Senators (or Representatives), don’t get to dictate to Executive Branch agencies what they must or must not do. If they want to influence such an agency, or the Executive Branch as a whole, the Congress as a whole must pass a bill that does so and get the President, the head of the Executive Branch, to sign off on it. Alternatively, the Congress as a whole must believe strongly enough in its move to muster a supermajority of legislators in each House to override the President’s veto.

That Schumer chooses to ignore that aspect of our Constitution is all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt of and disregard for our Constitution.

Us ordinary Americans need to remember this in 16 months.