Tag Archives: political parties

Disingenuosity in Wisconsin’s Legislature

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A bill that would prevent election workers from correcting mistakes a voter makes on his absentee ballot is making its way through the State’s legislature. The bill would

would clarify that only voters or their witnesses can correct a mistake on an absentee ballot.

After all, as Congresswoman Donna Rozar (R-Marshfield) put it:

Because [absentee voting] is a privilege, there’s got to be some responsibility that the voter has to exercise that privilege. And I think that responsibility is to do it right and legally.

The disingenuosity is illustrated by Congresswoman Lisa Subek (D-Madison):

I don’t care if absentee voting is a privilege. That doesn’t mean you should have to pass a test, or make sure that you dot every I and cross every T. If someone makes an innocent, honest mistake, it is appalling that we’re not going to then let their ballot count.

Subek cynically exaggerates what the bill does. There’s no test (other than the implied one of being able to read well enough to read the ballot—but witnesses and others approved by the voter can help with that—and every uncrossed i or undotted t do not disqualify the ballot.

The biggest bit of dishonesty (here, not mere disingenuousness) is her claim of not letting the ballot count. The bill explicitly allows the voter in question, or his witness, to correct the error, thereby making the ballot count.

It’s only invalid ballots that wouldn’t count, especially were the bill to pass.

Bipartisanship and Hypocrisy

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As I write on Wednesday, President Joe Biden (D) is negotiating with Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R, WV) and some of her Republican Senate colleagues on an infrastructure bill. Or so he says.

The Republicans already have nearly doubled their surrendercounter-offer from their original $500+ billion dollar for a bill limited to actual infrastructure to more than $900 billion for a gussied up bill that is less than strictly about infrastructure. That’s some negotiation Capito and hers are doing.

The yet more serious problem, though—if that’s possible—is the behavior of Biden and his Congressional Progressive-Democrats.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA):

So why are we negotiating with Republicans for a smaller infrastructure plan? Now is the time to GO BIG.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY):

The Republican party has already shown a pattern of the fact that their vote can’t even be counted on[.]

Because too many Republicans won’t vote the way their Betters tell them to.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Reconciliation is certainly a serious consideration to get that big, bold action if we can’t get it with Republicans[.]

If Republicans won’t be bipartisan the way Progressive-Democrats demand, they need to be bypassed and ignored.

There’s also the question of who’s actually in charge in the White House. Senator Roger Wicker (R, MS):

If the president gets to make the decision, he will accept this [surrender offer of the $900+ billion proposal.]

Because when Republicans go talk to Biden’s subordinates,

they’ve been frustrated by subsequent talks with his aides and other White House staffers, who they say appear to be less interested in making a deal than the president….

Of course, Biden is the one in charge; his subordinates are simply doing out of the public’s eye what he’s instructed them to do, out of the public’s eye.

“The White House,” last Tuesday:

The president is looking forward to hosting Senator Capito on Wednesday afternoon at the White House, where they will continue their bipartisan negotiations about investing in our middle class and economic growth through infrastructure.

Well of course he is. He’s enjoying his pro forma meetings.

Biden’s pseudo-negotiating is a sham, purely for eyewash and to accrue talking points for next year’s election campaigns.

College Entrance Discrimination

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A letter writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of racial discrimination, at least as practiced by Harvard, in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case.

If the plaintiffs…win, you can bet that elite college- and graduate-admissions offices around the country will establish workarounds to assure that opportunities remain for admittance of significant numbers of underrepresented minorities.

Therefore, he asserts,

The justices would be wise to take a pass on the Harvard case, or to affirm the lower courts’ decisions.

Which decisions upheld Harvard’s practice of racial discrimination for admission to its ivy-coated halls.

Harvard, to the letter writer’s first plaint, already uses “workarounds”—opaque and obscure criteria for assessing admissions “essays” and “descriptions of what this means to me” for starters—in selecting entrants on the basis of race while nonselecting other entrants on the basis of race.

Were the letter writer serious, he’d stop demanding free passes for the “underrepresented minorities” solely on the basis of their under-representation; that’s just racism under another guise. They’re underrepresented because they’re not qualified.

The solution is not free passes at the late date of college admissions applications, it’s getting these high school “graduates” actually educated and qualified.

More importantly, the solution is working to correct the K-12 systems and broken families that are the cause of unqualified-ness. But that takes actual work, and it’ll be a generational struggle to correct the ills so deeply embedded in what we’re pleased to call our education system. That solution is not the feel-good quick fix of which the Left is so enamored.

Another letter writer, however, takes a markedly differ view of the matter.

It [The Supreme Court] ought to take this case and apply strict scrutiny to the rationales advanced to justify treating some students more favorably than others merely on account of their ancestry.

But that doesn’t go far enough. As Chief Justice John Roberts already has said, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. On this, he’s right.

There is no justification for discriminating on “account of ancestry.” No more strict scrutiny; end the use of race as a discriminant, no matter how far down the list of selection criteria. Any—any—use of race as a selection criterion is rank racism.

Full stop.

Arrogance and Cowardice

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrat State congressmen have joined Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen and Indiana’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen in their abject cowardice, masked by their o’erweening arrogance.

In order to block legislation of which they personally disapprove, they’ve run away from the State’s House of Representatives explicitly to deny a quorum and to block a bill that would expand access to the ballot box while also expanding the sanctity of each Texas citizen’s vote.

Texas Democrats walked out of the state House’s chamber just before midnight on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a final vote on a controversial bill that would tighten voting laws in the state.

This has been all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party over the last several years. If they can’t get their way, they block democracy—especially our republican form of democracy—altogether with their cowardly and toddler-esque temper tantrums.

Or they rule with their pen and phone. Or, when they’re in complete control, they simply ignore all others and act unilaterally. Or as President Joe Biden (D) has said, repeatedly, regarding the spendiferous and tax exploding bills Party currently is ramming through, he’d like to have Republican bipartisanship, but if they won’t come along, he and Party will act alone.

This instruction from the State’s House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D, 101st District (centered in Tarrant County) says it all.

Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly. Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.

Do not go to the gallery. Slink away through the back door and alley. Do not face Texas’ citizens.

Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t the first time that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have run away from their duties.

An Oxymoron Constitutional Amendment

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That’s what the Illinois State legislature wants to inflict on the State’s citizens. That body has passed a State Constitution amendment proposal, at union behest, that would

guarantee a ““fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively,” including for better wages, hours, working conditions….

Never mind that that right already exists in our nation’s Constitution via the 1st Amendment’s Freedom of Assembly clause and the Supreme Court’s NAACP v Alabama ruling, which extended “speech” to include association and extended both to the State level.

That’s not the end of it, though. The legislature’s proposed amendment also says that

no law would be allowed to block labor agreements from “requiring membership in an organization as a condition of employment.”

That is a blatant violation of citizens’, and of a citizen’s, freedom of association—and of their speech rights by requiring them to associate with others in order to speak of certain things.

The thing will go to the citizens of Illinois in 2022, and it’s one more illustration of Illinois’ governmental dysfunction.