Tag Archives: politics

A Solution

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Last year, a People’s Republic of China-owned and -operated mine in Zambia had a catastrophic failure of a mine tailings wall, creating an environmental disaster for Zambian citizens.

[A] tailings dam owned by Sino-Metals collapsed and unleashed toxic sludge into the Kafue River, farmlands along the river valley are scorched, hundreds of people lack a source of clean drinking water and residents continue to live on land contaminated with heavy metals.

The Zambian government meekly aided the PRC and its mine operators in covering up this disaster, trying to hide it from the public. To hell with its own citizens who still are paying with their health and their lives for the failure, now of their own government in addition to that of the PRC and its mine operators.

According to a US House Select Committee on China,

The Zambian government, which owes $6.6 billion to the Chinese government and Chinese lenders, has held back from pressing Sino-Metals over the disaster, fearing retaliation from China….

Retaliation. Here’s an alternate solution: cancel the contract with Sino-Metals and all other PRC “investments” and “loans” in Zambia, declare the $6.6 billion debt reclassified as the PRC’s and Sino-Metals’ debt to Zambia for the cleanup, and dare the PRC to retaliate in any material way.

No actual dollars would flow from this, but two salutary things would result: Zambia would be freed from a debt it never should have taken on in the first place—PRC terms are notoriously usurious and are designed for to force default and confiscation of the collateral (here, the mine itself) put up for the loan. Zambia also would be out from under the PRC’s thumb and free(r) to trade its wealth of natural resources to more honorable nations under more equitable terms.

Primary Elections and Redistricting

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With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Louisiana v Callais et al. many more States are looking hard at redoing their district maps, ostensibly to eliminate Voting Rights Act-centered racial gerrymandering, and to enhance (Republican) partisan gerrymandering.

For good or ill (ill, I say), the current potential move very strongly emphasizes partisan gerrymandering. In the way, though, is the fact that many of the States looking here have already begun mail-in balloting for their primaries, or have completed their primary elections.

That’s an impediment, but I don’t see it as an impassable barrier. Primary elections are not final elections; those don’t occur until well after the political parties have made their nominations. Following those party decisions, the nominees will have months during which to campaign before the actual elections occur.

The dispositive factor, it seems to me, is that primary elections are strictly party-run elections; they are not bound by the laws for district/State/nation-wide elections. These party-run elections are conducted under party rules, albeit within overarching, generalized State criteria. Indeed, most jurisdictions limit primary election voting to members of the particular party fielding its own prospective candidate list. The general voting public isn’t involved in most of these jurisdictions.

That suggests to me that it’s a straightforward matter to cancel primaries in progress (as Louisiana is doing with its upcoming primary season), declare null completed primaries, and (re)hold them after a State’s redistricting effort is complete or has legislatively failed.

The Only Even Remotely Legitimate Move Re TPS

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The Supreme Court heard last Wednesday in an expedited manner (“certiorari before judgment” for the judicial nerds among us) oral argument in a case centered on whether a President’s Executive Branch agency can withdraw, on its own recognizance, Temporary Protected Status from immigration populations who remain here under that status. Several District and Appellate courts have said no, not without (judge-determined) sufficient interagency review of the matter.

The governing statute is quite clear: granting, withdrawing, extending, or not extending temporary protected status for folks from particular nations is not a justiciable matter; courts have no standing to adjudicate these decisions.

The only legitimate recourse those demanding TPS be extended/maintained for Haitians (for instance) is to argue that that governing statute limit is unconstitutional and should be struck. Even this, though, is itself doomed to failure. Here’s Art III, Sect 2, Clause 1 on judicial jurisdictions:

The [Supreme Court] judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity…to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party….

DHS, which is the agency with TPS responsibility within the United States, most assuredly is “the United States” in this context.

Here’s Art III, Sect 2, Clause 2 on judicial jurisdictions:

…the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Under the Immigration Act of 1990 as amended, which created the Temporary Protected Status facility, there “is no judicial review of any determination” of the DHS secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.”  That’s a pretty clear act of setting such Regulations—limiting the courts’ jurisdiction—here withdrawing TPS actions from judicial scrutiny.

And Art III, Sect 1:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Federal District and Appellate courts, being inferior to the Supreme Court are bound by those same jurisdictional limits.

For good or ill, US courts have nothing to say regarding any aspect of Temporary Protected Status settings.

The Act, as amended, can be read here. The Act withdrew references to court jurisdiction and placed that jurisdiction within the State or INS district, or in the main, within the DHS.

Don’t Forget the Plutonium

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President Donald Trump (R) wants to eliminate Iran’s ability to generate enough fissionable uranium to make nuclear bombs, and he’s correct to want to do so, and to do so. He’s also correct to demand Iran turn over all of its already generated U-235, the uranium isotope used in making those bombs, of whatever purity the isotope has already been spun down to. There can be no peace from terrorism-generating Iran until those goals have been achieved.

However.

John Bolton, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, reminded us all, and Trump in particular, that we can’t afford to leave behind Iran’s accumulating stockpile of plutonium. Pu-239 is the plutonium isotope used in making nuclear bombs that are even more powerful than U-235 centered bombs.

The terrorists in Iran’s government, and their nuclear scientists are well aware of that fact, and they’re well aware of this, too: Pu-239, aside from being produced in nuclear reactors explicitly designed for the purpose, also is produced, in smaller quantities, as a natural byproduct of U-235-fed nuclear reactors that are built solely for power generation.

Of particular importance here—but not sole importance—is Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear reactor in Bushehr.

It gets worse:

Once Bushehr launched, its accumulating spent fuel amounted to ever larger amounts of accessible plutonium. … Based on current Russian estimates of spent-fuel levels at Bushehr and International Atomic Energy Agency estimates about the reactor’s energy production, nuclear-proliferation expert Henry Sokolski estimates that Iran has enough plutonium to make more than 200 nuclear weapons.

The Bushehr reactor isn’t Iran’s only nuclear reactor; it’s just the one they’re using explicitly to produce Pu-239. It’s necessary to control, or destroy, all of Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear reactors.

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.