Tag: Congress

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initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary term limits

A Second Life for Limits

Congress, age limit, voters, democracy

Will the Supreme Court let states impose limits on the representatives and senators they send to Washington, D.C.?

Thanks to events in North Dakota, there’s a good chance this question is about to asked again. 

And get a different answer.

The first time was thirty years ago. The case: U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton.

In May 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in a 5 – 4 decision, that states cannot impose restrictions like term limits on their congressional delegations.

But: “Nothing in the Constitution deprives the people of each State of the power to prescribe eligibility requirements for the candidates who seek to represent them in Congress,” observed Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent. “And where the Constitution is silent, it raises no bar to action by the States or the people.”

Now 61 percent of North Dakota voters have passed a ballot measure to impose an age limit on their congressmen. The 1995 Supreme Court would have ruled it unconstitutional. The only justice serving on the high court then who is still there is Thomas.

Everybody thinks that North Dakota’s outlawing of ancient candidates will be challenged in court. In a June 17 podcast for U.S. Term Limits, its president, Philip Blumel, says that USTL would welcome such a challenge.

“Surely, U.S. Term Limits versus Thornton would be the basis” for the challenge and would thus “provide an opportunity for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the issue.”

Moreover, a case brought in federal court won’t necessarily take years to decide, because “sometimes the [Supreme Court] expedites election-​related cases.”

Fingers crossed, everybody.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: Paul Jacob is a former president of U.S. Term Limits and continues to serve on its board of directors. Paul is currently the president of Liberty Initiative Fund, which made significant contributions to North Dakota’s age limits initiative.

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Awkward for Ideologues?

Congress, taxes, wealth redistribution

There’s good news about inequality?

In late March, George F. Will argued that the truth about inequality in America, according to his op-​ed title, is “awkward for the left and right.”

He points to the reality of transfer payments in the United States. 

Ignoring that reality is what leads to awkwardness.

On the left, critics of capitalism portray low-​income earners as a growing class of the impoverished … and high-​income earners as a growing class of filthy rich. 

But by “not counting about 88 percent of government transfer payments that enlarge the buying power of lower-​income households, and not counting taxes that lower the wealth of higher-​income households, government statistics purport to prove that the average income in the top quintile of earners is 16.7 times that of the average in the bottom quintile. Counting transfers and taxes, however, the actual ratio is 4 to 1.”

So leftists ignore the “successes” of the very system they set up, the better to complain and demand more of what has already been done.

But what do rightists ignore?

That’s where Mr. Wills’s Washington Post editors (a class of professionals who usually determine titles and blurbs) may have given us the wrong impression. Most of his column explodes leftist interpretations of contemporary reality. But he does talk about “the populist right,”: the “national conservatives” who mimic the progressive left in favoring “industrial policy” that, he notices (as I’ve noticed here at Common Sense) “regressively funnels money upward to corporations.

“The populist right advocates protectionism (tariffs to shield corporations from competition), and the populist left advocates hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies (for semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, etc.).” Both favor the rich when it comes to regulations, while complaining about the rich in other contexts.

A poor way to help the poor.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship Regulating Protest

Home of the Surveilled 

surveillance, banking, Congress, government, privacy

Abusive investigations that must themselves be investigated are piling up.

In the case commanding our attention today, the meta-​investigating organization is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It is investigating the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Who does FinCEN pursue? True scoundrels? Hapless executives caught in a regulatory net?

Nope. FinCEN has been on fishing expeditions. It hasn’t been going after persons suspected of either willfully committing crimes or even tripping over regulations accidentally, or at least not only such types.

It has been going after anybody whose purchasing history puts them in the category of wrong-​thinking rightists — hence, I guess, crypto-terrorists.

FinCEN has been instructing banks to scan customer records for evidence of suspect purchases. Not illegal purchases. Just “suspicious” in light of an ideological filter, unconstitutionally applied.

On Twitter, Representative Jim Jordan reported recently that the subcommittee now knows that FinCEN required financial institutions to screen transactions in which terms like “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Bible,” and “Bass Pro Shop” popped up. 

Apparently, if you’re fishing while wearing a MAGA cap and quoting Genesis, you just might be on the verge of shooting up your local post office.

Please don’t ask me to explain what anybody involved with FinCEN could possibly be thinking by engaging in this illegal spying. Or whether they have even a glancing acquaintance with constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

I’m just glad Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee are on the job, “watching the watchers.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

Two Roadblocks, and Their Names

Jeffrey Epstein, UAP, UFO, cover up, Congress

Meandering through social media, a popular meme with several variants runs something like this:

“Hey, this guy says the government believes in UFOs!

“See, nobody cares. Now show us the Epstein client list.”

The gist: the Jeffrey Epstein story is a bigger, more important story than the on 70-​plus years of government control of the UFO story.

Well, we now know precisely why we cannot have either: a few specific politicians are blocking disclosure, one Democrat on the Epstein story and a handful of Republicans on the UFO story.

Hillary Vaughn of Fox News asked Senator Dick Durbin (D‑Ill.) why he — the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — won’t subpoena Epstein’s flight logs to and from his private Caribbean island wherein sex trafficking with under-​age females and males went on. His response? “I don’t know anything about his flight logs” and “This has never been raised by anyone.”

This is untrue. 

UFO/​UAP transparency, on the other hand, has gone much further than the Epstein — probably because there are fewer politicians implicated in crimes. Yet two major disclosure elements in a recent defense bill have been nixed by Mike Turner (R‑Oh.) and Mike Rogers (R‑Ala.). Journalist Ross Coulthart, who has covered this story best, ascribes this pair’s opposition to disclosure to their respective military-​industrial complex constituencies. And Coulthart adds that Senator Mitch McConnell (R‑Ky.) also had a hand in disclosure suppression.

Both the Epstein and the UFO story reveal a lot about our government, which wants us to know the truth about neither.

And as for the notion that these issues must be played off each other, the proper memed response would be “Why can’t we have both?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt national politics & policies

Of Stopgaps and Ladders

budget, debt, Congress, shut down

“By law, we have one job,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R‑Tenn.) asserted the last time he opposed the “continuing resolution” (CR) on the federal budget. 

What is that “one job”? It is “to pass twelve appropriations bills and a budget. We aren’t doing that, which is why we are $33 trillion in debt.”

Katherine Mangu-​Ward, at Reason, fleshed this out: “In theory, the president proposes a budget, Congress passes a budget resolution, and then various committees put together a dozen separate spending bills. They’re debated and voted on, and then the president signs them into law by October 1.”

The practice, however, is a bit different: “What happens instead is that the members of the House careen into each fall full tilt, screaming at each other until they throw together some kind of stopgap measure to fund the federal government for a little while longer until they can get their act together to generate a big, messy omnibus bill that no one will have time to read.”

But it’s worse: “When they can’t manage even that, we get a shutdown.”

To prevent a shutdown, but also not fall back into the usual iterations of the continuing resolutions, the new House Speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R.-La.) has floated the idea of a “laddered” CR. According to The Epoch Times, this plan “would spread the due dates over a period of time rather than having all the bills come due at once.” Think of it as an ultra-​weak echo of the responsible budgeting process.

Will it work? Will Congress manage this merest hint of responsibility?

In ten days, it’s go time — or, no-go time — again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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ideological culture national politics & policies

A New Speaker Conjures

New Speaker, Congress, debt, spending

The new House Speaker was a dark horse in the mad rush to fill the position vacated after Kevin McCarthy’s ouster in a historic political play. But Mike Johnson (R.-La.) appears to be a thoughtful man, known more for his prayers than backstabbing, and sporting an interesting set of principles. They are listed on his congressional web page; he calls them the seven “core principles” of conservatism:

  1. Individual Freedom
  2. Limited Government
  3. The Rule of Law
  4. Peace Through Strength
  5. Fiscal Responsibility
  6. Free Markets
  7. Human Dignity

Inspiring, but the devil can bog us in details — under each rubric his elaborations sound more like fantasied ideals than anything like current practice. And for a man who got ahead by having “no enemies,” any real advancement would hardly conjure up consensus and comity.

Johnson acknowledges current government failure — at least in his fifth principle, which he explains entirely in terms of political fault: “Because government has refused to live within its means, America is facing an unprecedented debt and spending crisis. Federal debt now exceeds $33.5 trillion, and our current fiscal path is unsustainable and dangerous, jeopardizing our nation’s economic growth, stability and the security of future generations.” He goes on to express a congressional “duty to resolve the crisis.”

Yet, only standard Republican talking points are offered as back-​up, with zero acknowledgment of the bipartisan difficulty of reducing spending even a smidgen.

Truth is, each of his principles is honored by the federal government only in the breach. While we may hope and pray that the new Speaker takes all of these serious enough to work to change course, we have to wonder: Does he have a prayer? 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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