Category: Accountability

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Time to Wait

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the mortgage/financial/intervention-induced crisis of 2008. “It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

The “important things” most politicians want to do usually involve more government controls. Post-crisis, they hurry to expand the state’s power over us before crisis-bred emotions like panic and anger can fade.

In doing so, they often blindly ignore relevant facts that even a little time for discussion would bring to light. That’s why Glenn Reynolds argues for a “Waiting period for laws, not guns” in a recent USA Today column.

Efforts to push legislation through while emotions are high mean that the legislation doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that legislation is supposed to get. Laws are dangerous instruments, too, and legislators seem highly prone to sudden fits of hysteria.

Even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg now says we must “start thinking a little bit more about the implications of things before we rush to legislate.” That’s “a bit rich” for Reynolds, since Bloomberg had PR men on standby to exploit the latest mass shooting as quickly as possible.

Still, if even Bloomberg is okay with hitting the pause button, “maybe the next time politicians want to rush a bill through without sufficient deliberation, others will have the fortitude to slow things down, read the bill and inform the public.”

This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposal. In many cities and states, today, an informed public can even petition a hastily enacted law onto the ballot for a referendum, at least when legislators don’t slap on a phony “emergency clause” to speed their worst enactments past the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Sequester Squeezes Solons

The deep, excruciating pain inflicted by the infamous sequester’s automatic $85 billion in spending cuts is beginning to crush the spirit of our glorious leaders.

Every stroke of the pen hurts, as congressional budgets are slashed a mindless 8.2 percent. The resultant chaos, we are told, presents a fatal threat to our survival as a nation.

A recent Washington Post exposé revealed more than a few of the budget-cutting horrors:

  • Congressional offices are wantonly canceling magazine subscriptions. Magazines contain important facts desperately needed by those entrusted with governing every aspect of our existence. Denied essential reading material, national literacy levels could plummet.
  • Communication between congressional representatives and their constituents is being disrupted as offices increasingly respond through low cost e-mail, instead of mailing through the more expensive U.S. Post Office.
  • Foreign junkets are also getting scrutinized. For instance, the congressional delegation sent to Rome to welcome the new pope dared the indignity of flying commercial.

It has gotten so bad that U.S. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) was forced to actually look into the phone bill paid by his congressional office. He found he could save $200 a month.

The sickening reality of budget cuts? They always hit our poor leaders hardest. But somehow, without magazines or lavish junkets, forced to use email and fly commercial and occasionally peruse a bill, our solons bravely carry on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Droning On?

For my birthday, Sen. Rand Paul started a filibuster.

I jest. The junior senator from Kentucky had something more important than my big day on his mind: the U.S. Constitution.

At 11:47AM, Sen. Paul took the floor: “I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA. I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes.”

I didn’t watch all of his endeavor (yet). What I did catch was amazingly eloquent.

It was also very specific. The Kentucky senator had asked candidate Brennan not one but two substantial lists of questions regarding the drone strike program. He also asked the Obama Administration whether the president thinks he has the constitutional right to use drone strikes against non-combatant Americans on American soil. Brennan had answered well enough, but left the administration to answer for itself. Attorney General Eric Holder responded, later, evasively.

And so Rand Paul took to the floor. And spoke at length — without teleprompter. He was joined, later, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. And then some Republicans, including Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.

Though Rand Paul’s office had started a Twitter hashtag, #filiblizzard. It didn’t take off. Instead, #StandWithRand became the international trending topic.

The world watched.

But filibusters have to end. About 13 hours in, Rand Paul did end it, though not before insisting that, with regard to our rights, compromise is very, very bad: “The Fifth Amendment is not optional.”

If this filibuster solidified that constitutional principle, what a present that would be — and not just to me, but to all Americans. And the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets

Standing By, Standing For

While President Barack Obama, Intoner-in-Chief, reads his “State of the Union” Address this evening, in front of a Congress of Over-Clappers, seated next to his wife will be Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Gene Sperling, White House economic advisor, enthused about the symbolism:

Apple is a great American company, and it stands for our sense of innovation, invention, entrepreneurship, and risk taking and I think that’s quite an appropriate person to be in the First Lady’s box when the president is talking about our economic future, the importance of job creation, manufacturing, innovation and how we create strong middle-class jobs.

Apple is, indeed, a great American business — one of the few that people who typically disdain business can’t stop loving. But it might be worth remembering that Apple’s success doesn’t so much “stand for our sense of innovation, invention, entrepreneurship and risk taking” as exemplify all of those things . . . “our sense of” those qualities is secondhand at best.

But politicians like to soak up secondhand qualities. They eat symbolism for lunch and dinner.

I wonder if the president, in stating the union’s state, will dare compare the qualities of America’s best companies and folks like Tim Cook (corporate heir of Steve Jobs; master of the supply chain) with that of America’s government.

A huge chasm separates them. Having won the election, President Obama enjoys a captive customer base over the next four years. Mr. Cook does not. Obama seeks to raise his revenue by taking more from a tiny minority. Cook has to persuade people to willingly buy his product.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

A Symbolic Threat

“Medicare’s trustees estimate that the hospital insurance fund supported by the payroll tax will run out of cash by 2024,” informs a Washington Post editorial, “but this is mainly a symbolic threat: The government will draw on general revenues to keep Medicare going.”

So, what exactly does this “symbolic threat” symbolize?

It shows that Medicare — like Social Security — was set up and run in an unsustainable, even fraudulent, way. Politicians promised benefits without collecting the taxes to pay for those benefits. This left “today’s voters” getting unpaid for bennies and future voters being handed a hefty bill.

The only question is: how hefty? That depends on how quickly the imbalance gets addressed.

Already, Medicare represents 15 percent of total federal government spending, last year costing taxpayers $555 billion. Worse yet, the cost is expected to double in the next decade — in large part, because the number of seniors on the program is expected to explode, from 50 million today to 78 million by 2030.

“No structural solution is,” the editorial bemoans, “for the moment, politically possible.” Instead, the Post endorses a number of small cuts — all making seniors pay more and/or get less — that add up to slightly over $40 billion a year. That drop in the bucket would, in a decade, account for less than 4 percent of Medicare’s projected yearly cost.

Frankly, the unavoidable first step in any honest fix of Medicare’s big, structural problems, is for those in Congress and the White House to fully admit the rotten fraud they have perpetrated against us for their personal political gain.

Acknowledging their deception would be more than symbolic.

You can’t change your ways until you first repent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom individual achievement initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

It’s a New Democracy!

Another New Year.

Should I have used an exclamation point? Shouted out the calendrical truth?

When each new year brings the same old nonsense, an exclamation point seems a bit like overkill. British novelist E.M. Forster famously said that democracy was worth “two cheers, not three.” Does a new year deserve at best half an exclamation?

After all, there will be many repetitions in 2013 of what we saw in 2012.

Incumbent politicians will just “happen” to throw up hurdles, making initiative measures harder to put on the ballot as well as more difficult to pass. They will also continue to support “campaign finance” regulations that will “just happen” to make incumbents more likely to get re-elected.

And of course they will continue to heap scorn on, and oppose any way they can, term limits.

Further, their tendency to avoid properly dealing with unsustainable government worker pension programs set to unravel in too many states and localities, will still continue, up until (and past?) the last possible moment for reform.

Similarly, the national debt will grow. Politicians will still get away with calling slight reductions in expected spending increases “spending cuts,” even when spending continues to soar.

But hey: at some point the politic avoidance of responsibility will evaporate when the economy these fools are driving hits the proverbial wall.

Before that happens, it sure would be to our advantage to take over our own government, wresting power away from politicians and creating real measures of accountability. We’ll need democratic tools like initiative and referendum.

Three cheers for citizens who take the initiative . . . and a few unashamed exclamation points!!

This is Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability folly too much government

A Dog-Wagging Tale

In California and Rhode Island (to name just two states) cities are going bankrupt . . . or closing libraries and parks and cutting police and firemen to forestall going belly up. Meanwhile, they continue paying huge sums in employment benefits for folks who used to work at city hall, but have since retired into the politicians’ promised land.

Bankrupt cities don’t do so well at paying out those promises, though.

That’s why even many union members in San Jose and San Diego, California, supported the victorious citizen initiatives earlier this year that created a reasonable and workable pension program, and why serious pension reform passed through the legislature and was signed into law in deep-blue, heavily unionized Rhode Island.

In Los Angeles, former Mayor Richard Riordan’s Save Los Angeles campaign has worked mightily to prevent the city’s three pension systems from hitting the outrageous and piggy-bank breaking annual cost of $2 billion by 2017. Unfortunately, Riordan’s group abandoned a petition drive to place a reform measure similar to San Diego’s and San Jose’s on the Los Angeles ballot next Spring. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 721 claimed credit for blocking the initiative, claiming they convinced thousands of petition signers to withdraw their signatures.

Now, the Los Angeles Daily News reports that, “With no pension ballot initiative to fight, the unions can re-focus their energy and their money on the races for mayor, controller, city attorney and the City Council.”

“We are more freed up now,” said an anonymous union official.

And likely to have even more influence on how the city will be run and financed and managed.

Or should I say, “mis-managed”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Those Pesky Online Citizens

Are “the people” a problem for technology to solve?

One of the benefits of the Internet has been the increased ease with which citizens can learn about their governments. Just as important has been the increased opportunity to tell elected representatives and public officials, along with their hired guns in federal, state, and local bureaucracies, just what they think.

Technology has given democracy a second lease on life.

But that doesn’t mean that politicians aren’t fighting back. And finding service providers and consultants to help them.

According to Michael Cohen, co-founder of Peak Democracy, Inc., online public comment forums can have awful consequences for politicians. They may fall prey to the dreaded “Referendum Effect.” This malady, Cohen explains, is

the loss of decision-making autonomy that government leaders incur when a community expects decisions to be based solely on the majority opinion of public feedback. More specifically, the Referendum Effect occurs when public feedback usurps the decision-making independence of government leaders.

Note the assumption here: government leaders should be “independent” of the voters.

Another way he counsels the International City/County Management Association “to minimize the Referendum Effect is to exclude the word ‘vote’ from the user interface – as the ‘v-word’ can create an expectation that feedback with the most votes wins.”

Cohen ends with an offer: “To learn more about the Referendum Effect and ways to prevent it, contact Mike@PeakDemocracy.com.”

Cohen is more than willing to advise how to keep pesky citizens from actually having an effective voice online. If you want to keep yours, meet his e-realpolitik with e-vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Robert J. O’Neill, Jr. (roneill@icma.org) is the executive director of the International City/County Management Association, which published Cohen’s comments.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies responsibility

Get Off the Omnibus

“Not one member of the Senate will read this bill before we vote on it,” said Sen. Rand Paul, last Friday. The junior senator from Kentucky had received the 600-page monstrosity mere hours before, and yet the august solons managed to pass it by a huge majority before close-of-business.

The legislation tackled three big funding extensions — another grab-bag “omnibus” bill in all but name. Obviously a rush job, even with the short turn-around it was too late for the president to sign that weekend.

By Senate internal rules, bills are supposed to be delivered 48 hours before any vote, to give time for senators to peruse their content. “We ought to adhere to our own rules,” said Sen. Paul, who went on to note that 48 hours isn’t that much time to read and comprehend everything in a bill of such length.

Such is the chaos in the Senate, run, apparently, like a business set on course to fail.

In a perhaps quixotic attempt to re-insert some sense of responsibility in the underachieving outfit, Paul has introduced two pieces of legislation, one requiring a day’s wait for every 20 pages of a bill, before voting, another designed to prohibit bills on more than one subject.

Frankly, I’d rather require every senator who votes on a law to be present in the chamber while the law in question is read aloud.

And the “one subject rule” is the kind of thing that many states have, regulating citizen-initiated measures. What’s foisted on the people should definitely be yoked onto the Senate, which obviously needs an omnibus-load of tough “love.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment

Report No Evil?

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee recommends that Attorney General Eric Holder be held in contempt of Congress for his refusal to turn over thousands of subpoenaed documents.

Motivations may be hard to decipher, but Democrats charge Republicans with evil partisanship. But then, the president’s claim of executive privilege in “Fast and Furious”-gate is surely every bit as partisan. As was the same plot that played out (several times) when Bush was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress.Three Wise Monkeys

It takes a partisan to know a partisan.

There is no disputing that the ATF botched the effort to trace illegal gun trafficking, handing over thousands of guns to criminals who used the weapons to murder lots of people, including Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

That seems worth an investigation.

Holder’s congressional testimony regarding when he first heard of the program has since been proved “inaccurate.” He followed this by refusing to hand over documents. Then, when the contempt vote was at hand, President Obama claimed executive privilege to shield Holder.

Obama once promised the “most transparent and accountable administration in history.” Give that promise a funeral.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder work for you and me. The documents — those shedding light on the disastrous gun-walking program and any that illuminate a cover-up — belong to us.

So, why do so many media mavens excuse, rather than accuse, the administration? MSNBC’s Chris Matthews suggested that the whole investigation is racist. But Chris, why don’t you want to see the documents?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.