Tag Archives: politics

A Progressive-Democrat’s Bigotry

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Recall Senator Joe Manchin’s (D, WV) statement a couple of days ago when he said that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be pressured into voting for a reconciliation bill about which he has serious, and potentially bill-killing reservations in order to get the already Senate-passed “infrastructure” bill voted on in the House.

Manchin said major parts of his reservations centered on these:

How can I in good conscience vote for a bill that proposes massive expansion to social programs when vital programs like Social Security and Medicare faces insolvency and benefits could start being reduced as soon as 2026 in Medicare and 2033 in Social Security? How does that make sense?

And

Nor will I support a package that risks hurting American families suffering from historic inflation. Simply put, I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it’ll have on our national debt, our economy, and most importantly, all of our American people.

In response, Congresswoman Cori Bush (D, MO) said

Joe Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better Act is anti-black, anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-immigrant.

Manufacturing a racist or sexist beef where there is no racism or sexism, as Bush has so blatantly done, is an especially pernicious form of racism, of sexism, of bigotry in general.

A Window on Biden-Harris Priorities

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Not so much from President Joe Biden’s (D) words or his Vice President and co-President Kamala Harris’ (D) careful silence, as much as what’s left in and left out of the current iteration of his reconciliation bill.

What’s still in after its seeming paring from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion (don’t believe those numbers or that any numbers are anywhere near close to finality or even accuracy, but take them at value for now): climate change initiatives.

What’s out (so far):

  • paid family leave and Medicare expansion
  • drug pricing, paid leave, Medicare expansion on dental and vision
  • pathway to citizenship for millions

As Varshini Prakash, Executive Director of Sunrise Movement argued,

Progressives are the ones who have fought like hell for Biden’s full agenda, and their votes cannot be taken for granted[.]

Yet those concrete and potentially directly actionable programs are the ones that were dropped in favor of the Biden-Harris (and of so many others) fantasy of global warming as an existential threat to our species.

Yet, if those dropped programs actually were any good, they’d be fully supportable and easily voted up in their separate and individual bills. Prakash even (cynically I say) argued that the pathway to citizenship for millions was left to an unelected parliamentarian—never mind that here too, maybe especially so, the pathway to citizenship question, if it’s actually something We the People want, would be easily voted up in a separate Pathway Bill.

But no. Progressive-Democrats know these are not particularly desirable; that’s why they tried, from the height of their control of both houses of Congress and the White House, to ram these things through unilaterally with not a syllable of input from the minority party.

Success or Failure?

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In a Just the News piece concerning how the People’s Republic of China is stealing our (and Japan’s, Republic of Korea’s, and European Union’s) technology and using it to build a military establishment that can defeat us and from that compel us to do PRC bidding, FBI Director Christopher Wray was quoted as testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security September a year ago,

I think I publicly acknowledged that the FBI now has over 2,000 counter-intelligence investigations related to China, by far the biggest chunk of our counter-intelligence portfolio, and we are opening a new Chinese counterintelligence investigation about every 10 hours.

2,000 investigations, with a new one begun every 10 hours. Wray was touting that as the level of effort the FBI is putting into the matter.

What it really looks like is the extent of the PRC espionage effort, especially since those cases and case-openings only represent what the FBI has detected. Those data seem, more accurately, to indicate the degree of success the PRC is having at stealing our data, and the lack of success we’re having in defending ourselves.

That failure is not all on the Federal government, either, for all the centrality of their role in our nation’s security. It’s also, in very significant part, on the managers of our private enterprises and their lack of effort—empirically demonstrated by how often and how easily they’re entered (72 new FBI cases every month, not all of which concern government penetrations)—in protecting their own data.

Wray’s claim does not describe any form of success at all. He describes failure, perhaps even lack of seriousness regarding the matter.

A Risky Argument

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Stephen Miller, late of the Trump administration and current member of the board of directors of America First Legal, in supporting Texas’ law prohibiting doctors from performing abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected, is making this argument, among others:

In every other area of public life, people are able to, through the legislatures, pass laws against sex trafficking, sexual abuse, elder abuse, against every other social ill imaginable. And yet for about half a century now, there’s been no ability by citizens in any state to work through legislatures to ensure some measure of protection for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

This is, at best, a weak argument, and if the lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court rely on this, they risk setting back the anti-abortion cause by decades. Under the 14th amendment, citizen status only exists for those born…in the United States; the ones we’re trying to protect aren’t born, yet, so they are not citizens.

The unborn’s right of of relevance here is the much broader one: his right to life, which he has through the simple fact of his existence and as acknowledged under that other founding document of ours, our Declaration of Independence. His status, or lack, as a citizen of the United States isn’t relevant to his right to live.

Miller should know better.

Backwards

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Maine is voting today on an amendment to its State Constitution that would declare the right to food to be a fundamental right. The specific phrasing is this:

Constitution, Art. I, §25 is enacted to read:
Section 25.  Right to food.  All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.

The problem here, though, is not with the proposed amendment, which may or may not be a good idea. The problem is with the response to the proposal by folks who apparently slept through their grade school American history lessons and their junior high Civics classes. Typical is this response, from Katie Hansberry, Maine State Director of The Humane Society of the United States:

We do not think it is the intent of this proposal to allow food producers and and/or hunters, trappers, and fisherman be exempt from animal welfare and cruelty laws, but as currently written that would likely be the case as the current list of limitations fails to include any reference to such laws.

Constitutions are not subordinate to laws; laws are subordinate to Constitutions. Maine’s laws must fit within Maine’s Constitution, and when its Constitution changes, those laws must be changed accordingly; the laws are not immutable. Nor is there any requirement to enumerate subordinate matters into a governing document.

More than that, it’s foolish to expect the Constitution to be malleable by whatever later lawmakers decide with their new laws.

Still worse, if a Constitution is changeable by any collection of politicians, it will be vulnerable to willy-nilly changes according to the whims of the day, and from that it will soon cease to be a governing document. It will merely be a reflection of what men in government from time to time see as their own benefit, and it will no longer stand as a long-lasting and stable document that represents the will of the citizenry and that restrains those elastic politicians and their inconstant desires.