Tag Archives: politics

Rule By Law

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Rather than Rule of Law, which is how we do things here.

The men and women of the government of the People’s Republic of China change the nation’s laws whenever convenient to their personal aims and whenever convenient to their personal power. This is how those men and women have acted, have preserved their power, since the beginning of the days of Chinese emperors.

Two current examples: their enactment in 2017 of an intelligence cooperation law that requires all PRC companies, whether state-owned or “private,” to cooperate with any intelligence community request for information, including about any company affiliate or customer wherever in the world that affiliate or customer might be.

There’s also the just-enacted law that permits the PRC government to remove—outside of the courts—anyone in the Hong Kong governance apparatus of whom the emperor’s men the men and women of the PRC government might decide to disapprove.

Now we come to the Progressive-Democratic men and women of the Wisconsin State government.

At a special meeting that lasted more than five hours, [Progressive-]Democrats on the state elections commission sought to change recount guidelines after the Trump 2020 Campaign filed a petition to review the state’s votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Existing State law on the matter had become inconvenient to those Progressive-Democrats, so—time to change the rules. As Reince Priebus noted,

The Trump campaign sent the Wis Election Comm. $3 mil and filed its petition for a recount. Then the WEC immediately called a special meeting to change certain recount rules that deal with the issues brought up in the petition? You can’t make this up!

Here are Progressive-Democrats in action.

Pocket Vetoing

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Consider this scenario: in 2022, Republicans sweep to veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate. (I agree, but work with me here.)

Let’s say that one of the bills that Republican Congress passes—late in the year after much debate—is either a tax reduction bill that permanently reduces even further both corporate and personal income taxes or (especially after much debate) a spending cut bill that cuts actual spending (not just slows increases) and that includes material reform of Social Security and Medicare.

Let’s say further that one of those bills is presented to a President Joe Biden right before Congress adjourns (not merely recesses) for the year-end holidays, an adjournment that will last for more than 10 days (as even many Congressional recesses do).

Biden doesn’t like the bill, never-minding its general popularity among Americans, or that it was passed by a veto-proof Congress. He can’t veto it outright, or it will simply be passed over his veto. So he pocket vetoes it—he takes no action at all.

Here’s what Article 1, Section 7 of our Constitution says:

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

Leo Fisher has argued that such a “veto” wouldn’t hold up in court (in fact, the courts have never ruled directly on the matter) because this would be an absolute veto—Congress having no opportunity to attempt to override it as otherwise specified in our Constitution—and so would go directly against the Constitution’s authors’ intent. This, he intimates, flows from the otherwise not-signing for 10 days making the bill law, or the veto of the bill within those 10 days with an explicit Congressional override making it law that are provided for in the immediately prior sentences:

If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated…. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law.

Fisher’s argument fails because of that categorical and uncaveated clause: unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law. That’s precisely an absolute veto, and it was written into our Constitution by its authors.

Thus, it strikes me that the matter is quite clear on two grounds (and yes, I’m aware of conflicting Supreme Court rulings that hint at the matter). One is that when Congress is adjourned, it is explicitly not in session, as opposed to merely taking a break for a bit, which is what a recess is. When Congress is not in session, it cannot receive anything—it’s simply not available. That decision creates the condition for an absolute veto.

The other ground is this: it’s easy for Congress to remain in session for the extra period needed to consume those 10 days within which a President must explicitly veto a bill and return the veto to Congress. By adjourning during those 10 days and not returning before the 10 days are expired, Congress is consciously creating the condition for a pocket—absolute—veto.

Tax Breaks

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In particular, child tax credits and their proposed expansion, but the principle below applies across the board.

…pair the expansion of the child tax credit with extensions of expiring business-tax provisions, some of which have Democratic support.

Pairing in order to get the credit passed, one being a bell for the other’s whistle.  Refundable credits, too, so those who don’t pay much, if any, income tax can get their own taste. Here’s Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s offer on the credit:

…a temporary expansion of the child tax credit that would bump the $2,000-per-child credit to $3,000 for most children and to $3,600 for those under age 6. He would expand the credit to include 17-year-olds and allow monthly payments, so families wouldn’t need to wait for lump sums at tax-filing time.
Mr Biden’s proposal would cost more than $100 billion a year.

Leave aside the fact that refundability is spending increase, not taxing cut.

Here’s a better idea: lower income tax rates (permanently) across the board, for both businesses and individuals.

Leaving all that money in the private economy, which is to say in the hands of the businesses and individuals who are earning the money, pays far more benefits far more quickly, running from the folks more efficiently spending their money than can any government spend it for them through businesses having more—again, of their own—money for capital improvement, product/service development, R&D, wages, hiring.

All that increased economic activity—real activity, not the fiction of government spending as economic activity—is what will help families with children. And if Government—or rather the politicians populating Government—take the additional step of not singling out particularly favored groups of Americans for special treatment, that increased economic activity will particularly help minority families, who are the ones most needful of access to that increasing prosperity.

Clinton-2 vs Obama-3

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That’s the hope expressed by Phil Gramm and Mike Solon in their Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

By electing a divided government, Americans may get what they appear to want: a Biden first term that’s more like Bill Clinton’s second term than a third term for Barack Obama.

That is in no way a done deal. The current situation is not at all comparable to the Clinton situation. Biden’s handlers have no inclination whatsoever to move off their far-left ideology, much less the far-left policies they intend for enacting that ideology.

Nor have they any willingness to compromise, as Ocasio-Cortez has made blatantly clear.

The best we can hope for is a Republican-majority Senate and enough party unity to say “No” for four years.

‘Course a gridlocked government isn’t a bad thing.

WaPo Contempt

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The Washington Post is at it again. Abolish the electoral college, its editors demand. And they thereby display the same contempt for ordinary Americans, our Constitution, and our federal republic structure as did Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and more recently Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, among a long list of today’s Leftists and Progressive-Democrats.

The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.

After all,

Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.

You bet. That’s right there in that pesky Constitution, because federation. That’s where the individual States, by design, are nearly on a par with the central government. That’s so a far away, remote government cannot rule the roost with its one-size-fits-all diktats. Those pesky States just keep getting in the way of Progressive-Democrats’ need to implement their Know Better policies. Absolute control from the center would make that so much more convenient. Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the need for a Progressive-Democrat majority, reigning from DC:

[Jake Tapper, interviewing Ocasio-Cortez]: Are you going to work with more moderate Senate Republicans to try to pass something in the House that can get through the Senate?
[Ocasio-Cortez]: Well, I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support…that we secure a Democratic Senate majority, so that we don’t have to negotiate in that way[.]

Back to WaPo‘s need to clear away the obstacles to Leftist control of the promise of American life.

Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million.

With the Electoral College having far more popular representation than the Senate, surely, these wondrous exemplars of what passes for journalism will be demanding proportional representation in the Senate, too. Truly equal representation gives the dinky States, those locales too small to be worthy of notice, ‘way too much representation.