Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.
Herbert Spencer, “The Evanescence of Evil,” Part 1, Chapter 2 of Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851).
On Jan. 12, 1904, Henry Ford set a land-speed record of 91.37 mph on the frozen surface of Lake St. Clair in Michigan, driving a four-wheel vehicle, dubbed the “999,” with a wooden chassis but no body or hood. Ford’s record was broken within a month, but the publicity from Ford’s achievement was valuable to the auto pioneer, who had incorporated the Ford Motor Company the previous year.
Yesterday, we discovered that the biggest term limits opponent in Arkansas — former state senator Jon Woods — also allegedly led an elaborate legislative fraud scheme, whereby he and a state representative traded tax dollars for cash bribes.
For now, Woods is an unindicted co-conspirator. But last week, the representative involved pled guilty to a felony carrying a possible 20-year prison term and directly implicated Sen. Woods.
Woods’s alleged criminality involves the GIF program — General Improvement Funds. Legislators can personally direct GIF dollars to pet projects and favored cronies, taking political credit. The process is similar to congressional earmarks. And just as corrupting.
In an article entitled, “How a 1997 Power Grab is costing Arkansas taxpayers millions on pet projects,” the grassroots group Conduit for Action explains that the GIF rules changed just before our new millennium, when term limits first cleaned out the state House (1998). The old batch of legislators gave themselves unchecked control over this vote-buying slush fund.
And that is when even bigger corruption surfaced. “A Federal grand jury shook the Arkansas political establishment today with a long list of political corruption indictments that reaches to the apex of the state Legislature,” the New York Times reported in 1999.
Back then, Sen. Nick Wilson was Arkansas’s loudest term limits critic . . . until his three-decade-long career ended with a guilty plea to 133 counts of racketeering and other public corruption.
Interesting that top legislative enemies of term limits, both past and present, wear the Scarlet Letter “C” for corruption. Coincidence?
Term limits are no friend to corruption. And vice-versa.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I renounce the idea sometimes advanced that the state governments ever were or continue to be, sovereign or unlimited. If the people are sovereign, their governments cannot also be sovereign.
John Taylor of Caroline, as quoted in Walter E. Volkomer, ed., The Liberal Tradition in American Thought (G. P. Putnam Sons, 1969)
On January 11, 1571, the freedom of religion was granted to Austrian nobility.
Former Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal pled guilty last week to a felony charge of conspiring “with an Arkansas state senator to use their official positions to appropriate government money to certain nonprofits in exchange for bribes.”
Neal, who embraced graft his first month in office, received $38,000 in “legislating-around” money between 2013, when he entered the House, and 2015.
Court documents mention a number of seasoned conspirators, though not by name. There’s mysterious Senator A, who took Rep. Neal under his crooked wing.
Their scheme, reported Arkansas Business, “direct[ed] $600,000 in state GIF funds to the Northwest Arkansas Economic Development District, which then distributed it to two nonprofit entities.” Those two outfits — Entities A and B — then kicked back dough to Rep. Neal and Senator A through bagmen.*
Arkansas Business sorted out “the alphabet soup of unindicted people and entities.” It turns out Senator A, the ringleader, is someone we’ve encountered before: former State Senator Jon Woods.
Remember Issue 3, the dishonestly-worded 2014 constitutional amendment that weakened term limits (while telling voters it “established term limits”), imposed a gift ban so “tough” that now all legislators can get free meals from lobbyists anytime, and created an “Independent Citizens Commission” (a majority appointed by legislators) that gave legislators a 148 percent pay raise?
That was Woods’s.
His indictment appears imminent.
Meanwhile, Neal’s attorney extends to us his client’s wish that “this case does not overshadow all the good he did while serving as [a] representative.”
What good? The term limits scam.
Neal’s corruption doesn’t overshadow all he did as a legislator — it illuminates it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Three additional conspirators were engaged in delivering the bribe money to Rep. Neal and Sen. Woods. In court papers, these bagmen were referred to as Person A (a lobbyist for Entity A), Person B (“the president of Entity B and a friend of Senator A”) and Person C (“a friend of Senator A and Person B”).
I don’t need to be hit over the head with the unsubtle political musings of a bunch of 105 IQ actors.
Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show, dailywire.com, January 9, 2017
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.
Bernie’s plan will SAVE MONEY through Government Efficiency!
Click here for high resolution image:
“Republicans would create chaos in the health care system because they are stuck,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, “between a rock and a cliché.”
Oh. Off by a word or two. But I don’t need to fix it.
What needs to be fixed is the whole system. “Head clown”* Schumer gloats that it cannot be done. The “delicate balance” that is the Affordable Care Act makes it impregnable. For all Republicans’ talk of repeal, “for five years now they’ve had nothing to put in its place.”
Schumer sees the trap. He set it when he and his comrades voted Obamacare in without reading it. Any new program with any new constituency always presents a set of . . . political hurdles . . . that quickly become “impossible” to jump.
The President-elect, he notes, has supported three of the “most popular” regulations in Obamacare: “pre-existing conditions,” “26-year-olds on parents’ plans,” and sex equality re: insurance rates.
What Schumer fails to mention is that these are three huge drivers of spiraling insurance prices. The Affordable Care Act “delicately balances” medical markets by shifting who pays for what, hoping that the biggest losers† don’t complain too much and the obvious winners never cease protesting‡ any change.
The truth? Obamacare can be repealed. But replacing it would be a disaster. The best plan is no plan. Repeal all the regulations. The federal government should completely deregulate the markets, and prevent states from ruining interstate markets in insurance and health care.
Do what the Commerce clause was designed to do.
Schumer is counting on Republicans to do nothing. Despite signs they’re cooking up something.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*What Trump called Schumer. And in the same tweet dubbed Obamacare “a lie.” Truer words never spoken?
† Obamacare presents a huge burden on the self-employed, self-insured, and on the previously insured, since it is these people who most obviously pay for all the newly insureds. Of course, in the end, everybody pays . . . from increasing prices and decreasing rates of progress.
‡ At least they are the focus of advocacy groups. The poor neatly serve as innocent shields of the spoliators.
N. B. Adapted from this weekend’s Townhall column.
