Category: government transparency

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Accountability Common Sense general freedom government transparency too much government

(Un)Intended System Failure

Campaign Finance Follies

The system worked. The problem? The system doesn’t work.

Last year’s successful term limits ballot initiative in Grand Rapids pitted two pro-​limits ladies with scant political experience against a united big business/​big labor opposition campaign, sporting Dr. Glenn Barkan, professor emeritus of political science at Aquinas College, as treasurer.

Just before Election Day, Professor Barkan’s group stuffed mailboxes with advertisements warning residents: “Don’t let your vote be shredded.” The mailings seemed odd in two more respects: (1) there was no mention of “term limits,” and (2) according to campaign finance reports, the professor’s committee didn’t have enough money for mass mailings.

Then, after the election, the committee filed reports acknowledging big money raised and spent prior to the election.

“It just seemed odd that they could do all the mass mailings with little money,” said term limits advocate Bonnie Burke. “We ran a totally above-​board campaign and they have these seasoned people and they weren’t sticking to the rules.”

Michigan’s Bureau of Elections concluded the professor’s committee “deprived voters from knowing the source and amount of more than half of the contributions it received.…” The group was fined $7,500.

The system worked! Reporting led to a violation, which led to a complaint, which led to an investigation, which led to the imposition of a fine.

But to what point?

As my colleague at Liberty Initiative Fund, Scott Tillman, who filed the complaint, explains, “Campaign finance laws do not stop connected insiders from gaming the system and hiding donations. Big money can ignore the laws and pay the fines if they get caught.”

Even worse, Tillman warned, “Campaign finance laws intimidate and discourage outsiders and grassroots activists from becoming active in politics.”

Is either result unintended?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Campaign Finance Follies

 

Categories
Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom government transparency national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Swarms of Officers to Harass

Playing cards

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

It’s simple but true. And, as a corollary, let me add that using the power of the federal government to harass individuals or groups one happens to dislike or disagree with is wrong.

You might recall that our Declaration of Independence rebuked King George for sending “hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.” Or consider the recent civil-​rights-​violating behavior of the IRS against conservative groups during President Obama’s administration.

Yesterday, I proposed to end all taxpayer subsidies to Planned Parenthood. Obviously, I’m not a fan of the organization. And neither are the Republican presidential candidates — especially Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

“Planned Parenthood had better hope that Hillary Clinton wins this election,” Jindal boasted at last week’s JV presidential debate hosted by Fox News, “because I guarantee you that under President Jindal, January 2017, the Department of Justice and the IRS and everybody else that we can send from the federal government will be [looking] into Planned Parenthood.”

Speaking with reporters after the debate, Mr. Jindal doubled down, suggesting there might also be a role for the Environmental Protection Agency and perhaps other tentacles of the federal Leviathan.

Jindal has removed Planned Parenthood from Louisiana’s Medicaid program. That’s within his legitimate power. But directing an assault against anyone using the IRS and other federal agencies is both wrong and … against the law.

It promises not change but the same rotten, rights-​robbing, goon-​squad government we have now. Just with a different color shirt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Playing cards

 

Categories
Accountability government transparency term limits

Listen to Lobbyists

Institutional Memory

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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Institutional Memory

 

Categories
government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall

Temporal Redistricting

Sneaky Democracy

They must be proud of themselves, the Little Rock insiders who pushed through a vote on a bond measure in hot-​as-​Hades mid-July.

Less than 4 percent of eligible voters turned out for the off-​cycle exercise in 100-​degree democracy. The measure, which refinances previous library bonds and puts an influx of cash into Little Rock public library branches, passed with over four-​fifths of the minuscule turnout.

Now, as bond measures go, this one sure seems like a dream; its advocates say it will reduce, not increase, taxes.

But that July 14 vote!

“There was no organized opposition to the bond refinancing campaign,” we read, courtesy of the Arkansas Democrat-​Gazette. “Still, Pulaski County Election Commission Executive Director Bryan Poe expected a higher voter turnout.” He thought they would get at least 6,000 voters. Still, even that many votes would have amounted to less than 5 percent of the over 126,000 registered city voters.

It certainly wasn’t any surprise, then, that turnout would be tiny and democratic decision-​making left to a tiny fraction of the public.

Detect a certain odor?

It stinks of redistricting. When politicians redistrict voters so that predictable partisan outcomes can be reached — somehow to the benefit of those doing the redistricting — the insiders are not really trying to provide representation to voters. They are trying to continue their business as usual.

“Insiders know best”?

By selecting a summer date for the vote, insiders in effect redistrict the voters using time as the gerrymandering boundary. Call it temporal redistricting, advantaging those with the most at stake in the vote’s outcome.

Call it democracy for the 1 (or 3½) percent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Sneaky Democracy

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Impeach IRS Boss Now

Impeach him

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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Impeach him

 

Categories
folly general freedom government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Safety, Savings and Symbolism

NSA Hydra

How can the U. S. save $2.5 billion a year, reduce the federal workforce by 4,000 hires, and engage in a symbolic act of undoubted patriotism, all at the same time?

Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt A. Mayer, a former DHS employee who claims to have “written more on DHS than just about anyone,” writes in Reason that dismantling DHS would increase co-​ordination and decrease inefficiencies.

Since DHS was put in place, in 2003, to increase governmental co-​ordination in the face of terrorist threats, Mayer’s charge that it serves the opposite cause should … give us pause.

Establishing the DHS didn’t get rid of turf wars. Why would it? It increased the turf rather than merely reroute chains of communication and command. All other agencies still exist. Extra turf exacerbates co-​ordination difficulty.

And then there’s what state and local law enforcement faces: “the multi-​headed hydra.” The federal operation remains fragmented, which “only ensures that key items will fall through the cracks between these departments, whose personnel spend far too much time fighting each other for primacy than they should. Our enemies couldn’t ask for a more fertile environment within which to attack us.”

I added the italics, for emphasis.

Ever since Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency on consolidating bureaucratic departments in the nation’s capital, but delivered, instead, new departments, the “logic” of adding new bureaucracies onto old has proven to be the “easy answer” for insiders. But a transparent failure, for everyone else.

So, start over. Get rid of the inefficient monster.

And take heart: republics don’t have “homelands”; empires do. Let’s stop playing the wrong game.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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NSA Hydra