Category: Accountability

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 12, 2019
7 Comments on What’s Love Got to Do With It?

term limits, democracy, representative, congressman, Senate, House of Representatives

“One of the great myths in official Washington,” writes pollster and pundit Scott Rasmussen at Ballotpedia.org, “is that voters hate Congress but love their own representative.”

Working for term limits, boy have I heard this assertion a lot.

Oh, voters do hate Congress; this we know. Less than one in eight Americans approve of the job being done (or not) by Congress, according to a brand new The Economist/YouGov poll.

The remaining question, however, is whether we really like our own congressperson. The correct answer appears to be: Not so much.

A recent ScottRasmussen.com national survey, conducted Feb. 1 – 2, 2019, found that less than one in four voters, only 23 percent, “actually think their own representative is the best person for the job.” A far larger percentage, 38 percent, believe “others in the District are more qualified.”

It is certainly possible, of course, that folks could think there is someone better than their sitting congressperson and, nonetheless, still love their Rep.

Though, doesn’t “love” seem like way too strong a word?

The notion that we are consumed with amorous urges toward our own federal representative is evidenced only by the high re-election rate for incumbent congressmen. But those rates are more likely the result of the powerful advantages of incumbency.

Not gleeful adoration of “our” career politicians.

There is one way to test our level of devotion: Let us vote on term limits and see what happens.

It would lead to a new question: Where did our love go?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congressman, democracy, representative, Senate, term limits

Accountability First Amendment rights local leaders

Insiders Strike Back

It costs time, not money.

Ron Calzone and others read and consider legislation on their own dime. Calzone’s all-volunteer Missouri First group, which analyzes legislation filed in Jefferson City from a constitutional, pro-liberty perspective, doesn’t even have a bank account.

A small businessman outside of Rolla, Calzone devotes a great deal of time and energy during the legislative session, traveling to the capitol to speak face to face with Show-Me State public servants.

For some reason, establishment politicians and bureaucrats have generally failed to express gratitude.

Back in 2015, the head of Missouri’s “lobbyist guild” filed a complaint, at the urging of two powerful legislators, alleging that Ron Calzone should have to register as a lobbyist. Meaning a $10 fee and lots of paperwork about the money neither he nor his group spends.

“Average citizens have acted in harmony to stop hundreds of millions of dollars worth of graft that would have otherwise benefited the people who hire herds of professional lobbyists,” he responded at the time. “No doubt, it’s hard for those lobbyists to explain how average men and women can, with no budget and with no palm greasing, beat them so often!”

With the assistance of the Freedom Center of Missouri, a wonderful public interest litigator, and the Institute for Free Speech, the national leader in protecting political speech, Mr. Calzone has stood tall against the Missouri Ethics Commission.

Last week, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a 2 – 1 decision against him, agreeing to have all the circuit’s judges weigh in on the case.

In a free society, citizens must not be required to register and pay a fee in order to speak to legislators.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Obstruction

building a divide, wall, immigration, ideology, Trump, Pelosi

The federal government “shutdown” — now on reprieve — has been and continues to be a rather strange charade. Various political players make motions towards one another, and we, the people, are supposed to guess the real meaning.

Which is usually conceived as

All about President Trump’s “Wall”;
All about the Pelosi-Schumer commitment to never letting Trump get away with his Evil Agenda; or
The great huge, honking divide in America that grows every day.

I suspect it is about all these things and more — which is easy to say, since these three issues are intimately related.

And as if playing a subtle joke on us all, the standoff that appears as obstructionism is about a proposed obstruction at the southern border: literally a “Mexican standoff.”

Meanwhile, a different security measure has received attention.

Americans have, rather spontaneously, been taking canned and packaged foods, and even fresh produce, to unpaid but “forced-to-work” TSA agents. A heartwarming story. Sure. But the Transportation Security Agency, cobbled together in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is spectacularly ineffective, an example of “sec urity the ater.” TSA agents repeatedly fail internal tests.

Congress could, of course, take this opportunity to disband this airport security worker agency. If managed by the airlines or any entity but the federal government, TSA wouldn’t have suffered through the shutdown.

Tragically, Congress long ago ceased being functional, responsible, or even the eensiest, teensiest bit respectable. And a divided public stands little chance of forcing a change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags building a divide, ideology, immigration, Trump, wall

Accountability video

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of … Abortion?

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 19, 2019
No Comments on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of … Abortion?

Andrew Klavan begins his show with satire, but then segues into a serious discussion of abortion. Oh, and Google, evil Google:

Accountability term limits

None Dare Call It Careerism

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 16, 2019
4 Comments on None Dare Call It Careerism

Let’s build a wall, I said last week, between the Office of the President and all these emergency powers our Congress has recklessly given away to the chief executive.

After admittedly “scrambling to figure out” the emergency powers possessed by POTUS, the Washington Post’s editorial board lamented its discovery “that Congress has delegated a surprising amount of emergency or quasi-emergency power to the executive branch over the years, possibly too much.”

Possibly? Well … it is the Post.

Yet, the paper acknowledges, “The implications for constitutional government are potentially serious.”

The federal government currently operates under “31 presidentially declared national emergencies,” informs Post columnist Charles Lane. “[I]f Trump evades Congress’s refusal to fund a border wall by declaring a national emergency at the border … it would not be the first time a president took advantage of the inherent elasticity of the term.”

Congress last legislated on emergency presidential powers in 1976, a mere two years after Richard Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign in disgrace. Yet, even then, the law left presidential authority largely unchecked, and the term “emergency” completely undefined.

Why has Congress simply handed away so much power, writing laws with so little accountability? Has Congress been saddled with inexperienced rookies? No. There are no term limits. This is the product of very experienced career politicians.

Read between the lines.

“Only Congress can reclaim the emergency powers it has granted the president,” Lane writes, adding … “assuming, of course, that lawmakers want the responsibility back, too.”

They don’t. They prefer their cushy careers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congress, emergency, presidential

Accountability government transparency

Put the Public in Public Policy

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 2, 2019
2 Comments on Put the Public in Public Policy

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, secrecy, transparency, negotiations

“Negotiations are impossible without trust,” wrote Leon Panetta in a Washington Post op-ed.

What with all his experience, Mr. Panetta has some reason to be trusted on his chosen subject, government shutdowns. The California Democrat spent 16 years in the Congress before joining the Clinton Administration as Director of the Office of Management and Budget and later serving as White House Chief of Staff. He was Obama’s first CIA Director and then Secretary of Defense.

But not every one of the sage’s pronouncements passes muster.

“Never,” he advised, “negotiate in public.”

He is of course referring to the hilarious chat President Trump had with two Democratic leaders . . . and a bland, bored, and blank Vice President Pence.

“The talks to avert a shutdown got off to a terrible start,” Panetta argues, “when the president, during an Oval Office meeting with likely incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi (D‑Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D‑N.Y.), began arguing his position in front of White House reporters.… In all the negotiations on the budget that I took part in as both House Budget Committee chairman and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, not one took place in front of the media. Public shouting matches usually guarantee failure.”

The implication? That these previous negotiations were “successful.”

To those with careers ensconced in Washington power, they worked out just splendidly, I’m sure. But the aftermath of these private, secretive agreements on the rest of us? It can be quantified: $21 trillion.

In federal debt.

We do not need more of that “success.”

Let’s put the public back in public policy decisions. “It’s called transparency,” President Trump said.

Yes.

More of that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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