Tag Archives: political parties

True Colors

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The Progressive-Democrats, especially those in the Senate, have shown their true colors as they voted last Friday to shut down the Federal government, voting to block a temporary funding agreement that would have kept the government open for another month.  I wrote earlier about that shutdown’s practical effects.

Here’s what the Progressive-Democrats voted to kill: six years of funding for CHIP, so now some millions of children in our poverty-level families will have no access to health insurance.  DACA reform so that those illegal immigrant children could have some hope for their future.

CHIP funding was in the stop-gap bill, but now there’s no funding for it, and the program has expired.

DACA reform was not in the bill, having nothing to do with funding, but the Progressive-Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) demanded it be included or there would be no votes from his Party (in the event, five Progressive-Democrats from Republican States whose seats are in jeopardy in this fall’s elections, knowing their Party would kill the funding, cynically cast their meaningless votes for the bill).  It didn’t matter to these worthies that DACA had until early March to be negotiated or that there already exists bipartisan agreement on the outline and substance of a DACA proposal that could have been debated and voted up by the end of January in a separate bill.  Schumer and his Party cronies demanded their DACA right damn now.  Their attitude has badly poisoned any future DACA negotiations, perhaps fatally.

It gets worse.  There was nothing in the bill to which Progressive-Democrats actually objected.  It funded the government for a time, which the Prog-Dems claim they want.  It funded CHIP, which the Prog-Dems claim they want.  It funded defense, which even Prog-Dems claim they want.  The clean funding bill just didn’t have all the other, unrelated, things the Prog-Dems also demanded.

When Schumer went to the White House late Friday before the vote to deal personally with President Trump, he went with a Christmas tree of Progressive-Democrat demands beyond just DACA for inclusion in the stop-gap bill, including for instance, bailing out public union pension funds, added spending on opoid programs, and on and on.  That Christmas tree is what Schumer was talking about when he said after the meeting that progress had been made, but “we still have a good number of disagreements.”  All of these extras also could have been negotiated and voted on in the ensuing period.

Not good enough.  The Progressive-Democrats voted to shut down the government because the stop-gap didn’t have DACA and Schumer’s Christmas tree.  Party ego before national weal.

Remember this next fall.

Update: The Senate, on another cloture vote later this morning, voted 81-18 to end the filibuster and bring the bill to the floor for an up or down vote. The bill is changed trivially–the funding period is good for three weeks instead of four–but otherwise, it’s the same bill.  Because of that period change, though, it has to go back to the House, where I expect it’ll be voted up forthwith and sent to the President for prompt signing.

In return, Senate Republicans promised negotiations on DACA and on immigration and a vote on DACA. The DACA debate has been going on, all along, as noted above.

Businesses Behind the Tree

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California wants the Federal tax reform-saved money for itself, and they want a State Constitutional amendment to make the seizure permanent.

A proposed Assembly Constitutional Amendment by Assemblymen Kevin McCarty (D) and Phil Ting (D) would create a tax surcharge on California companies making more than $1 million….

The Progressive-Democrats claim the money would go to “programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families,” but that’s just tear-jerking.  The State’s government would divert the monies to favored programs at convenience.  That’s minor, though.

The point of the proposal is to take the money from business—the surcharge is a tax of fully 50% of business’ Federal tax cut—because Government Knows Better, and business doesn’t deserve it, anyway.  Nor did they earn it.  Government did that.

Don’t tax you, don’t tax me.  Tax that business behind the tree.  That’s not quite what Russell Long (D, LA) said all those years ago, but California’s new tax proposal is close in spirit.  What the Progressive-Democrats in California’s legislature and governor’s mansion are missing, though, is another sentiment of Long’s regarding tax breaks for businesses:

I have become convinced you’re going to have to have capital if you’re going to have capitalism.

This is an understanding completely absent in the Progressive-Democratic Party.

A Government Shutdown

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Louise Radnofsky had a piece early Friday morning—before the Senate vote on a bill that would keep the Federal government running for another month—outlining the costs of a shutdown, based on the Progressive-Democrats’ 2013 shutdown.  Over those roughly two weeks of relative inactivity, the costs were quite trivial.

Those trivial costs are part of why the Progressive-Democrats are so anxious to have the shutdown this time around, too—they know there’ll be small practical impact while having large publicity impact.

Frankly, I hope Trump stands firm, and with the government shut down that it stays shut down for far more than a couple of weeks—let everyone see how little Big Government is needed and how well a skeleton government (at least compared to the present morbidly obese government) functions.  After all, to take one example from that 2013 shutdown, then-EPA Secretary Gina McCarthy admitted that more than 90% of her EPA personnel were non-essential, and she furloughed them for the duration.  Now, 90% probably overstates the long-term case (assuming we actually need an EPA, but that’s a separate discussion), but the EPA’s current budget request, which reflects a 47% reduction in EPA employees, is a good place to start.

The Party Wants No Deal

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The Progressive-Democrats in Congress don’t want a deal, neither on the budget nor on DACA.  They want the Federal government shut down so they can blame the Republicans for it during this fall’s elections.  They also want to keep the DACA situation and immigration in general alive as a debating question for those same elections.

Democrats said Mr Trump’s dismissal of “shithole countries” in Africa in a closed meeting last week with lawmakers positioned him as the person who upset the negotiations.

Notice that.  The Progressive-Democrats are doing two things here: masquerading a claim of certain words being spoken as a fact that those words were spoken, and then using those words as an excuse to refuse to deal on DACA rather than actually dealing on DACA.

That the Progressive-Democrats do not want a DACA deal at all is illustrated by a third thing to notice, a matter that’s being carefully ignored by both those Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM.  Such words spoken publicly would be damaging to our national reputation; on that we’re all agreed.  What’s ignored is that, having been said in that closed meeting (if they were said), no one outside the meeting would know about them and no damage would be done—but for a meeting participant (Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) comes to mind) running screaming to the press as soon as the meeting broke up to bruit about those words.  This is a deliberate move to blow up any DACA negotiations.

Nor is a DACA agreement needed in the current budget debate.  President Donald Trump’s rescission of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) DHS memorandum gave Congress, where such a matter belongs, until next March to enact a DACA program legislatively, or explicitly decline to do so, before Trump’s rescission takes effect.  The lack of urgency is further well-known to the Progressive-Democrats: a Federal judge has blocked Trump’s order.  Demanding a DACA deal in the current budget debate is simply a mechanism to block a budget deal.

Too, the Progressive-Democratic Party must come before children.  That Party is more important than children is demonstrated by two outcomes of the Progressive-Democrats’ obstructionism.  The DACA children will get nothing from any government shutdown.  The Progressive-Democrats’ rejection of a budget deal also will reject the CHIP program, whose funding is renewed for six years, in the deal on offer.  Millions of children will be denied access to health insurance.

Remember that in the coming elections.

Poverty and Concern for the Rich

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Recall the Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled legislature with their Progressive-Democrat governor who run things in California.  In response to the just-passed tax reform bill’s capping of state and local tax deductions on the Federal income tax form at $10,000, these worthies have introduced a bill that would create a State-run “charity” foundation into which California citizens could make “donations” and receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit that they could then apply to their SALT requirements that exceed those $10,000.

Never mind that, as The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board pointed out last Friday,

According to IRS data, California’s 71,000 taxpayers with million-dollar incomes deducted on average $462,500 in 2015 compared to $6,940 for individuals making between $50,000 and $100,000. Few California middle-class taxpayers will be harmed by the $10,000 deduction cap since the standard deduction has doubled to $12,000.

Kevin De León, President Pro Tempore of the California State Senate, and the Progressive-Democrat who introduced the bill, knows this full well.  These worthies are interested in protecting their rich buddies and donors.

Couple this with what the Los Angeles Times published last Sunday.  Twenty per cent of California residents are poor according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which considers the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing.  The Measure, importantly, also includes noncash government assistance in its income measure.  This 20% poverty rate is the highest rate in our nation.  It gets worse:

California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as though welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place.

But think about that in conjunction with the California progressive elite’s protection of their rich buds.  It’s not “as though welfare reform passed California by,” it has been by design that those elites created that dependency trap.  That’s how they get the votes—the poor have far more votes than their wealthy friends—and with those votes the elites can stay in power, exchanging favors and money with their wealthy associates.

Of course, the LAT laid most of this travesty for the poor part of the balance off on an exploding social-services community with its 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees (as of 2014).  But who hires and provides the payroll and other budgets for these folks?  Yewbetcha.