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Accountability election law Tenth Amendment federalism

States Still Have a Role

When asked what kind of government had been proposed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin famously responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

But Old Ben did not clarify the nature of the republic. 

It was to be a federal republic. 

In the new Constitution — which was adopted by the states over the next few years — the States were sovereign, the general government given a concise and limited list of tasks to perform.

Since then, nationalism has won most of the big battles, but federalism remains vital as a principle, re-asserting itself in interesting ways.

Most recent? “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton receives huge win with court ruling delivered on Tuesday deeming the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package passed in 2022 unconstitutional,” as Leading Report explained on Tuesday. “This victory marks a pivotal moment in Paxton’s challenge against the legislation, highlighting concerns over the bill’s approval process.”

At issue is Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which President Biden signed in December 2022, with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Lubbock Division, concluding that “by including members [of U.S. Congress] who were indisputably absent in the quorum count, the Act at issue passed in violation of the Constitution’s Quorum Clause.”

As Paxton gleefully summarized, “Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi abused proxy voting under the pretext of COVID-19 to pass this law, then Biden signed it, knowing they violated the Constitution.”

The story, as Leading Report argues, “showcases the role of state attorneys general in upholding constitutional principles and ensuring adherence to legal frameworks within the realm of federal governance.”

The States have some say. Still.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability deficits and debt international affairs

The Shock of Surplus

The current president of Argentina is an avowed “anarcho-capitalist.” He isn’t really — but close enough for government work.

It’s more accurate to say that Javier Milei is a capitalist and libertarian. He has taken on the job of extricating the Argentinian economy from the mire of socialism and corruption — unleashing outlawed market processes.

He seeks to do it not by pushing for micro-changes around the edges of the margins of government spending and intrusions but by figuratively wielding the chainsaw that he literally wielded during his election campaign.

One sign of the success of his “shock therapy” cited by The New York Sun is the “first budget surplus in more than a decade.” A monthly surplus of almost $600 million is the first surplus since the summer of 2012.

But, the Sun quickly adds, Milei’s various radical proposals still face an uphill battle in the legislature. All those people who created the mire are still around.

There are hopeful signs. The lower chamber has already passed a preliminary or framework agreement to make various basic reforms. These include privatizing of currently state-operated companies, deregulation, and revamping of criminal and environmental laws.

The lawmakers “chose to end the privileges of the caste and the corporate republic, in favor of the people,” Milei says.

Meanwhile, though, egged on by unions, thousands of Argentinians have taken to the streets in a general strike to protest the reforms. Milei can win, but it won’t be easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PREVIOUS COMMENTARIES ON JAVIER MILEI

Milei Defends Capitalism
January 24, 2024

Market Rents Work in Argentina
January 23, 2024

Milei’s Chainsaw
January 6, 2024

To End the Great Declension
December 13, 2023

The Outsider Who Won
November 20, 2023

The Ultimate Outsider
October 24, 2023

Two Libertarians, North and South
September 19, 2023

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Accountability folly national politics & policies

Sympathetically Diminished

“I’m sympathetically diminished.”

That’s how legal analyst Jonathan Turley described President Joe Biden’s “victory lap” over news that special counsel Robert Hur would not charge Mr. Biden with felonies for his “willful” mishandling and disclosure of classified documents. 

You see, in the special counsel’s “searing” 300-plus-page report, one reason for not prosecuting Sleepy Joe is that investigators found our president’s “memory was significantly limited.” In interviews, Biden couldn’t “remember when his son Beau died,” CNN explained, “nor the years he was vice president.”

Sure, it’s hard to testify about past criminal willfulness if one cannot remember the past. 

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him,” the special counsel points out, “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Ah, our 81-year-old commander-in-chief! Where did I put those nuclear codes?

Mr. Biden is “someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”

Yes, I certainly have my own misgivings about our commander’s . . . er, cognitive skills. How can a man incompetent to stand trial possibly be competent to preside over the federal government?

Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer and White House counsel Richard Sauber expressed their own doubts “that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”

“Appropriate”?

They claim “a lack of recall” is “a commonplace occurrence among witnesses.”

If not leaders of the free world.

Is our major party choice for president going to be between a sitting chief executive who cannot be charged for criminal conduct because he is “not all there” and one who can be and is being prosecuted, strangely disadvantaged by his pre-octogenarian mental acuity?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability crime and punishment too much government

Stop Causing the Next Pandemic

A lab in Wuhan, China was fiddling with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 when that virus was accidentally or intentionally released into the world.

I would like such a thing not to happen again. I adhere to the radical political doctrine that the world should not be repeatedly ravaged by avoidable pandemics. I especially don’t want to see a pandemic considerably worse than the COVID-19 pandemic.

But politicians and scientists continue to make pandemics more likely by permitting, paying for (with our money), and even defending the gain-of-function research that weaponizes viruses. 

Why, oh why? I hear you ask. The reason, they say, is so they can learn how to better combat these more virulent forms.

And if somebody happens to unleash a lab-enhanced virus capable of killing a third of the human race, will words like “sorry” and “oops” and “now we know how to stop it better the next time” undo the damage?

This danger is one theme of a talk given by U.S. Senator Rand Paul last November. As Paul, author of Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, puts it, “To think that we can prevent future pandemics even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses is the height of hubris. . . . We must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.”

Senator Paul echoes MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, who says “Please stop.” 

Let us have no more experiments “likely to disseminate blueprints for plagues.”

Policymakers and investigators have no inalienable right to threaten the well-being of us all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability government transparency ideological culture

Pandemic Politics … or Poltroonery?

Fear was a major theme — and ploy — during the pandemic. But it’s looking now like the people we have been told to rely upon for our safety are themselves moved by fear. They’re cowards, poltroons.

The Centers for Disease Control wrote an alert in the thick of 2021’s “vaccine” rollout, warning of the dangers of the Moderna and Pfizer jabs.

It was never sent out.

“In the May 25, 2021, email, exclusively obtained by The Epoch Times, a CDC official revealed why some officials were against sending the alert,” explains Zachary Stieber. You see, while an alert to health care professionals using the official Health Area Network system made complete sense, one CDC official gave a clue to her colleagues’ hesitance: “people don’t want to appear alarmist,” you see.

What did we who took the jab risk? Heart inflammation, or myocarditis. The CDC knew this early on.

But did not warn us.

Now, from listening to Dr. John Campbell on YouTube and Rumble, we have learned a lot more (if not in time in 2021) about the myocarditis threat. The takers of the modRNA treatment who are most at risk are those who engage in strenuous exercise soon after inoculation (which explains why the bulk of the afflicted have been boys and young men in the prime of life). Or so I last heard. I am certainly no doctor; I merely rely upon doctors to advise me.

And those doctors, in turn, rely upon official sources of information like the CDC. 

Who did not advise them properly.

Who worry too much about “appearing alarmist” and not enough about relaying the best information.

Poltroons!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability government transparency media and media people

Transient Stars

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UFOs and “flying saucers” made newspaper headlines, and government officials had contradictory things to say about them. Then, soon after 1952’s summer UFO flyovers of Washington, D.C, the government got into the denial game, and the general tenor of the conversation changed.

The federal government, it seems, had instituted a policy of “cover-up.”

This has changed in the last few years, after a military investigation into UFOs went public, and as Congress began making public and confidential inquiries.

What do we really know?

Not much.

Still, that startling 1952 UFO wave appears to have received some additional evidence . . . from an unexpected quarter.

A team of astronomers compared old sky plates from the Palomar Observatory —photographed in the 1950s — to modern digitized pictures of the heavens, searching for “vanishing stars.” Appearing and disappearing stars are a fascinating study, in this research the aim being to detect “instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole.” The scientists found none of these “failed supernova” events. 

But what they found surprised them: “several images where multiple star-like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again.”

They tested many possible explanations for the mysterious data, and then an automated search coughed up a doozy: “The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS-I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure. . . . The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself.”

These were not single bright dots on photographic plates, but multiple simultaneous dots.

As scientist Beatriz Villarroel writes, “our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.”

One wonders whether later mass-sighting events, such as the “Belgian Wave” (November 1989–April 1990) and Arizona’s “Phoenix Lights” (March 13, 1997), might have recorded similar transients above, ready for study. 

Thankfully, we do not need to rely directly upon government agents to do the research.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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