Tag Archives: rights

Rent Collections Moratorium

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Recall earlier this summer when the CDC’s interminable ban on landlords collecting the rent payments due them came before the Supreme Court.

Recall, further, the 5-4 ruling that upheld the ban, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh rationalizing his vote to uphold by saying that he’d be a fifth vote to bar the ban beyond the end of July—because the ban was due to expire then, anyway—absent Congress’ specific authorization by passing a law allowing a rent collection moratorium. He averred the CDC had no authority to issue a moratorium on its own authority.

Then the moratorium expired last weekend, and the House recessed with no action taken on the matter.

Now President Joe Biden (D) has instructed his CDC to figure out how to extend the moratorium, and the CDC has done so—into early October.

Biden and the CDC have played Kavanaugh for a chump.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Justice’s excuse will be this time for upholding the “moratorium” in the event the matter comes back to the Supreme Court.

“Voting System ‘Under Assault'”

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So says President Joe Biden (D). He also says protecting it was the “single most important thing to do.”

The single most important thing that we have to do is we have to protect the voting system, protect the sacred right to vote. It’s under assault in ways that I haven’t seen in my entire career.

He’s right.

That assault, however, comes directly from his own Party’s attempt to nationalize how elections are run in each of the several States—in deliberate, cynical contravention of what our Constitution says–and from Progressive-Democrats’ lies about what’s actually in the election reform laws.

Here’s Article I, Section 4, on the matter of who sets the rules for elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

The Congress cannot write its own laws regarding how States shall run elections in their jurisdictions. Congress can only modify State laws, and then only to ensure compliance with the rest of our Constitution, vis., our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Further, in order to modify a State law, that State law must exist. If Congress writes the Federal law, there will be no State law extant to be modified.

The other part of Biden’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s assault on our voting system rests on the fundamental dishonesty of their claims about what the States are doing.

Georgia, for instance, lengthened the weekend hours of early voting and added a Sunday to that early voting period. This is somehow suppressive of the vote, the Progressive-Democrats claim, and they want the expanded hours rescinded.

Georgia also legalized, standardized, and ensured the security of ballot drop boxes—drop boxes which did not exist prior to the Wuhan Virus-impacted 2020 election and whose creation for that election were illegal, having been created by the Georgia Secretary of State and not Georgia’s legislature. This legalizing and regularizing also, Progressive-Democrats dishonestly claim, are supposed to suppress voting, and they must be blocked.

Arizona’s proposed election reform laws would, among other things, prohibit mass mailing of absentee ballots, requiring instead each voter to explicitly request one, a move which would reduce the opportunity of fraud and enhance the safety of actually cast ballots. No, the Progressive-Democrats say; they want those fraud opportunities.

Progressive-Democrat lies about Texas’ moves are similarly broad. The proposed bills expand early voting hours, standardize procedures across counties, require the objectivity of some sort of voter ID with absentee ballots rather than the by-guess-and-by-golly of signature matching, and bar ballot harvesting. These improvements to vote integrity and ballot access are unacceptable to the Progressive-Democrats; they want here, too, their opportunity for fraud preserved.

And on top of all this, Texas’ House Progressive-Democrats, in the name of supporting the vote, have absconded from the legislature and departed the State explicitly to suppress voting on those bill proposals.

All of these expansions of voter access and of vote integrity are just Jim Crow on steroids, Biden says. Go figure.

Systemic Racism

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As my wife and better half says, “The tote board tells the tale.”

The title of the Senate Amendment might be hard to read (even after a Right Click|Open in New Tab maneuver), so:

To prohibit Federal funding for any institution of higher education that discriminates against Asian Americans in recruitment, applicant review, or admissions.
Amendment Rejected (49-48, 60 votes required)

All 49 Yeas were, without exception, Republican. All 48 Nays, rejecting this anti-discrimination amendment and by extension overtly supporting discrimination by race, were, without exception, Progressive-Democrat.

The amendment was to S937, the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Even though this cloture vote was last April, it’s remains as a shocking example of the systemic racism that is in a significant part of our nation—the systemic racism that pervades the Progressive-Democratic Party.

The Progressive-Democrats’ unanimous decision to kill an actual anti-hate amendment to a Hate Crimes bill is…ironic.

Union Political Spending, Union Political Power

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A couple of numbers illustrate the matter.

Organized labor spent more than $1.8 billion on political activity and lobbying in the US during the 2020 election cycle, according to a new study published by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research (NILRR). The majority of the money spent by labor, $1.4 billion, came straight from union dues taken from workers who can legally be fired if they refuse to fund union activities[.]

Those two numbers also emphasize the need for even more right-to-work laws, laws that not only allow workers to work for an employer without joining a union whose members also work for that employer, but also allow those non-union workers to decline to pay any form of dues or tribute to that union.

Reverse Roe v Wade?

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That’s part of the goal of an amicus brief being prepared for the Supreme Court for when it takes up the appeal of the Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case itself concerns whether Mississippi should be able to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks).

A coalition of approximately 22 pro-life groups and several legislators collected signatures from more than 300 lawmakers in 35 states in support of the brief, ranging from Michigan State Representative Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) to Arkansas State Senator Scott Flippo (R-Bull Shoals).
“We’re hoping to accomplish protecting life within our respective states as best as possible,” [University of Michigan Law School] graduate Jacob Weaver [the lead on the brief] told The Center Square. “Roe v Wade was abundantly unconstitutional. It’s now clear that it’s life in the womb, not potential life.”

Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President, demurs.

Mississippi has said the quiet part out loud. The purpose of its blatantly unconstitutional abortion ban is to have the Supreme Court overrule 50 years of precedent and allow states to ban abortions. This is not what the American people—80% of whom support safe, legal abortion—want, and it would deny essential health care primarily to people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with low incomes.

Her first is both correct and a cynically done exaggeration. Mississippi has, indeed, said a quiet part out loud: that States, not the Federal government—including the Judiciary—should be regulating abortion access and abortions. There is no particular move to ban all abortions, though, except in the minds of a very few, and in the fetid imaginations of hysterical pro-abortionists.

Next, the fact that Roe has lasted 50 years only illustrates the duration of the error; that duration in no way legitimizes the error. Indeed, Roe itself reversed 150 years of precedent in which the Federal government, correctly, played no role in the matter.

Then there’s the business of polling. Johnson has chosen not to cite the poll she claims has produced that result. I’ll leave aside the exposure over the last 5 years of the utter reliability of polls generally. But aside from her claim, she’s assuming “80%” are evenly distributed across all States—or assuming the legitimacy of a Federal, one-size-fits-all status of abortion preference, so that “80%” of California or Illinois should be able to dictate to Mississippi or Texas the outcome, even if “80%” of Mississippians or Texans adamantly disagree.

No, with States in control of their own domestic matters, as our Constitution holds, the citizens of each State would be, as they should, the arbiters of their State’s abortion laws. Each State then will take care of its own minority populations—which would tend to better protect the lives of minority babies otherwise vulnerable to being killed in their mothers’ wombs.

Finally come Johnson’s two dog whistles: that abortion is health care and that LGBTQ+ might be denied access to abortions. Regarding the first whistle, there’s nothing particularly healthful for the babies in their being killed in the womb. Regarding the second shrill whistle, only biology, not “identification,” can make it possible for a member of the LGBTQ+ community even to get pregnant, much less decide subsequently to want to abort her baby.

The rest of the goal of the Michigan amicus is to restore, under the 9th Amendment of our Constitution, that right of individual States to regulate access to abortion and to abortion itself.

“The power to regulate abortion falls squarely into States’ police powers,” as it did for 150 years pre-Roe.
“We argue this depoliticizes the court and that it returns states to their rightful place in the constitutional scheme,” Weaver told The Center Square in a phone interview.

At worst, the Supreme Court should recognize current, realized medical capability. Roe is essentially a technology-based ruling, setting its abortion threshold to the point at which the baby is viable outside the womb—roughly the start of the third trimester at the time of the Roe ruling. Today’s capability brings that viability far earlier in the pregnancy.