Tag Archives: rights

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.

A Thought on Income Taxes and Equal Treatment under Law

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It occurs to me that many of our States’ income tax codes violate our Constitution. Here’s the relevant clause, from the 14th Amendment’s Article I:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any income tax law that taxes citizens differentially plainly does not afford all citizens equal protection of the (tax) law. Such laws confiscate the incomes of some people far more than it does others, and such laws that exempt some people from paying the tax favors those folks over others who must pay.

States’ income tax laws that do not tax every one equally must be found unconstitutional. That such a ruling would disrupt State budgets is no reason to continue this violation.

That principle applies, or should apply even if not strictly constitutionally, to our Federal income tax code, also. In particular, the 16th Amendment authorizes a Federal income tax, but it in no way authorizes the Federal government to tax Americans differentially from each other.

Hungary’s Election

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The results of Hungary’s election last Sunday are pretty much in, and the upstart Tisza Party, led by Péter Magyar, has won a resounding victory, 53.6% of the votes compared with 37.8% for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, with 98% of the votes counted. That puts Tisza on track for a better than two-thirds majority in the nation’s unicameral Parliament.

Some on the Left in the US and in Europe are calling that a defeat of a traitorous right-wing Orbán and his party. Others have a different take on the outcome:

Notre Dame College Republicans
@NDRepublicans
Orbán was just voted out democratically and conceded. Meanwhile countries like France, Germany, and Romania ban opposition candidates from running, cancel elections, and surveil parties for “extremism” if they oppose immigration.

Rasmus Jarlov @RasmusJarlov · 19h
This is the biggest and most needed defeat for traitor right in Europe in modern times. It is not a victory for the left. But a victory for sane conservatism that believes in democracy and does not ally with the enemies of Europe. This is what….

In the event, we’ll see. Magyar wasn’t very unifying in his victory speech:

Together we replaced the Orbán system. Together we liberated Hungary and took back our country. Those who commit the sin of dividing the nation must leave power.

Neither was Orbán:

What today means for our homeland, we do not know, time will tell. In any case, we will serve our homeland even in opposition.

It appears, though, that the Notre Dame Republicans have the better read. Divisive rhetoric, or not, this was a more democratically achieved election outcome than those of the so-liberal France and Germany and Romania.

In Which the Editors Get One Right

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors this time. Don’t expel him [California Progressive-Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell] from Congress. Let California voters have their say, goes their subheadline.

Swalwell is about as unsavory a man, let alone a politician, as it gets this side of Tren de Aragua, and the sexual assault and rape charges being leveled against him are even worse. However, as the editors point out near the end of their editorial,

He deserves a chance to explain himself, while accusations alone shouldn’t be enough to drive an elected Representative out of office. ….
The [House] Ethics Committee can take up formal complaints, sift the evidence, and recommend an appropriate punishment.

That’s right. In our legal system, an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a trial court. The legalism doesn’t apply to Congress; each house can expel its members for any reason at all, if two-thirds of its members can be persuaded to the expulsion. However, the principle underlying the legalism assuredly does apply to Congress, as it does to all of us citizens.

Let the House Ethics Committee do its investigation and recommend the punishment it deems fit, but short of expulsion. Let the matter also come to serious criminal trial, and if he’s convicted, the Ethics Committee then can revisit the matter and recommend expulsion—and the House then should vote unanimously for that expulsion.

All of that may have become moot, though: Swalwell announced Monday that he was resigning from Congress with immediate effect. Withal, my claim regarding presumption of innocence remains unbloodied and unbowed.

A Sanction of New York over its Board of Elections

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New York’s State Board of Elections has inadequate safeguards regarding its elections and appears to be refusing to correct that.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a nonpartisan organization focused on election security, alleges the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) stonewalled a request to fix the state’s voter registration form to comply with federal voting law.

Absent those corrections, the State-dominating Progressive-Democratic Party could register loads of voters of whom Party approves, thereby cementing Party’s reign over the State for generations.

If RITE’s allegations are true, and the NYSBOE continues to refuse to correct its errors, there is a sanction that would have strong and sharp teeth. Here’s Article 2 of our 14th Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The 19th and 26th Amendments modify this Article only to the extent of extending the right to vote to women and lowering the minimum age of eligibility to 18 years old.

Allowing ineligible persons to vote dilutes the votes of eligible, legitimate voters, and that is a functional, even if not direct, denial of those eligible voters’ right to vote. That dilution means their votes no longer count as whole votes, but only as reduced, fractional votes. In our system of elections, any reduction in the value of a vote to less than that of the entire vote is a denial of that vote.

The sanction, then, should be a reduction of New York’s representation in Congress according to the proportion of registered ineligible voters to registered eligible voters plus the proportion of eligible voters denied registration to the whole number of voters in the State.