Tag Archives: political parties

It Isn’t Your Money

Posted on by
Reply

Or, gimme, gimme, gimme.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told “Fox News Sunday” that President Obama will neither sign government funding bills that slash domestic spending nor negotiate with Republicans over spending cuts to reduce the federal debt limit.

That’s not all.  He told ABC’s “This Week”

I think the president has made crystal clear, he’s not going to negotiate over the debt limit.

But he’s willing to “work with” all comers.  Sure.

This President, and his cronies in the Senate, are perfectly willing to blow up our credit rating (or what’s left of it after their last fiasco just a couple of years ago) and shut down the government if they’re blocked from taking more of your money away from you (in their demanded higher taxes) or taking more of your children’s money away from them (in their demanded continuing borrowing) and spending ever more of your money (their demanded spending increases).

All because these…politicians…think they know better than you—or your children—what that money should be spent on, and they’re convinced it’s their money and not yours in the first place.

Because Some Things Are More Important Than Others

Posted on by
2

…and just can’t wait.

Congressmen Donna Edwards (D, MD) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D, TX) propose in the “Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act” that a national historical park on the moon be created to ensure the American landing sites are preserved for future generations.

Incredibly, the bill

would allow the federal government to accept donations to help preserve the landing sites and would create visitor services and administrative offices “within reasonable proximity to the Historical Park.”

Reasonable proximity.  Yeah.

Because visitors—tourists—are beating down the doors to get there, this has to be done right away.

A Measure of Responsibility

Posted on by
Reply

The House plans to take steps to curb the power of federal agencies and impose more checks on them in response to recent scandals emanating from the Internal Revenue Service.

Here are the bills the House plans to introduce before the August recess next month—and hopefully pass and send up to the Senate for passage in September after the recess.  The several bills would

  • bar [the IRS] from implementing and enforcing Obamacare
  • make it legal for citizens to make recordings of any conversation they have with a federal enforcement official
  • necessitate[] the approval of the leadership of the agency for conferences held by government officials
  • [give] Congress…final approval of any regulations that would seriously impact the economy
  • mandate the creation of a customer service system at agencies
  • let agencies place “senior career officials on investigative leave, with or without pay, when they are under investigation for serious abuses.”

Will the Democrats in the Senate support this, or will they block the bills, favoring, instead, continued (Democrat) Executive Branch abuses?  Will the House actually pass this legislation, or is this just a Republican version of Obamatalk?

We’ll see in a bit.

Obamacare Fail. Again.

Posted on by
Reply

President Barack Obama has admitted that another critical aspect of his Obamacare is a dismal failure.  This time he’s

delaying a requirement that verifies the income levels of those seeking taxpayer subsidies until after the 2014 midterm elections.

Instead, the new insurance marketplaces operated by states and the District of Columbia will take the consumer’s word that they qualify for the subsidies[.]

And

Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, and a consumer advocate, said it’s not unprecedented for the government to use the honor system, and compared it to reporting cash tips to the Internal Revenue Service.

It’s also like the 21%-25% of Earned Income Tax Credits that go to people who aren’t eligible (according to Treasury’s Inspector General) because their eligibility is self-verified, too.

Or rather than an admission of failure, is this just another administration excuse for lax pay outs of monies that aren’t deserved, even under the law?  As the Wall Street Journal puts it,

[A]nyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects.

Of course, a third alternative also includes none of this as abject failure.  These cynical (say I) delays simply are for building the dependency of Americans on government largesse, trapping us into voting for the Progressive party.

Another Harebrained Idea

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Eric Swalwell (D, CA) and two colleagues, Steve Pearce (R, NM) and Cynthia Lummis (R, WY) actually think this is a good idea.  They want to

amend House rules so lawmakers can vote remotely through a secure communications system[.]  The resolution would allow lawmakers to vote on bills that require a two-thirds majority in the House to pass, meaning they are being considered under a suspension of regular rules and are typically noncontroversial….

Further,

Under the proposed resolution, lawmakers and witnesses would be allowed to participate in committee hearings held in Washington via secure videoconferencing technology….

No.  This defeats a major purpose and a major advantage of requiring an in-person quorum in order to conduct business and to vote on that business: getting our elected representatives in the same room together for face-to-face interaction.  No matter how good the virtual links get, they cannot be the same as being there in person, seeing, hearing, and interacting with everyone and everything on the floor and not just with the parts conveniently within camera or microphone range.

Also, it overstates the noncontroversial nature of votes requiring a two-thirds majority: little things like a veto override, or an impeachment vote.

It also overstates the noncontroversial nature of bills needing a suspension of regular order to pass, including a vote on the suspension of the rules.  As recently as the 108th Congress (the 2003-2004 session), for instance, the House considered some 920 bills under suspension, and only about 620 achieved final passage.  That seems a shade controversial to me, especially those 300 that failed.

Leave things alone, guys.  It won’t hurt you to show up in your place of work and do a little work there.