Tag Archives: political parties

Lawless Progressive-Democratic Party

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Recall that, in the vote-counting in Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick (R)-Bob Casey (D) campaign for Senate, Progressive-Democrat Diane Ellis-Marseglia, Bucks County Commissioners Chairperson and member of the county’s Board of Elections had this on the matter of counting illegally cast ballots:

I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country[.]

She then proceeded to have her BoE count those improper ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court then ruled unanimously on merit and 4-3 on procedure that those ballots could not, in fact, be counted because of their lack of proper dating. This was, in its essence, a repeat of its earlier ruling, some weeks prior, that those ballots could not be counted, and it’s that prior ruling which Ellis-Marseglia so contemptuously—and contemptibly—dismissed.

Now we have this from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Casey campaign: they’re suing

10 county Boards of Elections, demanding they count provisional ballots that were already rejected.

Because they agree with the Ellis-Marseglia Principle that court rulings be damned, they’re going to do what they want to do, regardless of law.

This is the bullet that most of us dodged a couple weeks ago and, hopefully, the good citizens of Pennsylvania will dodge this one, too.

It’s also a strong indication that we average Americans need to remain vigilant and active throughout the next several election cycles, too, so we can dodge the hail of bullets that will be coming from Party.

Labor Unions, Labor Workers, and Employers

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The lately formed Republican Party coalition, led by President-elect Donald Trump, consists of business-friendly and labor-friendly folks from opposite wings of the party.

Opposite, though, is not the same as opposing, a distinction the misconception of what’s involved masks. For instance:

People close to the transition said Trump’s potential appointments to key labor positions could include old-guard Republican functionaries, corporate executives, or individuals who are closer to the New Right and see themselves as more pro-worker.

Maybe and individuals who are pro-worker.

This makes plain the misconception:

[U]nion officials said Trump’s record is at odds with his pro-worker rhetoric. “It’s going to be a rude awakening for a lot of folks who wanted to take Trump at his word,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, which campaigned for President Biden and, subsequently, for Vice President Kamala Harris. “They talk a big game when it comes to workers, but…they’re going to attack the working class.”

Not at all. It’s entirely possible—useful, too—to be both pro-company and pro-working class while simultaneously opposing today’s unions. This is especially the case with today’s unions, where union management, far from concerning themselves with their membership—those working class folks—concern themselves more with what’s good for them personally.

That misplaced concern includes threatening employers with destruction of their businesses—striking and denying the businesses’ ability to function at all unless and until the union managers get their demands satisfied—and with ripping off workers with their efforts to force unionization in businesses where employees continually reject unions in labor votes. Union management in the past ripped off workers even more blatantly by exacting tribute union dues from workers whether they were union members or not. Court rulings have slowed that particular abuse, but they’ve not eliminated it.

What’s needed, and what becomes possible with the incoming administration, is bringing those pro-business and pro-labor folks into the same room to work out processes that benefit both, without the middle man union management in the room clouding things up and constantly trying to pit the one against the other, rather than helping them collaborate on business-labor policies.

Inflation vs Prices, but Not in Isolation

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Not in isolation from each other, but more importantly, not in isolation from other factors that also impact our economy.

The Biden-Harris administration and the associated “advisors” on staff focused on inflation during the just concluded campaign season (the article at the link mentions spending packages during the first Trump administration along with spending packages at the onset of the Biden-Harris administration as causes of that inflation), but they missed other key factors.

…roughly 40% of voters said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other. Those voters backed Trump by a 22-percentage-point margin. Inflation has declined without a recession, but many were thinking instead about how prices are still high.

This was while the Progressive-Democrats and the Left kept on about how inflation was abating (that the Biden-Harris administration’s spending had caused the sharply higher inflation is beside the point of this post), while us average Americans were concerned about prices. After all, we pay our bills based on actual, extant prices, not based on how prices change from time to time.

That’s not all, though:

White House officials interviewed for this story defended their record by pointing to how the ARP was designed at a time when it wasn’t at all clear the country was about to escape the pandemic. Virus counts and deaths were rising as Biden took office.

The data, collected in real time, made clear that while the Wuhan Virus was enormously contagious, it wasn’t very dangerous except to one relatively small slice of our (and the world’s) population: the very old and especially those with severe comorbidities. Outside of that, the mortality rate from the virus was a very small fraction of one percent; even the risk of hospitalization was not much larger than that tiny rate. The rising virus counts and deaths were solely the result of the virus’ enormous infection rate.

And yet, the Biden-Harris administration extended the virus-related declared national emergency for another two years, which facilitated the administration’s ability to control our economy wholly independently of actual economic factors.

Then,

Strong demand from Biden’s additional fiscal stimulus…ran headlong into crippled supply chains and discombobulated labor markets.

This would have been known, and was at the time, to any high school economics student. The hard drop in labor had already occurred—those shutdowns—and was already in rapid recovery at the end of the Trump administration, for all that employment still had a considerable ways to go, and the disruption to the supply chains—from the various nations’ shutdown of their borders—had already occurred and was in full disruption. It’s a basic tenet of economics, too, that when demand outstrips production supply, prices have nowhere to go but up. It was clear at the time, too, that production supply was going to be disrupted for some time as producers were not going to be able to expand production (they couldn’t even maintain their original production rates) from those labor and input supply chain dislocations.

The administration worthies and the press ignored all of this in their determination to panic-monger and deprecate everything Trumpian in that preceding administration.

There’s this laugher (otherwise it’s simply insulting to our intelligence), too:

White House and Democratic officials have argued that overall US economic outcomes were better than those achieved in nearly every other advanced economy.

Whoopty-do. None of us, average Americans and elitists alike, live in any of those “other advanced economies.” We live here, in our US economy, confronted with our US economic outcomes, and those outcomes were highly disruptive to our lives when they weren’t being outright destructive of our livelihoods.

That these folks still are making excuses rather than learning from those mistakes makes it unlikely that Party can be trusted with our economy any time soon.

Politics’ New Driving Force

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A trio of news writers in The Wall Street Journal’s news room think that [n]ew fault lines are emerging in American society based more on class than race.

Racial fault lines may be fading, but the remaining, class-based, fault lines aren’t all that new. The Progressive-Democratic Party and its forebear Democratic Party have operated on manufactured class-rifts for years:

• middle out and bottom up
• tax the millionaires and billionaires
• make the rich (and corporations) pay their fair share
• spend more on welfare
• work requirements for welfare are unfair
• flyover country
• bitter clingers to religion and guns
• educated vs uneducated [which, at least, the news writers back-handedly acknowledged]

Dividing Americans from each other is what Party does.

It’s Not So Much That

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The Wall Street Journal is puzzled by President-elect Donald Trump’s (R) move to persuade the Republican-majority Senate to go into recess so he can install his several Executive Branch nominees as recess-appointments.

…it was strange the other day when President-elect Trump issued a pre-emptive demand that his own party let him make recess appointments, “without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner.”

The editors go so far as to try to lay Trump’s move off on trying to ram through his nominee for AG, Matt Gaetz (R), the ex-Congressman from Florida. There is much about Gaetz over which to be dismayed by his nomination, but getting the Senate to blanket allow a plethora of recess appointments to mask this appointment really isn’t the reason for the recess appointment push. Or certainly not the only one.

Going through the confirmation process is interminably slow even in the best of times. It can take months to work through the list of nominees, years even, with a determined and skillful opposition. For a variety of reasons, most of them entirely sound, the Committee vetting process takes days—for each nominee—a time frame that can be dragged into weeks when the minority party wants to. It was the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators’ practice throughout Trump’s first term to hem and haw and delay and stall each of then-President Trump’s nominee confirmations.

Then, once out of committee, Senate rules mandate a minimum 30 hours per nominee of floor debate, absent unanimous consent.

Party already is gearing up to block as much of Trump’s announced agenda as it can; blocking as many of his nominees as it can will be an extension of that.

It’s not at all surprising that Trump would ask Republicans to go along this time.