For my weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WADK 1540 AM show, the topics were Mattiello’s PawSox change of heart, NY “free tuition” and Raimondo, Gina’s change of heart on pot, and Whitehouse’s strange relationship with campaign money.
I don’t have much of note to say about this, but it struck me as odd. This is the Providence Journal’s presentation of a Bloomberg article by Steven T. Dennis, Chris Strohm and Billy House. Here’s the headline and lede:
Investigators: Details needed before Flynn gets immunity
Rep. Adam Schiff says he’ll discuss Flynn’s offer with Senate Intelligence Committee, Justice Department
Schiff is the ranking Democrat on the committee, but the article doesn’t even mention Republican Devin Nunes of California, who is the chairman of the committee. Doesn’t that seem odd?
An obvious point is oddly missing from Ted Nesi’s Notes item on the possible Republican campaign of Robert Flanders for U.S. Senate:
His announcement that he’s exploring a 2018 U.S. Senate run against Sheldon Whitehouse, first reported by the indefatigable Kathy Gregg, had the Rhode Island political class chattering all week. Flanders told me he isn’t doing interviews yet, but suggested in a statement he’d be “a senator that works with Republicans, Democrats, and independents to promote practical solutions.” The former judge is no fool, so he knows the tough odds he’d face – the last time a Republican not named Chafee won a Rhode Island U.S. Senate race was 1930. Flanders would have a number of advantages, including his intellect and a robust Rolodex to tap for donations, which is why some local Republicans are enthusiastic about his chances. He also has some disadvantages: the deep pension cuts he approved as Central Falls’ receiver are ripe for negative TV ads, and President Trump’s unpopularity could allow Whitehouse to effectively rerun his 2006 campaign, which was technically against Linc Chafee but really against George W. Bush. Flanders says he’ll make a final decision “over the next several months.”
Know what I mean? Maybe this, from an item farther down in Nesi’s column, will help:
Two Rhode Islanders who did not visit Trump, however, are Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse – both men skipped a White House dinner for senators the president held on Tuesday night.
Sure, Trump is unpopular in Rhode Island (particularly in those circles with which journalists have the most interaction), but even people who don’t like the president, if they’re just a little pragmatic, can see the advantage of having at least one of our four federal legislators be from the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. The question, then, is whether the Republicans, pragmatic Democrats, and friends of Flanders can outnumber those who like the fact that Whitehouse repeatedly stands out as an especially radical and aggressive voice in the party out of power.
Well, things just heated up in Rhode Island’s 2018 race for US Senate. Kathy Gregg has the scoop in the Providence Journal.
Robert G. Flanders, a former Rhode Island Supreme Court justice, respected Providence trial lawyer and onetime Brown University football star, has taken the first step toward a potential GOP run for the U.S. Senate against two-term Democratic incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse.
This is somewhat out of the blue: rumors where that Justice Flanders was considering, at the urging of RIGOP Chair Brandon Bell, a run for Governor. Justice Flanders isn’t technically announcing his candidacy, as Gregg notes, but rather, he
plans to create an “exploratory committee” to determine whether he will be able to muster the money and support he would need for a potential GOP primary fight and, ultimately, a 2018 run against Whitehouse.
He is certainly clear as to why he sees the need to run, however, as he indicates to Gregg in a statement that includes a nice little zing at the incumbent.
“With the unease and hyper-partisan political environment in Washington,” Flanders said, Rhode Island needs a U.S. senator who “will work across the aisle to unlock innovation and job growth, provide a system of high quality and affordable health care, reform unfair and anti-competitive tax policies, lift regulatory burdens off the backs of small business, promote better education and enhance our security by restoring global confidence in America.”
“In short, we need a climate change in Washington,” he said in a play-on-words on Whitehouse’s signature issue.
If his candidacy is a go, he will first face off in a primary against State Representative Robert A. Nardolillo III (R-Coventry).
This Wall Street Journal editorial offers some worthwhile perspective on the meaning of the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) estimates around Republicans’ initial ObamaCare repeal bill:
The CBO attributes “most” of this initial coverage plunge to “repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate.” If people aren’t subject to government coercion to buy insurance or else pay a fine, some “would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.”
What this finding says about the value Americans attach to ObamaCare-compliant health insurance is damning. If CBO is right, some 14 million people would rather spend their money on something else, despite the subsidies.
In keeping with the general worldview of central planners, if you cease to get something through them, you’ve “lost” it. This attitude permeates government, from charitable grants that local governments give to their preferred charities up to massive federal entitlements. In this case, the government isn’t even just taking credit for something it’s using other people’s money to provide, but behaving as if forcing people to do something gives them that something.
As perverse as that is, it may be the perfect representation of progressive government. It’s like an abusive spouse who rationalizes his or her pathology into the belief that commanding and berating his or her significant other is for the other person’s good.
As for the CBO, the Journal also reminds us that it’s a policy group working off a model, not a mystic order of prophets telling the future.
The Providence Journal and Rhode Island progressives are doing a disservice to the people of our state by advancing a biased and non-realistic perspective on the federal healthcare reform debate.
There are few issues that are more personal or important than planning for the care that can preserve the health of ourselves and our families. But what governmental approach best helps us accomplish this?
Currently, our state is following the federal Obamacare approach of seeking to insure more people with government-run Medicaid or with a one-size-fits-all government-mandated private insurance plan. This approach is in a death-spiral.
Continue reading at Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
Those subsisting on a diet of local news in the Northeast might believe it’s crazy to think the “resistance” isn’t grassroots and that Obama is behind much of the organizing should expand their reading horizons. Here’s Debra Heine, writing on PJMedia:
Leaked audio from a recent “Indivisible” group meeting sheds light on how the anti-Trump activists manufacture hostile environments at Republican town halls.
The audio, obtained by radio station KPEL out of Lafayette, La., features the Indivisible activists plotting to create the false impression that Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy’s support for President Trump is unpopular with his constituents. …
If Indivisible — which recently partnered up with Obama’s “Organizing for Action” — is trying to model itself off of the TEA Party — they’re doing it wrong.
Of course, things are skewed in Rhode Island. Here, a bakers dozen of Indivisible activists get a private meeting with Democrat Congressman Jim Langevin’s chief of staff and partly spend their time thanking the congressman.
In keeping with my post, yesterday, about the government’s impositions on people who dare to work with others’ hair without a license, Jeff Jacoby highlights, in his Boston Globe column, an exchange between Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and hair salon owner LaRonda Hunter during the senator’s debate last week with his Republican peer Senator Ted Cruz.
Ms. Hunter wanted to know how she’s supposed to grow her business when the government imposes thresholds for benefits, like health care, that don’t work within her profit margin. Jacoby:
The exchange could not have been more enlightening. For entrepreneurs like Hunter, a mandate to supply health insurance triggers inescapable, and unignorable, consequences. For Sanders and other defenders of Obamacare, those consequences are irrelevant. They believe in the employer mandate — a belief impervious to facts on the ground.
Lawmakers so often enact far-reaching rules with worthy intentions, but little awareness of how much harm government burdens can cause.
Jacoby goes on to note this classic anecdote about liberal Democrat Senator George McGovern:
After a long career in Congress, former senator George McGovern tried his hand at running a business — a small hotel in Connecticut. “In retrospect,” McGovern wrote after the inn went bankrupt, “I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business. . . . I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day.”
Think of all the idiotic (yes, idiotic) legislation being submitted by the likes of the General Assembly’s quintessentially inexperienced Ivy League legislator Aaron Regunberg. Voters must become the adults in the process, because too many of the politicians and their special-interest-or-ideologue supporters are not capable of playing the role.
Leave it to our own Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to weigh in on the recent price increase of the EpiPen in a way that is both blindingly insidious and enlightening:
The sky-rocketing cost increase of the EpiPen is just the latest evidence that our regulation of prescription drug pricing is broken. (The) system is rigged by the pharmaceutical industry to allow this price-gouging, and that is what needs to be corrected.
Drug pricing doesn’t have to be regulated; it’s regulation of drug production that’s the problem. Everybody from The Guardian to the Wall Street Journal knows that the pricing of the EpiPen is made possible by the government’s enabling of Mylan’s “near monopoly” (as Whitehouse and other senators characterize the company). A Wall Street Journal editorial explains:
… the steady Mylan rise is hard to read as anything other than inevitable when a billion-dollar market is cornered by one supplier. Epinephrine is a basic and super-cheap medicine, and the EpiPen auto-injector device has been around since the 1970s.
Thus EpiPen should be open to generic competition, which cuts prices dramatically for most other old medicines. Competitors have been trying for years to challenge Mylan’s EpiPen franchise with low-cost alternatives—only to become entangled in the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory afflatus.
Of course, when I write “everybody,” I’m limiting my set to those who are modestly well informed. A little economic understanding helps, too. Let me repeat something I write regularly: Prices are measurements of value. If a price goes up a great deal, especially if it does so quickly, that means people want more of the product than they’re able to get, and it’s a signal to other producers that they should enter the market, even at great expense.
Immediately after a devastating hurricane, it may seem predatory for people with chainsaws and water bottles to charge super-high prices, but their doing so not only forces affected families to weigh the value of the assistance, but also sends a signal far and wide that it’s worth people’s time to invest in tools, supplies, and gasoline and travel to the affected spot. Of course, as a moral matter, we should all approach such situations in a spirit of charity, but by the same principle, we shouldn’t stroke our own moral vanity by insisting that only those with the right intentions can help.
In the case of pharmaceutical gouging, the focus of Congress should really be on creating laws that require smarter, lighter handed, less capricious regulation and therefore allow more companies to offer comparable products at competitive prices. Unfortunately, it’s so much more profitable for progressive politicians to empower unaccountable bureaucracies to manipulate the market and create “near monopolies” that make the politicians’ corporate friends and donors rich and allow the politicians to posture in meaningless poses while grabbing more power to repeat the process.
Mark Zaccaria suggests that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse should back away from his attacks on Constitutional rights and focus on making a positive difference in people’s lives.
The man-made conflict between trees and federal disability law is a fine example of why most government should be done locally (to the extent it has to be done at all):
Town officials say they are facing a painful dilemma: They can’t make the sidewalks accessible to the handicapped and save the trees.
]Nearly 80 years after the Works Progress Administration installed the curbing and sidewalks during the Great Depression, the thick trunks and roots of the trees planted along the road are blocking and buckling the pedestrian way.
The situation came to a head recently when the town began reconstructing King Street, a quiet road one block east of Main Street and just south of the downtown. Once the town undertook substantial repairs to the road, it triggered federal requirements that the sidewalks comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to Public Works Director John Massed.
For a before-and-after picture, click the link above and watch the related video. The camera shot at the 20-second marker shows the street with one side de-treed and the other not.
As communities, we do have a responsibility to accommodate those with the misfortune of being disabled, but dictating minute policies from Washington, D.C., is lunacy bordering on tyranny. If the responsibility were local, neighbors could figure out solutions that work best for everybody involved, answering questions like, “What are the odds that a disabled person is going to go down this street so often that both sides have to be cleared of trees?”
We’ve reached the point of the absurd. When the Tiverton Yacht Club reopened this year (after a fire and years of legal battles), members could not use the second floor. Hefty barriers blocked the stairs, not because the upstairs was unfinished or otherwise unsafe, but because there had been a delay in installing the elevator required for people with disabilities. A private club, using the property mainly for a children’s camp, a swimming pool, and the occasional social gathering, could not let members upstairs because some hypothetical disabled person wouldn’t be able to get up there for a couple of months.
Now apply this observation to the thousands and thousands of pages of laws and regulations passed at the national level that affect our lives in ways we can’t so obviously see.
Rhode Island Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has repeatedly shown that he’s got no problem using government to go after people and groups he perceives as political enemies. He’s sympathetic to the literal conspiracy of attorney generals to prosecute those who take a different view on the question of climate change, and now he’s coordinating a smear campaign from the floor of the Senate.
Whitehouse’s office circulated assignments for his fellow Democrat senators for a two-day extravaganza of attacking private center-right think tanks and advocacy groups, from the local (Nevada Policy Research Institute) to the national (Heritage Foundation), from the morally focused (Acton Institute) to the libertarian (Reason Foundation).
To be sure, much of this is the pure stagecraft of politics, but it ought to, in any event, make us a little uncomfortable. The senators are using a government podium to embark on a coordinated attack on Americans, dividing the country as if their domestic opposition is the real enemy. One could suggest that it would be incorrect to see Whitehouse as representing all of Rhode Island. He represents a specific worldview, and he’ll use our money and other resources to advance that worldview and impose its conclusions on everybody who live within the borders of his reach.
English has multiple words by which to describe that sort of behavior.
Arthur Chrsitopher Schaper commiserates with Rhode Islanders as a California conservative represented by an anti-2nd Amendment sit-in progressive.
The Wickford Junction is an unmitigated disaster. So, of course, it makes sense (???) to strive to repeat it in Pawtucket.
Rhode Island has taken its biggest step yet toward building a new train station to serve Pawtucket and Central Falls, requesting $14.5 million from the federal government to cover about a third of the project’s cost.
But a new train station in Pawtucket would net only eighty nine new riders per day, with hundreds more poached from the South Attleboro and Providence stops. By the way, it isn’t just federal dollars that would be involved.
Separately on Tuesday, the House Finance Committee is scheduled to take up a bill sponsored by Rep. Carlos Tobon, D-Pawtucket, that would appropriate $10 million to help underwrite the cost of the Pawtucket train station. Tobon proposed a similar bill pegged at $20 million last year.
RIDOT is currently looking to fill a $126,648 – $140,920 position of “Administrator, Office of Transit, New Starts, Operations and Transportation Alternatives“. It looks from the job description that this proposed new train station would fall under the purview of this position. Is this taxpayer-funded job the sort of “opportunity to transform the area and provide much needed economic opportunity for local residents” that RIDOT Director Peter Alviti is referencing when he tries to justify this completely unneeded project?
This is serious derangement. The “If You Build It, They Will Come” approach to expensive public transit projects didn’t work in Wickford. We know NOW it won’t work in Pawtucket, either. So why are our elected officials working to repeat Wickford’s costly mistake in Pawtucket?
Back when Rhode Island’s Junior Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse led the charge to mandate the audio of television commercials, I suggested that “government regulation of television volume is not likely to signal the end of the republic, but the oppression of ‘there ought to be a law’ is a patchwork, encouraging voters to acclimate to the big government mentality and investing them in its exercise of power.”
Having gone some years without another such coup, Whitehouse is apparently at it again, as Shaun Towne reports:
“There’s a big, it appears, emerging scam of selling people cheap, lousy products that have been misdescribed for purposes of getting their business,” said Whitehouse.
Rhode Island’s junior senator is pushing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on fraudulent clothing websites. In a letter to the agency, Whitehouse said the websites “…use stolen photographs and deep discounts to lure consumers into buying products that are indeed “too good to be true.”
One suspects laws against stolen photographs and false advertising are already in place, so it isn’t clear what a “crack down” would entail, but is this really the sort of stuff-of-life priority that a U.S. senator should have?
It’s not coincidental that Whitehouse is also arguably the nation’s leading advocate for using innovative legal maneuvers to intimidate and “crack down” on organizations that disagree with his conclusions about climate change. Building on what I wrote in 2011, a public that gets used to having government go after every little inconvenience or example of advantage-taking will produce a weakened backlash when that same government begins taking advantage of the new practice in order to punish political enemies and help political allies (while enriching politicians).
Well, this is quite the interesting and unexpected development.
House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Karen MacBeth of Cumberland filed official paperwork with the secretary of state’s office on Monday afternoon, telling a crowd of reporters she thinks Democrats no longer represent Rhode Islanders effectively.
In a conversation tonight with WPRO’s Matt Allen, Rep MacBeth cited the jamming through of tolls last month in only “thirteen days” over the objections of “screaming” voters as the straw that tipped her to make the decision to change parties.
With regard to a potential run for Congress from the First District, MacBeth told Allen that she expects to make that decision in approximately the next week. Um, has someone let her know that, if she does run for Congress, she would almost certainly face a primary challenger in September?
Ted Nesi’s Saturday roundup column gives Rich Davidson, the spokesman for far-left-radical Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, room to offer some spin related to the senator’s push to make a crime of disagreeing with him on climate change:
Simply denying climate change isn’t what Senator Whitehouse believes could violate federal law. Like courts found with tobacco companies, it can be a violation of the federal civil RICO statute when companies engage in an enterprise designed to mislead the public about the dangers of their products. The senator’s questions to the attorney general were to learn whether the Department of Justice is doing its due diligence to investigate whether fossil fuel special interests are leading a coordinated fraudulent effort to deceive the American people.
Two observations. First, the entire effort, including Whitehouse’s public pronouncements and especially the hearing with the attorney general, is an excellent example of how government can make the process the punishment and use broad threats to chill speech and activity. What company or organization wants federal law enforcement agencies rifling through its files or telling the public that it’s under investigation for potentially criminal activity? This sort of “due diligence” is thug government.
Second, it doesn’t get nearly as much press coverage as it should — particularly when the media presents Whitehouse’s tyrannical overtures as just a bit of he-said-she-said politicking (at worst) — but in this entire controversy, it’s the government that looks like a more likely candidate for RICO investigations. Consider, for example, the relatively minor matter of an Obama administration video promoting propaganda about how “climate change” is producing polar vortexes (i.e., how global warming makes winter colder). When the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) requested through official channels that the video be corrected and then requested documents substantiating the refusal of that request, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) engaged in a time-and-money wasting exercise to keep its documents secret, lying about the nature of the video.
Now, one could interpret the White House’s actions as evidence that it wants to hide its efforts to deceive the public, or one could interpret them as a bid by an over-sized organization that overspends its revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars every year to drain scarce resources among its ideological opponents. Either way, Sheldon Whitehouse comes out looking objectively worse as a representative of the people of Rhode Island.
If only there were some way the news media could provide residents with an accurate picture of their junior senator and the schemes of which he’s a part…
Rhode Island’s own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat) led off episode 4 of Mark Levin’s new online show. Reviewing a clip of Whitehouse presenting an obviously prepared line of questioning for President Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, Levin draws parallels between Whitehouse’s content and presentation and the sort of government activity we used to expect from the Soviet Union.
Without any specifics — leaving much to the imagination and the insinuation — the senator and the AG discussed criminal and civil investigations of private companies that aren’t fully in line with the required climate change ideology. Levin suggests that the entire performance isn’t meant to enlighten the senator from Rhode Island, but rather to get the message out there in the air, so to speak, that companies should start worrying about an FBI knock on the door. “It’s as tyrannical as is possibly imaginable.”
The idea is to intimidate the public in order to prevent real debate over public policy. In practice, the government doesn’t have to take oppressive action to the extent that people believe that oppressive action is always a possibility. The great majority of people (including business leaders) just want to move along with their lives, and so they’ll respond to implied threats from officials. Then, those who either won’t or can’t capitulate so easily seem like extreme cases and are easy to marginalize in an environment in which everybody else just wants the tension to go away.
This is how freedom dies, and it’s sad to see how large a role even little Rhode Island has managed to play in the process through its electoral choices.
Well, at least one government labor union representative has remorse that she didn’t sooner tell the Republicans who actually did something about atrocious behavior at Veterans Affairs facilities because they were Republicans:
“If I would’ve gone to him two years ago, who knows what kind of lives could’ve been saved,” Germaine Clarno told a radio interviewer Monday, referring to the Republican leader of a VA subcommittee. Clarno, a lifelong Democrat and social worker at the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Hines, Ill., was president of the union representing doctors at the hospital as the deadly wait-time scandal unfolded.
On the other hand:
But there is no remorse in Wisconsin. The union is now running ads against [Republican Senator Ron] Johnson, faulting him for not acting on information he was never given. The public employees union is campaigning for Russ Feingold, a Democrat who preceded Johnson in office and is now running to retake the seat.
Maybe someday Americans will look back at this era of our history and marvel at how little we resisted despite the obvious and predictable harm when a particular ideology and labor structure brought together a political party, labor unions, and cultural institutions all in the service of an ideology placed above the country they were supposed to be serving and even the lives of people like the veterans who have died for lack of care.
A quick word on the “YouGottaBeKiddingMe” portion of Providence Journal columnist Edward Fitzpatrick’s “Fitz Hits” notes, today. He writes:
A group of top constitutional law scholars, organized by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, said the Senate’s “advice and consent” duties contain no exception for election years.
One needn’t be a lawyer from a left-wing activist group that exists solely for the purpose of “countering the activist conservative legal movement” to read the Constitution. That document — the starting point for our laws, which no code, regulation, or legal ruling can contradict — puts the appointment of Supreme Court justices in Article II, pertaining to the presidency, not in Article I, pertaining to Congress.
In keeping with that placement, it makes perfect sense that there would be “no exception for election years” on the Senate’s authority to approve of the president’s nominations. There are no imposed responsibilities on the Senate from which exceptions would be needed. Simple as that.
Rather, the Senate’s involvement is a restriction on the president. The president cannot appoint Supreme Court justices without considering the Senate’s advice and earning its consent. President Barack Obama has done nothing to earn the Senate’s consent and has done quite a bit to advise the body against giving his presidency that significant of a reach into the future.
Even a mildly objective commentary from those to the left of political center should acknowledge that Obama has done himself no favors with the Republican Senate over the past seven years and argue why the Senate should ignore that history for this particular reason. To the extent that they just assert that the Senate has a duty to review the president’s picks (particularly insinuating a presumption of approval), readers can reasonably infer that their motives are partisan or ideological.
Poll findings about trust in government at different levels and in different states might reveal a contradiction for progressives and a dark future for Rhode Islanders.
Today’s edition of the Providence Journal offers an end-of-the-year snapshot of why the state is struggling and likely to continue doing so.
The warning signs for civil unrest are all there, plain to see, but America’s ruling class is marching along nonetheless
Those who wish to re-engineer our society to better fit their tastes (and usually their own personal financial interests) have been staying quiet about RhodeMap RI and its related plans. The juggernaut keeps moving, though, with the persistence of the Obama Administration; the money never runs out, largely because it’s not real money.
As Ken Blackwell and Rick Manning mention, Congress is in the process of removing funding for enforcement of a rule propagated by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). Basically, federal bureaucrats use their limitless resources as a bribe for states, cities, and towns to commit their neighborhoods to social experimentation. (One suspects that we’ll be able to tell who’s really rich and/or influential by the fact that their own neighborhoods will remain untouched.)
This method raises an interesting point:
Refusal to comply with these invasive, unfunded mandates would empower the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to withhold millions of dollars in community development block grants from the area – effectively turning this $3.5 billion annual program into a political redistricting tool.
Like a drug dealer, the federal government has worked, over the years, to hook more-local governments on federal funds, which allows them to skirt mechanisms in the U.S. Constitution designed to prevent an overly powerful national government. The HUD bureaucrats aren’t specifically mandating local zoning rules, but they’re dangling a pretty big lure on that hook.
Some of us find it difficult to understand why it’s so difficult just to refuse the money, but our political system has come to be built for invidious incentives. Doing things with money that comes from a higher tier of government gets elected officials credit for spreading money around and getting things done without their having to suffer the consequences of taking that money away from somebody. The feds take that heat.
But then, they really don’t. Until the early-to-mid 1900s, the federal government ran surpluses more often than it ran deficits. Since then, surpluses have been very rare, and the deficits have been massive. Since Obama took office, the average annual deficit has been nearly a trillion dollars, and the government expects them to continue at around a half-trillion dollars for the foreseeable future.
That is, our local governments are being bought off with money that nobody currently in office has to take responsibility for collecting at any level. That’s not how our government is supposed to function; rather, it’s a recipe for lost rights, followed by disaster.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, from Rhode Island, isn’t backing off his suggestion that government should investigate his political opposition.
When a U.S. Senator is treating political opponents as comparable to Scarface, it’s a safe bet that some special interest has something to gain.
Conspicuously absent from the list of Jewish Congressional Democrats who have come out against President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is Rhode Island’s David Cicilline, and Arthur Christopher Schaper wonders what’s taking him so long.
It’s difficult to say which is more astonishing: President Obama’s willingness to skip Congress and adjust the crown that he imagines himself to wear or the news media’s lack of interest in calling him on it.
That’s from a general point of view; from a pragmatic point of view, neither is very astonishing, considering that they both see themselves as left-wing activists. The president wouldn’t attempt such things as creating new energy law without bothering with our elected legislature if he didn’t expect the news media to cover for him, and the news media wouldn’t ignore it if the partisans and ideologues who compose it didn’t support the Democrat party or disagreed the policy.
But any American with even a passing education in civics should read the following and ask, “Umm, where does he get the authority to do that?”
Touting the plan at a White House ceremony, Obama described his unprecedented carbon dioxide limits as the biggest step ever taken by the United States on climate change. On that point, at least, his opponents agreed. They denounced his proposal as egregious federal overreach that would send power prices surging, and vowed lawsuits and legislation to try to stop it.
The federal overreach isn’t even half of the problem. Even if the federal government had the Constitutional authority to impose such a policy on the states, how in the world does the president, acting unilaterally through a regulatory agency, have the authority to make “the biggest step ever taken by the United States on climate change”? This ought to be the stuff of impeachment and revolution, because it means we simply do not have a federalist, Constitutional, representative democracy.
We still get to elect the president… for now and discounting the realities of media bias, voter fraud, and immigration policy designed to counteract the American electorate… but this is not how our system is supposed to operate.
One suspects, frankly, that the move (indeed, the entire climate change hysteria) is primarily intended as a ruse to eliminate the rights of the people to control their own government and, therefore, their own lives. As Betsy McCaughey notes in The American Spectator, the amount of actual improvement in climate change results (even assuming the questionable models are correct) is minuscule.
If the American people don’t wake up and see through this very soon, we deserve the next step in this takeover of our country.
Senator Whitehouse’s notion of expanding the application of RICO suits might point the weapon in the wrong direction.
I’m with Kevin Williamson on this stunning Washington Post op-ed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. It’s dispiriting to read the very wealthy senator from Rhode Island crossing well into the range of McCarthyism, if not fascism. I mean, look at this:
To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.
The suggestion is clear. Laying the background for the tobacco industry part of the comparison, Whitehouse writes, “Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too.” And “finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.” That’s what the senator wants to attempt to do to organizations that express skepticism about climate change alarmism.
To what couldn’t this principle apply? Maybe same-sex marriage advocates have studies showing that children do just as well without their own moms and dads. Start a Congressional investigation! Or maybe the gun industry is conspiring to hide evidence that eliminating the Second Amendment would make Americans safer. Or maybe Grover Norquist has buried a report proving that high taxes are good for the economy and freedom. Or (and here’s the goldmine) internal memos among Republican groups might prove a big-dollar conspiracy to fool the American people into believing that the Democrats have become a party of ultra-wealthy radicals who have no interest in helping average Americans prosper and who lack the competence to achieve that goal, even if they believed in it.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. We’ll never know if we don’t start investigating every conservative organization.
This is not a difficult one. Even people (including journalists) who agree with all of the senator’s political positions should be able to see that. Whitehouse is way off the deep end, here, and he ought to be called on it. (But he won’t be.)