"The squad" reacted to a death on the New York Subway by declaring it was a murder, the result of racism. The facts didn't seem to matter.
by Jarrett Stepman | Reckless politicians and more than a few of their media allies are apparently eager to create another summer of riots. Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, was killed last week on the New York subway F train by an active-duty, 24-year-old Marine who reportedly restrained him by the neck for several minutes. There are conflicting reports about how long Neely was...
[White fragility] is what’s called a Kafka trap, a rhetorical device “where the more you deny something, the more it’s proof of your guilt.”
Kendi proposes an anti-racist amendment to the Constitution, which he wrote about in a short piece in Politico. It’s worth quoting in full:
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.
The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with ‘racist ideas’ and ‘public official’ clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.
The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state, and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
This proposal by Kendi effectively would end self-government and nullify the Bill of Rights. A cadre of intellectuals ensconced in the Department of Anti-racism would have the power to decide who can and can’t run for office, and which laws can or can’t be passed based on their interpretation of what is racist.
Again, racist being defined by Kendi as “one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.”
Which policies fall under the rubric of being racist or anti-racist?
All of them.
“Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” Kendi writes.
For those who believe they can escape the ugly culture war implications of these ideas and focus on economic or fiscal policies, it’s worth noting that embracing socialism and fighting capitalism is a critical element in promoting anti-racism.
And you will oppose capitalism, or else.
An example of racist policy, Kendi writes, is lowering capital gains taxes.
Therefore, a supporter of lower capital gains taxes—or even someone who isn’t actively opposing lower capital gains taxes—may be barred from running for or serving in office by a team of unaccountable bureaucrats in a permanently funded federal agency.
On top of that, this agency would have the power to void passage of a lower capital gains tax in Congress.
Gone are notions of individual rights or limited self-government. Gone are constitutional protections of freedom of speech and association.
Gone is the very bedrock of the system created by the Founders, the Constitution that has bent the flawed but exceptional American system toward liberty and justice.
According to The Washington Post, an internal investigation of a Department of Homeland Security watchdog found that the agency “whitewashed” a series of internal reports about FEMA’s disaster response. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The disclosure led to the resignation of John V. Kelly, a career government auditor and the department’s acting inspector general, who had ordered the reports.
The Post reported that Kelly “chose to flatter FEMA’s staff in some reports, instead of hold them accountable.”
As bad as that is, it gets worse.
“Investigators determined that Kelly didn’t just direct his staff to remove negative findings,” according to the Post. “He potentially compromised their objectivity by praising FEMA’s work ethic to the auditors, telling them they would see ‘FEMA at her best’ and instructing supervisors to emphasize what the agency had done right in its disaster response.”
This led to the extraordinary action in which the inspector general’s office retraced 13 FEMA reports.
Jennifer Costello, the deputy inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, was undoubtedly correct when she wrote that the inspector general’s retraction of the FEMA reports was “not an insignificant matter” and that the reports “represent millions of wasted taxpayer dollars and understandably cast doubt on our credibility.”
So, basically, the glowing FEMA reports left the American people with no idea how to assess the work of our federal disaster response agency, which has a budget of $18 billion as of 2018.
Accountability developed only in 2016 when, according to the Post, House Republicans began to ask questions about a response to flooding in Louisiana that had received a glowing inspector general report based on an internal audit.
First, they came for the bags. Then, they came for the straws, but perhaps instead of looking for other common products to ban, we should look at what these regulations actually do.
In areas with the shopping bag bans, there was a huge upsurge in the purchase of 4-gallon bags. These bags are typically thicker than the thin plastic shopping bags and use more plastic.
“What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” Taylor said in an interview with National Public Radio. “ … so, about 30% of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags.”
In addition, a plastic bag ban causes a jump in the use of paper bags—creating, according to the study, about 80 million pounds of additional paper bag trash a year.
That may seem like a reasonable trade-off. After all, paper bags are biodegradable, right?
Yes, but the process of manufacturing those bags is still quite intensive, and there’s evidence that paper bags are actually worse for the environment, according to some studies.
Not surprisingly, some big-government nannies want to ban, or at least curtail, the use of paper bags also, for good measure.
Douglass delivered his famed speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” at a time when slavery not only existed in America, but was spreading. Yet in that speech he said that America and the men who founded it were truly “great.”
Douglass pulled no punches when it came to slavery, which he considered a great hypocrisy in light of the Founders’ statement that all men are created equal. Yet this great sin did not convince Douglass that America’s foundations were hopelessly flawed.
Far from it.
“I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic,” Douglass said. “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men.”
Douglass insisted that the Founding generation was worth celebrating for all time.
“With them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”
America, in the eyes of Douglass, had always been great. To say otherwise was nonsense.
Douglass understood the difference between his country’s timeless ideals and its failure to live up to them. He only demanded that Americans, if they wished to remain in an exceptional country, uphold the sacred principles that their ancestors had bravely fought for.
It’s through this kind of patriotic criticism that Douglass convinced many of the need to extinguish the evil of slavery, or the promise of their nation would fade and crumble.
Later, when slavery was defeated, Douglass looked back not with contempt, but with gratitude for the country and fellow citizens who made such an achievement possible.
He hoped that this sentiment of thankfulness would “never die while the republic lives.”
As Klein noted, the Congressional Budget Office estimates were a large part of why the individual mandate was adopted in the first place, and a big reason why its repeal didn’t pass. So it’s a wonder why the media isn’t picking this up.
Initial estimates from the Congressional Budget Office said 14 million would drop off their health insurance coverage due to the elimination of the individual mandate. Then, during the height of the 2017 debate over repeal, progressives touted a leaked number from the Congressional Budget Office claiming that 22 million people would “lose” their insurance if Congress repealed the law.
However, as health care analyst Avik Roy pointed out, what made this number so high was the inflated number of people expected to lose their insurance due to repeal of the mandate—about 73 percent to be exact. So, it wouldn’t be 22 million Americans losing their insurance. Most of those in the projection would simply be choosing to opt out of insurance.
And it turns out even that wasn’t true. A far smaller number of Americans appear to be opting out of insurance since the individual mandate’s repeal. Only 2.5 million more people are expected to go without insurance in 2019 due to its repeal, according to the latest report, and that number is expected to decline in the years ahead.
In time, lawmakers become “inattentive to the public good, callous, selfish, and the fountain of corruption," according to a prominent Founding Father.
Kind of an obvious view for this blog, but the reason I’m posting this article is because Stepman also addresses federal agencies and how term limits could weaken Congress while leaving those agencies untouched.
A combination of the Civil Service Act of 1883, which, over time, has made it impossible to fire or remove career bureaucrats once they are hired, and the Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Supreme Court case, which ensures judicial deference to the bureaucracy in regard to regulation, has made the fourth branch vastly more powerful and less accountable than anything the Founders conceived.
Progressive Era reformers successfully created a system that left long-term power in the hands of the technocratic agencies that would handle most of the business of government.
Unfortunately, it’s possible that term limits may further reduce the power of the legislative branch vis-à-vis the agencies, as inexperienced legislators may lack the bill drafting skills to tightly circumscribe agency action.
Term limits may add “rotation in office” to the legislative branch, only to cede additional power to a permanent class of bureaucratic staffers who do not even stand for election.
Additionally, studies on state-level legislative term limits have demonstrated mixed results. The kinds of people holding office generally change very little and the balance of power generally tips toward the executive branch and bureaucracy. Yet the power of party leaders typically declines as well.
