Category: Accountability

Listen to Lobbyists

With 25 of 40 council seats turning over, “term limit advocates are enthusiastic about the influx of new folks and ideas,” explains Tennessean columnist Frank Daniels III, “but many council members are worried about the loss of knowledge and institutional memory.”

More precisely, “many council members” fret that the city cannot afford the loss of their “knowledge.” Politicians so want to kill such thinking that on today’s Nashville ballot is not one, but two measures to weaken the “eight is enough” council limit. Amendment 1 weakens the limits by 50 percent — from two terms, eight years to three terms, twelve years.

Amendment 2 weakens term limits just like Amendment 1 does. But Amendment 2 also reduces the size of the metro council from 40 representatives to 27. Reducing the number of “politicians” has some popular support, but what’s needed is closer representation. Which means more representatives, not fewer.

Nevertheless, when Amendment 2’s proponent, Councilwoman Emily Evans, was asked why the reduction in the council was combined with weakening term limits, she replied, “You have to give the voters something.”

The perennial argument against term limits asserts that lobbyists, special interests and the bureaucracy will have greater “institutional memory” and, therefore, take advantage of council members.

Talk about hollow! The group pushing Amendment 2 just released their campaign finance report. Their largest donor is the Service Employees International Union, representing city workers — followed by lobbyist after lobbyist, after developer, after payday loan company CEO, and a horde of politicians.

The open secret of our age: lobbyists hate term limits, voters love ’em.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

P.S. And if you live in Nashville, don’t forget to vote today, yet again, to keep the citizen-initiated, voter-enacted, three times voter re-affirmed term limits against the latest ballot schemes of politicians and their cronies

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Tags lobbying, lobbyists, term limits

Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

Gold Medal Worthy

The 2024 Summer Olympics will not be held in Boston.

Beantown abandoned its bid to host the games after Mayor Marty Walsh refused to sign a contract that would have left the city responsible for billions in possible cost overruns.

Did I say possible?

Call it seemingly inevitable.

“I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,” declared Walsh.

People throughout the Bay State can now rest easy — no tax hike or debt burden to build expensive infrastructure … and produce bigger traffic jams. Of course, polls had long shown voters opposed to the idea. But that doesn’t matter to career politicians. Nor to the mayor — until recently.

Mayor Walsh’s deep concern for taxpayers notwithstanding, citizen activism made the difference. A month ago, the Yes on 1 committee joined together with Evan Falchuk, chairman of Citizens for a Say, in supporting a ballot measure to prohibit spending any tax dollars on the Olympics.

Last year, I worked with Yes on 1 — led by Steve Aylward, Rep. Geoff Diehl, Marty Lamb and Rep. Shaunna O’Connell — to pass Question 1, ending automatic gas tax increases in Massachusetts. Olympic officials had been assured a ballot measure was unlikely to get in the way; then came the Yes on 1 folks with the know-how to petition just such a measure onto the ballot.

Walsh claimed this opposition had nothing to do with his decision, calling them “about ten people on Twitter and a couple people out there who are constantly feeding the drumbeat.”

Dancing to a different drummer, Mr. Mayor.

Bostonians can thank the state’s ballot initiative process, which provides a way for the people to be heard. And, of course, citizen leaders who take the initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot initiative, initiatives, Massachusetts, olympics, tax policy, Yes On 1

Accountability term limits

A New Tammany?

“We’ve been there and done that and voted not to do it,” St. Tammany Parish Council Chairman Richard Tanner explained last week. “I don’t know why we’d do it again.”

There’s a lot Tanner doesn’t know.

Like that his job is representing the people. You see, Tanner wasn’t one of the three members of the 14-member council who favored a public vote on enacting term limits.

“What are the other 11 worried will happen?” asked a New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial. “They must be afraid that voters will like the idea. What reason other than self-preservation could they have for refusing to even put the question on the ballot?”

According to a 2014 poll commissioned by Concerned Citizens of St. Tammany, a group that has long urged the council to put a term limits measure on the ballot, just a mere 92 percent of residents favor term limits.

The Home Rule Charter Committee and the St. Tammany West Chamber of Commerce have also implored the parish council to permit a democratic vote.

“Our members believe firmly that voters should be allowed their constitutional right to vote on this issue, rather than have this right outright denied,” read the Chamber’s resolution.

The old Tammany Hall political machine that once ruled New York City was corrupt. Criminally so. No one has suggested criminal wrongdoing by the gang running St. Tammany Parish.

No, theirs is an intellectual corruption, an embracing of power and self-interest and a rejection of republican and democratic principles.

Either form of corruption makes a strong case for term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags anti-democracy, term limits, voting

Accountability folly national politics & policies responsibility

Failing in the Future Biz

future, predicting the future, political, politics, collage, photomontage, illustration, prophecy, fortune teller, mistake

If you can’t sell us the future, you’re doing it wrong. We all want to get there in one piece.

Right now, a horde of Republican presidential candidates and a small cohort of Democrats vie to present themselves as visionaries, leaders.

Yet, what they all have in common is that they ignore the most serious issue facing us. Bigger than borders and terror and ISIS and gay marriage and all that, is the financial stability of the United States. Our future is in peril because of the continual Washington stalemate of never-ending deficit spending and continual debt growth — total debt being around $100 trillion.

The reason for this enormity? Politicians like to promise things, lots of things, very expensive things like wars and entitlements, to win our votes. But these same promiscuous over-promisers have more than a little difficulty agreeing on the taxes that would pay for all those “things.”

Why the difficulty? Because Americans already pay plenty in taxes and very few of us non-Omaha-based non-billionaires care to fork over even more of our hard-earned pay to a wasteful leviathan.

Any respectable vision of the future must acknowledge the current predicament, and provide a way out — before it’s too late, like it may very well already be … for Greece.

Wanting something for nothing isn’t Greek to any of us, unfortunately. That’s why we need leaders with the honesty and courage to present a vision more real than government providing ever more goodies on credit ad infinitum.

Credit just doesn’t add up, infinitely. The more you rack up debt, the more finite your future.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, debt, debt crisis, national debt, Presidential campaign 2016

Accountability general freedom tax policy

The People Supreme

“We’re the only state in the nation,” wails Wade Buchanan of the liberal Bell Policy Center, “where you can only raise revenues, taxes, by a vote of the people.”

Buchanan is talking about his state of Colorado and defending his side in the Kerr v. Hickenlooper case, which features 34 card-carrying members of Colorado’s political elite — sitting legislators, former legislators, former U.S. congressmen, local politicians and other assorted bigwigs — suing the voters of Colorado for having the gall to pass the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiative back in 1992.

Lovers of big government call TABOR a disaster; most Colorado voters like TABOR and will vote to keep it.

The crux of the case? The ridiculous notion that legislators have some cockamamie constitutional right to levy taxes and spend money without the people empowered with any veto. “When the power to tax is denied,” the suit alleges, “the legislature cannot function effectively to fulfill its obligations in a representative democracy and a Republican Form of Government.”

Immediately, however, the legal issue is whether the politically powerful Kerr plaintiffs even have standing to bring the lawsuit.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that had granted standing, returning the case to the appeals court “for further consideration in light of Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.”

That’s good news.

“Most tellingly,” constitutional scholar Rob Natelson points out in a Denver Post column, in that Arizona case “the court praised direct democracy and held that it was ‘in full harmony with the Constitution’s conception of the people as the font of governmental power.’”

Font? We’re the boss.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags big government, democracy, TABOR, tax, tax policy, voting

Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Impeach IRS Boss Now

Last week National Review reported that Republicans in the U.S. House have long been pondering impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for stonewalling about whether Lois Lerner’s emails were lost and irretrievable.

Lerner is the former IRS official who oversaw the obstructing of applications for non-profit status by right-leaning and Tea Party organizations. The timeline that has the GOP considering impeachment of the IRS boss goes like this:

March 2014: Koskinen testifies before Congress to the effect that it would take quite a while to retrieve Lois Lerner’s archived emails.
June 2014. Koskinen tells Congress (eliciting “audible gasps”) that many of Lerner’s scandal-relevant emails had been lost in a “computer crash.” (What happens when you hit hard drives with hammers.…)
June 2015. Congress learns from the Treasury Department’s inspector general that IRS wasn’t merely lethargic about finding the emails, and didn’t accidentally lose them to a sweeping Lerner-targeting technical glitch, but actively sought to destroy files “most likely to have contained Lerner’s emails.”

However, investigators have recovered data, including 30,000 Lerner emails, that probably do contain many scandal-related epistles. Which anybody who knows anything about the Internet and servers and backups knows had never been lost to begin with — not prior to specific attempts to lose them.

How many weeks must drag on before Congress does what is necessary? Koskinen strung Congress along for his benefit, not ours — giving him more time only plays into his hands.

Stop procrastinating, Congress. Do it. Now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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