Tag Archives: political parties

Dangerously Naïve Assumption

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Matthew Continetti, in his Free Expression piece, had this early on:

Yet Democrats are looking at the wrong maps. They’re winning the gerrymander battle while losing the larger war for America’s future. Their state machines produce Democratic victories, but from a shrinking base. Their populations are fleeing high taxes and housing shortages for Republican strongholds. Nor are Democrats prepared for 2030, when the decennial census will realign national politics toward the GOP-friendly South.

As Continetti noted,

House Minority Leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) threatened retaliation and summed up his party’s philosophy: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But he missed the implications of that, and that miss falsifies his underlying assumption that the Census Bureau count and subsequent House Representatives reallocation will occur in the normal fashion. That’s a dangerous miss, but he’s not alone in making that naïve assumption. No one in the press is thinking about the effect on the Census Bureau of Progressive-Democratic Party victories in the next two elections.

When the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House and possibly the Senate after the 2026 elections, retain House control and retain or gain the majority in the Senate while winning the White House in the 2028 elections, this is what Party will do. First, it will use its Senate majority, possibly as early as January 2027, to gain outright control of the Senate by eliminating the filibuster altogether. That’ll be bad enough, devolving us from the liberty-preserving republican democracy of our present government structure to the tyranny of popular democracy.

Next, they’ll rescind any requirement for voters to show ID in order to vote, and they’ll lift restrictions on who is allowed to cross our border and under what conditions. To prevent States like Texas from doing their own border enforcement, they’ll pack the Supreme Court in order to get the judicial rulings they want regarding immigration and voting rights.

Finally, they’ll use all of that to cement for generations Party control over the popular democracy they will have created: they’ll alter the rules of counting the Census Bureau is required to use to prevent just that Representative reallocation in order create and preserve their Electoral College advantage.

There’s one more step that will put a big, blue bow on it. Many of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States are making agreements among themselves to have each State award its Electoral College votes to the Presidential candidate that wins the national-level popular vote. Interstate agreements or compacts are illegal without explicit Congressional approval of each agreement or compact attempted, per our Constitution’s Art I, Sect 10, Clause 3. The Party-run Congress will promptly approve those agreements.

Our nation faces nation-defining elections in 2026 and 2028. The futures of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren depend on the outcomes of those elections.

What are they Going to Do about It?

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The Wall Street Journal opened its house editorial with this:

The gerrymander race to the bottom escalated on Tuesday as Democrats in Virginia won a narrow victory to redraw their state map to add as many as four Democratic House seats. This is bad news for GOP control of the House in November, but Republicans can also blame President Trump for starting this rolling rock that has now come down on their heads.

Say that’s true—and it likely is. It’s also true, though, that Texas was pressured by the courts to redraw its Congressional district maps because, those courts had decided, the then-just-drawn map was overly racially gerrymandered. However, the State’s Republican-led legislature didn’t need to redraw its map the way it did, if the goal was only to correct a court-claimed racial mistake.

At bottom, though, the question is, So what? This is where the Republicans are, regardless of how they got here.

What are they going to do about it? Wasting time, energy, and resources pointing fingers is time, energy, and resources they should be putting into unifying their party and dealing constructively with the situation—national as well as local—as it is. That begins with individual candidates getting out among their constituents, Left, Right, and Center, and talking directly to them about the candidates’ concrete policies and how those are better than the Progressive-Democrats’ and how each Republican candidate’s policies will directly benefit each set of constituents.

We Win the Elections

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Bruce Gilley, Portland State University Professor of Political Science and New College of Florida Presidential Scholar in Residence, asked an important question in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

What Do Democrats Mean by “Democracy?”

Then he answered his question:

What Democrats and leftist activists mean by a “transition to democracy” is a transition to permanent Democratic Party rule.

He’s right, except for one misconception: the Democratic Party no longer exists; it has been replaced by the Progressive-Democratic Party, whose adherents subscribe lock, stock, and barrel to the basic tenets of the founders of the modern Progressive movement. Those tenets are, first, the nationalization of our economy, from Teddy Roosevelt’s effort to nationalize one-sixth of our then national economy, our railroads, through Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to seize all of our factories east of the Mississippi to force them to produce what he wanted produced in the amounts and at the prices he wanted, to Harry Truman’s attempt to seize our iron industry because he didn’t like the way a strike was going, to Barack Obama’s successful nationalization of one-sixth of today’s economy, our health care provision and health care coverage industries.

The second Progressive tenet is the utter racism of the movement, from Wilson’s rank consideration of blacks to be intrinsically inferior and thus needing the “protections” of segregation, Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to integrate our military, through to today’s Party and Leftist supporters demand for special treatment of blacks and women, ostensibly to make up for past wrongs inflicted on them, but really an acting out of Party’s and Leftists’ belief that blacks and women are intrinsically incapable of competing in our economy without special treatment, and through also, to Party’s and Leftists’ identity politics which is overtly racist and sexist.

The third tenet is Party’s utter contempt for us average Americans, from Herb Croly’s bland statement that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat, to Progressive-Democrat politicians dismissing the Tea Party movement as Astroturfers and as just bitter Bible-toting and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country to be disregarded, to a Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate dismissing millions of us as irredeemable and deplorable, to a Progressive-Democratic Party President averring that 15% of us are just no good.

Thus: what the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians mean by democracy is, indeed, straightforward: “We win elections and run the country our way.” This is empirically demonstrated over the last few years by Party routinely shutting down our government every time its politicians can’t get their way through elections or otherwise politically while being the minority party in the Senate.

Party politicians’ promise—not threat—to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster ranks right up there as concrete demonstration of their definition. They know full well, that eliminating the filibuster will destroy the republican democracy structure of our government and replace it with the tyranny of popular democracy, with them in charge. That destruction is not a bug in their ideology; it’s the end game.

One More Step

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Thomas Savidge, of the American Institute for Economic Research, in his letter in Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, wrote about Washington State’s addiction to spending and its use of increasing taxes—even when they’re unconstitutional under the State’s own constitution—to feed the addiction. He offered a solution to the addiction from Washington’s own history:

Governor Gary Locke (D) in 2002 introduced the “Priorities of Government” strategy of ranking programs based on public value and essential government functions. This approach closed a $2.1 billion budget gap, just under $4 billion in current dollars, without raising taxes.

That, however, was an incomplete solution, for all that it “closed” that budget gap one time while pairing tax increases only with the lowest priority spending.

The complete solution, short of a State constitutional amendment to make more permanent the process, would have been to identify the revenue known to appear for the relevant fiscal year, then to run down the list of priorities, funding each one in turn until the expected revenues have been consumed, and then cut off further spending rather than raise taxes to cover the remainder.

But spending discipline is inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats, as it is today to too many Timid Republicans in DC.

Tax Flight and Iron Curtains

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Progressive-Democratic Party-run jurisdictions keep raising taxes, and those being taxed keep taking their incomes and assets and leaving those jurisdictions. Indeed, [S]tates with the highest taxes continue to lose the most income to States with far less onerous taxing regimes (including no income tax at all) as this graph, based on IRS data, illustrates.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren and a couple of her syndicate confreres are proposing an IRS/Party iron curtain against the Evil Rich leaving our nation altogether: a 40% tax on all assets, not just income or savings or investment accounts, as the price of leaving.

The bill, called the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2026, would impose an annual 2% tax on the net worth of households and trusts over $50 million, and an additional 1% tax on the wealth of billionaires. To deter the ultra-rich from leaving the US to avoid the new tax, the bill also proposes a 40% “exit tax” on anyone worth more than $50 million who renounces their American citizenship.

California already has an exit tax of sorts, a mix of…aggressive residency and sourcing rules (which can keep you on the hook for California tax if you still have strong ties or California-source income).

The government men of the late Russian SSR were financial pikers in comparison.

This is Party’s platform: raise taxes, and you will like it, or else. And don’t dare try to leave; you won’t like that.