Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.
Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 5.
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Jack McDevitt
What’s all the fuss?
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) was escorted ahead of all the other passengers onto a United Airlines flight from Houston to Washington, D.C., taking seat 1A in first class.
The congresswoman described it as “nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary.”
Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Simon possessed a boarding pass for seat 1A; she attached a photo to her Facebook post. Yet, Simon was stopped when boarding the plane and told her ticket had been cancelled.
Who cancelled it? United claimed Simon did.
Simon said that’s bunk — and it does seem strange to cancel your flight and then moments later attempt to board.*
“Since this was not any fault of mine,” Rep. Jackson Lee offered, “the way the individual continued to act appeared to be, upon reflection, because I was an African American woman . . . an easy target. . . .”
’Tis the season to cry “racism.”
And yet the congresswoman characterized herself as “kind enough” to apologize “out of the sincerity of my heart” — and “in the spirit of this season.”
Doubt her kindness? You have reason:
- In 2014, Rep. Jackson Lee won Washingtonian magazine’s contest for “meanest” member of Congress — garnering, incredibly, seven times as many votes as the second-place finisher.
- Years ago, after several incidents, Continental Airlines told Jackson Lee that she had to behave or find another airline.
- “You don’t understand,” the congresswoman once reportedly shouted at a staffer. “I am a queen, and I demand to be treated like a queen.”
Not “Queen for a Day,” mind you: Sheila Jackson Lee has been a congressional queen for the last 23 years! And today she is the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee on transportation security.
Feel more secure?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And, if it was truly her own fault, United appears to be overcompensating in compensating Simon, giving her a seat in Economy Plus, a $500 voucher and numerous apologies (though not yet in writing).
Additional Background Information
Daily Caller: Congressional bosses from Hell: Sheila Jackson Lee (2011)
Weekly Standard: Sheila Jackson Lee, Limousine Liberal (2002)
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An Arrest, a Resignation
On December 28, 1797, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason, after being tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine had been an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense. Paine then moved to Paris to become involved with the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him. Paine had not earned friends in the Revolution with his vocal opposition to capital punishment.
“During the whole of my imprisonment,” Paine later wrote, “prior to the fall of Robespierre, there was no time when I could think my life worth twenty-four hours, and my mind was made up to meet its fate. The Americans in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim me, but without success.”
Paine’s imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America. Future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.
With the publication of Paine’s The Age of Reason — a great part of which he wrote in French prison — the American population turned against him,and he died penniless in New York in 1809.
On this date in 1832, John C. Calhoun (pictured above, in his most famous but hardly most becoming portrait) resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first to do so.
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George Bernard Shaw
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.
Government is supposed to serve everybody . . . according to good, old-fashioned republican theory. But most governments serve some more than others. We can define as “corruption” any attempt to make government serve a few at the expense of the many — or the many at the expense of the few.
Illinois is corrupt, and most of us can only watch it get worse. But what can we say about those who live under the Prairie State’s thumb? When citizens see an institution slipping out of control, they can remain passive or take charge. Illinois citizens have petitioned for term limits, redistricting reform and a more transparent legislature only to be blocked again and again by the state supreme court.
What more can conscientious citizens, folks I like to call “liberty initiators” do? Well, they can
- express themselves in criticism as well as offer alternatives;
- vote thoughtfully and be well informed;
- consider running for office or work for good candidates;
- donate money to reform projects.
Alas, these and other expressions of “voice” have not exactly forestalled disaster.
The last resort is to “exit,” leave — vote with your feet.
The population of Illinois has declined. Many have pulled up stakes and fled across the border to Indiana and elsewhere. In the most recent year for which we have data, Illinois lost nearly 34,000 people, more than any other state.*
Unfortunately, this population loss is only an indicator of how bad Illinois State Government is doing. It offers no solution.
Except, of course, for the people who leave.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Idaho has experienced the biggest population increase. See Reason’s reportage.
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Milton Friedman
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.
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Flushing Remonstrance
On December 27, 1657, a group of English citizens in Flushing, New York, who were not themselves Quakers, signed a petition protesting the persecution of Quakers, a document that has become known as the Flushing Remonstrance. An eloquent statement of the principle of religious liberty, it is widely regarded as a forerunner to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
The petition was delivered to Director-General of New Netherlands, Peter Stuyvesant.
“They’ve been burned. They’ve been hammered. They’ve been bludgeoned,” George Washington University law professor Miriam Galston explained to the Washington Post. “They’re trying to survive.”
In this heartbreaking discussion at this special time of year, the “they” are the poor, long-suffering folks . . . at the Internal Revenue Service.
According to the Post analysis, “conservatives” have schemed to “scale back the IRS and shrink the federal government.” (I guess this is supposed to tear at every American’s heartstrings.) Notably, they “capitalized on revelations in 2013 that IRS officials focused inappropriately on tea party and other conservative groups based . . . Among conservatives, the episode has come to be known as the ‘IRS targeting scandal.’”
Note that term of art: episode.
The Post saw no scandal, however — despite the IRS having admitted to harassing, blocking and delaying Tea Party and conservative groups from exercising their most fundamental First Amendment rights to freedom of association and freedom of speech, in some cases for four years.
Instead, the Post decries the response to this gross violation of citizens, a congressional check on the power — and budget — of the agency responsible: reducing the budget for the Exempt Organizations division of the IRS from $102 million in 2011 to $82 million in 2016.
Heavens, Washington is never supposed to work like that! It actually approaches . . . accountability.
The budget cuts, along with hefty settlements the IRS is now paying to victimized groups that sued, make it less likely the IRS will repeat this scandalous . . . episode.
“To many, the IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative and even some progressive groups is not a scandal,” my Sunday Townhall.com column concluded. “To me, that’s the biggest scandal of all.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
N.B. The title reference is to Neil Young’s song, Burned, which begins, “Been burned, and with both feet on the ground . . .”
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Voltairine de Cleyre
A great ethical teacher once wrote words like unto these: ‘I have within me the capacity for every crime.’
Few, reading them, believe that he meant what he said. Most take it as the sententious utterance of one who, in an abandonment of generosity, wished to say something large and leveling. But I think he meant exactly what he said. I think that with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all the sweetness, the tenderness, and the nobility of his nature, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul. I think that within every bit of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of life, from the prehistoric racial morning until now, all crime and all virtue were germinal. Out of one great soul-stuff are we sprung, you and I and all of us; and if in you the virtue has grown and not the vice, do not therefore conclude that you are essentially different from him whom you have helped to put in stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be more even, you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether, or the outside temptation has not come upon you.
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Washington, Decembrist
On December 26, 1799, four thousand people attended George Washington’s funeral where Henry Lee III honored him as ”first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
The Decembrist revolt againt Tsar Nicholas I occurred on the 26th of December in 1825. It was, alas, put down. Later revolts would prove less liberty-minded, more communist, and far bloodier.