Tag: Congress

Categories
incumbents term limits

Missing in Congress

Congress, term limits, incumbency, age, power

Her “constituents in Texas Congressional District 12 have asked, ‘Where is Congresswoman Kay Granger?’

“Some Tarrant County residents,” The Dallas Express further reports, “have begun to speculate.”

“I’m hearing she’s in a memory care unit,” one posted on X. 

Express reporter Carlos Turcios explains that “the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering, lost, and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.”

Granger, 81, did not seek re-election last November after 28 years in Congress. Thankfully. She has not voted in Congress since July 24 of this year. Which, given the circumstances, is also a good thing.

Her son told the media she was suffering from dementia and had declined rapidly, but that could be a slight stretch.

Don’t condemn the congresswoman, argues former Texas legislator Jonathan Strickland. “Six years ago (as an elected official who worked regularly with/around her) it was obvious she had serious memory issues. She has had no idea what was going on for a while,” he explained, blaming “her friends, family, and staff” who “left her in office for their own benefit.”

The last six years in Congress . . . without . . . cognition. (Is that about par?)

Utah Senator Mike Lee, a fellow Republican, says Granger makes a “compelling case for term limits.” Yes. Sure. Of course. 

Even if these over-the-top instances of incumbency running amok overtime weren’t spilling out so often, however, we would still need term limits. 

The fact that things have gotten this bad is a sign we’ve needed term limits for a very long time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

The Biggest Gift of All

Donald Trump, debt, funding, Santa, Congress, government shutdown

We received an early Christmas present from the incoming Trump administration.

The gift? The torpedoing of a continuing resolution (CR) supported by House Speaker Johnson that was full of concessions to the Democrat side of the aisle. Aside from the drunken-sailor spending, the 1,500-plus-page legislation — just something to tide the government over for a few months — contained many other horrific elements that made it worthy of deletion.

Trump, Vance, and Musk are among those who volubly criticized the pork and other bad provisions of the CR.

Senator Rand Paul said: “I had hoped to see @SpeakerJohnson grow a spine, but this bill full of pork shows he is a weak, weak man. The debt will continue to grow. Ultimately the dollar will fail. Democrats are clueless and Big Gov Republicans are complicit.”

Ostensibly designed to continue funding the federal government after the money had run out, the bill’s poisonous elements included a pay increase for members of Congress and a provision to make it almost impossible for the Trump Justice Department to investigate wrongdoing in the House (such as the evidence-destroying way the J6 investigation was conducted).

Another provision would have extended the life of a State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a censorship office that Republicans have been trying to kill for years. Some Republicans, that is. The ones in favor of freedom of speech. The GEC funds efforts to suppress speech.

But the worst of it was stopped. The CR monstrosity became a much more manageable, much smaller CR; “the government was saved” — and, more importantly, we were saved some of the awful things packed into the earlier resolution.

Still, a lot of people (mainly Democrats) didn’t like their Christmas gift.

And dashed were the holiday dreams of members of Congress, stuck another term at current levels of remuneration.

Ho ho ho.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Firefly and PicFinder

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies

Leverage & Resistance

Speaker of the House, Congress, spending, compromise

“Let’s be clear,” said Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) yesterday, speaking of the difficulty Republicans in the House of Representatives have in finding a new Speaker, “January was a coronation, and it was difficult; this is a competition, and it’s going to be even more difficult.”

Asked about the Steve Scalise (R-La.) candidacy, Rep. Massie replied that at least 20 Republicans would never vote for Scalise as Speaker.

Wednesday, Scalise expressed his honor to have been nominated for the position. Thursday he withdrew his nomination. “There are still some people that have their own agendas. And I was very clear we have to have everybody put their agendas on the side and focus on what this country needs.”

This begs the question. What does the country need? Bad-mouthing the dozen or so who would not support his compromising techniques as pushing “their own agenda” is a rhetorical move, but it is by no means demonstrated. 

Massie made the point that the recently ousted Speaker (whose ouster he did not support) had negotiated a significant concession from the Biden Administration — a one percent reduction in spending for a debt limit increase — and that no candidate for Speaker who would not press this advantage further could be accepted.

The collapse of the Scalise campaign leaves only Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Oh.) in the offing. A far better option. As of this writing, on Thursday night, no one else has thrown a hat into the ring.

It’s a pretty contentious ring, with elbows getting thrown by the Republican Freedom Caucus types leveraging the power they have. The establishment GOP is reeling.

Which is not always a good thing.

And Democrats? Appalled.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. With a $33 trillion debt and growing fast, should everyone blithely march towards oblivion, meekly following the leader in Washington’s favorite version of Kick the Can?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies tax policy

Kick the Can

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R.-Fla.) , Congress, spending

At first blush, it seems like the most pointless political move ever.

When Rep. Matt Gaetz (R.-Fla.) moved to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R.-Cal.) from his role as Speaker of the House, lots of eyebrows were raised, and at least one pair of lips was licked. But did it make any sense?

This has never happened before, a House Speaker ousted by his own party mid-session.

That’s not an argument against the move, though. It was Gaetz who had blocked McCarthy back in January, through more than a dozen votes, allowing the moderate Republican to serve only with explicit conditions. Gaetz now says that McCarthy has failed to meet those conditions. Arguably, that’s accountability in action. Good?

Or mere revenge? After all, McCarthy had just made a deal with a sizable number of minority Democrats to fund the government and prevent a federal shutdown — thus kicking the overspending/insolvency can down the road again. Gaetz and his closest colleagues in the House made the same deal with the opposition party, ousting McCarthy. 

It’s a game of kick the can, however you look at it.

Gaetz argues that McCarthy did not do what was required to bring fiscal responsibility, such as un-package spending bills. “We told you how to use the power of the purse: individual, single-subject spending bills that would allow us to have specific review, programmatic analysis and,” explained Gaetz, “that would allow us to zero out the salaries of the bureaucrats who have broken bad, targeted President Trump or cut sweetheart deals for Hunter Biden.”

But the deed is done. McCarthy’s out. Now, who to replace him?

Funny that no one mentions the wild plan to put Trump into the job — you know, the plan first floated after Election 2020?

It was such a snickered-at notion, just a goofy way of taking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from Joe Biden.

Still, it was a plan. Only in the next few days and weeks will we learn if Gaetz really has one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts