Tag Archives: political parties

Making Joe Biden Testify

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It’s been suggested in the press that early on when Federal prosecutors let slip that they had enough evidence on which to base serious indictments of Hunter Biden, Biden’s lawyer Chris Clark “threatened” David Weiss, the US Attorney for Delaware with this:

President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial. This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis.

Weiss promptly folded, spent some more years pretending to work the case, and then agreed a plea deal that gave sweetheart plea deals a bad name. Only the acumen of the presiding Federal judge prevented the white wash from going through.

Weiss should have called Clark’s bluff. President Joe Biden’s (D) pretrial depositions and Biden-related discovery would have been highly illuminating. That Weiss consciously chose to back down from the threat calls into question the legitimacy of his overall investigation, and whether he really is that timid, or he’s not really on the side of serious investigative lawyering.

The bleat about Constitutional crisis from making a sitting President testify in open court about anything is idiotic, and I’ll deal with it briefly: then-President Bill Clinton tested in court—in front of a grand jury as the subject of that grand jury’s investigation. Of course, Weiss knew this, and he knew that if Clark called Joe Biden, Biden would be testifying as a witness, not as a subject.

That Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss to be a special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation charade after Weiss had so cravenly folded is a clear illustration of the Biden DoJ’s effort to white wash anything related to Little Biden and the Big Guy.

Mistake

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) is headed to the People’s Republic of China at the end of this month, ostensibly in an effort to stabilize rocky US-PRC relations.

The long-expected visit is aimed at deepening communications with Beijing, the department said.

And

Raimondo will be the latest administration official to visit China since President Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia last year.

This is a serious foreign policy mistake. The PRC is, as some pundits euphemize, an adversary. I’ll be blunt: the PRC is an enemy nation.

In addition to that, we already know where PRC President Xi Jinping stands—he wants to replace us as the world’s leader, with the outcome that he can dominate us. Xi already knows where President Joe Biden (D) and his Executive Branch cronies stand—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for instance, in her remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

When necessary, we will take narrowly targeted actions.
…
As we take these actions, let me be clear: these national security actions are not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage, or stifle China’s economic and technological modernization.

This is Yellen telling Xi that we might finger wag, but we don’t really mean it.

Biden, by his actions from as far from the PRC as Ukraine, where he’s slow walking delivery, even approval, of the weapons systems that nation needs for outright victory in the war Putin has inflicted out of fear of upsetting Putin too much, to as near to the PRC as the South China Sea, where he has meekly acquiesced to the continued occupation of other nations’ islands and waters by the PRC out of fear of upsetting Xi too much, has made clear that Yellen’s meekness is his own.

The United States doesn’t want conflict with the PRC, and we’ll go to great lengths to avoid it. This is backwards.

Xi doesn’t care one way or the other about conflict with us; he wants to be the sole hegemon in the world, and he’ll go to great lengths to achieve it.

There’s a parable that’s a propos. The mouse says to the owl that its ways are wrong. The owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

No. On the matter of improving relations (including trade, but mostly politically/diplomatically) let Xi and others of his government come to us. They know where we are, and they have our phone numbers. Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world regarding Xi’s and others of his government’s level of interest in improving relations with us.

A Thought on SALT Deductions

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New York Republican Congressman John Tamny had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal early last week in which he advocated enthusiastically for raising the ceiling on the deduction of State and Local Taxes from Federal income taxes. That deduction currently is capped at $10,000, and Tamny worries that that works a hardship on his constituents, since despite their high incomes, those folks aren’t really all that rich. New York’s high taxes and prices already work to reduce those folks’ relative wealth.

A WSJ reader responded in WSJ‘s Sunday Letters section.

The five New York Republicans in Congress take a page from the Democratic playbook to defend changing the SALT cap (Letters, Aug. 15), “especially since New York continues to be a donor state, paying more in federal taxes than it receives from Washington.”
When did that become the objective? They make it sound like the role of the federal government is to redistribute all funds in a fair and equitable manner. Sorry guys, we send our tax dollars to Washington to pay for essential services like national defense, not to have it parceled out again to the states in equal portions.

It’s true enough that Tamny and his fellow New York Republican Congressmen (all Congressmen, come to that) have to represent his—their—constituents first, and even as Federal Congressmen, our nation second. But as Federal Congressmen, they do have to represent all of us at some stage.

That tension makes the Congressional Tamnys’ collective and individual jobs hard, but if they wanted cushy jobs, they should have taken positions as mattress demonstrators.

That’s not all. Another Letter writer disagreed with Tamny in a different direction.

The New York lawmakers’ argument bears considerable similarities to Mayor Eric Adams’s demands for federal assistance to take care of the illegal immigrants his city invited. Talk about moral hazard. Both amount to pleas from politicians for federal relief from the consequences of their own state or local governments’ policies and, as such, should be summarily denied.

What the letter writers said is spot on, and their words carry national, and moral, weight.

“GOP Presidential Candidates Need to Talk About China”

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That’s the headline of Congressman Mike Gallagher’s (R, WI) op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal concerning today’s Republican Presidential Primary debate among the eight candidates who qualified for the show.

I agree, although I disagree with the depth of his emphasis on the People’s Republic of China—Vladimir Putin’s barbaric Russia is nearly as great a threat as is the PRC, much more proximately so, geographically, vis-à-vis Europe, and through them in terms of global power, to us. Notwithstanding, the PRC is a more proximate threat against us, and against our friends and allies elsewhere around the Pacific.

I do have a couple of other caveats, though, particularly in connection with what GOP Presidential Candidates need to talk about.

First, what the candidates talk about on any particular debate will be heavily driven by what the debates’ moderators ask them. In past debate fora, each debate has centered on one or two specific subjects, and this season’s sequence should be no different. I anticipate debates centered on our economy, our border, and on foreign policy. There will be other debates on other subjects, too; although when the field is winnowed to just a few candidates (less than five, perhaps), I’d like to see our economy and foreign policy revisited for more in-depth questioning and debate responses. I’m not holding my breath on the latter, though.

The other caveat is on those discussions of foreign policy. The moderators will ask their questions, but the candidates should speak with great specificity—what would each one do in concrete, measurable terms (no generalities), and why would each do those things in particular (again, no generalities)—regarding Russia and the PRC, not only the PRC. And each candidate should show the courage, and the speaking skill, to talk through the moderators’ interruptions, ignoring the moderators when they do that.

Of course, none of that prevents the candidates from talking about the PRC in any venue outside an RNC debate, also. They will, though, still be operating within the need to remain focused, and in any particular speech talk only about one or two (maybe three) major points regarding the PRC.

Republican candidates, and the Republican ultimately nominated, do to talk, firmly, about a number of other subjects, also, outside any debate venue: the state of our economy with its high and rising interest rates and still high overall inflation, the high and rising food and energy costs to American consumers, the Progressive-Democratic Party’s naked war on our hydrocarbon energy production and resulting dependence on foreign sources, our chaotic (to the extent it exists anymore at all) southern border.

When the candidates talk about “the swamp” and about runaway regulation, they need to talk in specific terms how they well eliminate specific members and agencies of the swamp and how, specifically, they’ll reduce the number of regulations—and which ones they’ll eliminate. And how hard they’ll push for legislation, rather than an Executive Order, to achieve something like an earlier EO requiring for every regulation an agency or Department proposes, it must remove and rescind two existing regulations.

Private Enterprises as Government Jobs Welfare Programs

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That’s the position of the Pennsylvania Progressive-Democratic Party’s Representative G Roni Green. She’s proposing, with an absolutely straight face, a State law that would require businesses with 500 or more employees to cut their employees’ 5-day, 40-hour work week to 4-day, 32-hour work weeks—with no change in pay. That’s a government-mandated 25% pay raise.

Jobs welfare doesn’t get much better than that.

Green’s rationalization centers on two premises. One is that society looks and operates differently than it once did in 1938 (when the government-mandated 40-hour work week was enacted). That’s true enough. Society has grown more complex, more technologically capable, and consumers’ needs (consumers being, after all, at the core of society) have grown quite a bit.

All of that, though, requires continued and increasing employee productivity to enable us Americans to continue, and continue to improve, our standard of living. That growing productivity isn’t possible with the proposed 25% reduction in hours of productivity Green is proposing.

That last brings us to Green’s second rationalization.

Technological advancement alone have [sic] significantly increased the productivity of workers allowing more work to be accomplished in less time.

That’s also true. Indeed, technological advancements have advanced to the point that entire worker jobs have been replaced. Technology does a lot of things that employees currently do at least in part. One result of Green’s move, were it to become law, likely would be a further reduction in employee hours, this time on business’ initiative: to substantially less than 32 hours, converting full-time employees to part-time, with commensurate reduction in pay and in most cases reduction or outright elimination of benefits. The eliminated hours of work would be done by robots…technology.

Green further claims (as cited by Fox Business) research [that] has shown that companies have been able to adopt a shorter workweek without compromising productivity. What isn’t looked at in such “research” is the degree to which such a shorter work week caps productivity growth so that there is no longer any improvement, merely maintenance. So much for keeping up with “society’s” increasing complexity and consumer needs.

Technological advancements—spurred by this government interference—will accelerate this trend in reducing human employment and reducing human income.