Tag: National

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politics

Dump Cheney

I was so disgusted with the lame excuse offered by our VP – that he is not part of the Executive Branch of government – that I did a little research to see how much of a legislator he is. Vice Presidents have cast 243 votes in the history of our nation (a little more than 1 per year) Cheney has cast 7 votes in just under 7 years so he’s right on track. By contrast, John Kerry was often maligned in 2004 for missing votes on the Senate floor while he was running for president. Although he missed more than 90% of the votes he still cast 16 votes that year. If Cheney is doing 7% of the work of an absentee senator without being part of the Executive branch then he should be working gratis (no charge) because I am convinced that he is not working pro bono (for the public good).

I have never been a big fan of Cheney and I thought he should be replaced years ago, but by now I have long given up hope of that. I was surprised to find A GOP Plan To Oust Cheney today. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really think this plan will happen although it certainly would be a step in the right direction.

Categories
politics

June Candidate List

It’s that time again when I review my current status on candidate endorsements. In the last month I manage to finish the whole list of candidates plus one who was not on the list a month ago. Despite all my work, the list this month is as long as the list last month:

  • Mike Huckabee
  • Alan Augustson
  • Wayne Root
  • Joe Schriner
  • Jon Greenspon
  • Charles Maxham
  • Bob Hargis
  • Fred Thompson
  • Daniel Imperato

The sad thing is that once you consider that two of the candidates on the list last month should not have been on the list (one was not running for president and I forgot that I had already covered the other one) you find that the list is actually longer at the end of the month than it was at the beginning. I have quickly glanced at all the candidates on the current list to make sure that they are all supposed to be on the list. Based on that quick review I am hoping that I can cover a large number of these candidates in a short period of time.

I’d like to get done with this soon so that I can review the endorsements and give some clarification on my positions with regard to the candidates. Not all my endorsements are equal and I want to get through all the candidates before I try to explain who I think are the best candidates and not just who is qualified enough to deserve votes.

Categories
culture politics

Right Thinking

Townhall is not a place I have linked to before because much of what I see there is more partisan than I would care to pass along. Surprisingly today there are two articles there that give me hope that there are still active Republicans who stand for something besides being not Democrats (there are also Democrats who are more than not Republican, but I discovered that a while back).

In the first column, the author rejects the most famous sound bite of the second Republican Presidential debate where the media latched on to the sound bite from Rudy Giuliani and allowed him to twist the words of Ron Paul about terrorism and 9/11 to the detriment of this less popular candidate. Ron Paul gave an insightful answer about the situation we are in but the media covered the sound bite response. Typical.

In the second column, the author reminds us what the Republican party used to be known for and what they claim to represent. By the time I was done with that I wanted to ask the current Republican party which is worse for our economy and our future generations – a spend and don’t tax leadership or a tax and spend leadership? The answer should be obvious. We need to be talking less about funding welfare and saving social security and more about helping people get off of welfare and helping them not be dependent on social security. More importantly we should be doing things to reduce the perceived need for such programs.

So my point is, it’s no wonder that things aren’t looking good for the GOP right now – their words (especially historically) and their actions are inconsistent. That is bound to inhibit people from trusting them even if they like their rhetoric. When people don’t trust them they are less likely to make an effort to vote for them.

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politics

Balanced Government

I have long believed that Utah needs balanced government. I have made most of the same arguments on this issue as were raised in that article. Having a single party in power does not generally provide the give-and-take, compromise-and-entertain-new-ideas environment that is the strength of a democratic society. One of the problems that encourages the current dominant-party situation in this state is the blurring of the proper separation of state and federal government. (And you thought I was going to talk about church and state separation.) One of the major causes for this blurring is that the federal government has been given power in many areas that were once reserved to the states. The It’s-a-Small-World mentality means that we think everything is local and we have to make our local decisions based on national implications.

The Utah County Democratic Party tried to make some distinction between different spheres of government last year by adopting a platform that was less like the platform of the Democratic National Committee and more closely aligned to the mainstream voters of this very conservative region. Now they face some resistance from local democrats who are more in favor of the national platform. In a place where the other party has more than 10 times the number of members your party has the initial move makes sense, but what does that imply about the relationship between the national party and the county party? How far from the national platform can you go and still retain the party name?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the idea that there should be no correlation between the platforms is as useless as the idea that there should be no variation between them. I hope that the balance here can be found so that Utah will have two viable parties throughout the state and not a ruling party and an opposition party such as we now have.

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politics

Where Do I Fit

This morning I was thinking about my political orientation and wondering where I fit. I’m independent from a republican region. I am more and more in favor of a smaller federal government. I am convinced that we rely too much on the government, especially for things that the government is not well-suited to address. Libertarian ideals hold some appeal for me, except that I think there should be some measure of social norms that people should conform to – the chaos of anything being acceptable does not make an environment conducive to prosperity. This sounds republican so far, but I also believe that there are things that are more in line with the democrats or green party – such as the need to be responsible in our treatment of the earth and its resources – that tend to be ignored more in republican circles in favor of shortsighted business interests.

Conveniently, I ran into a pre-debate analysis of tonights republican presidential debate which offered some insights for me:

To what extent are the candidates going to be playing to a national audience rather than a California audience . . . There are issues that are important here — the environment and global warming, energy conservation, stem cell research — that are not as important in other states.

From the sound of it I have a lot in common with California Republicans – who’d have guessed.

Categories
culture life politics

Non-Binding Resolutions

While listening to NPR today I heard a senator talking about many agreements we have made with the Iraqi government where the Iraqi’s failed to do what they promised. He attributed that failure to the fact that “the agreements [had] no teeth.” That got me thinking. We don’t have to look outside our country to see ineffective government posturing related to agreements without teeth. Just look at any non-binding resolution ever passed by a legislative body. For that matter we can look at any legislation that gets passed without funds to carry it out. In case anyone is wondering – legal teeth start like this “$” and end like this “.00” and each digit that comes between that beginning and that end constitutes a tooth. For private citizens three teeth is generally enough to encourage compliance, but once we start dealing with governments and corporations it takes a lot more teeth to be convincing.

I think that wherever government passes any measure to redistribute wealth there must be teeth to ensure compliance with the law, and great care that the law be written to discourage abuse of any such program. I believe that government should generally avoid such laws because bureaucratic programs tend to be magnets for abuse, especially where money can be gained, but when they do legislate those things they need to put teeth into the law.

That lead my train of though onto a new track – we have our share of non-binding resolutions at home with the kids. As I think about it there are times (at least times in the home) when laws without teeth are a good thing. The children should learn to obey because it is the right thing, or because they trust us, not merely because they will lose some privilege.

So my question is, when do you think teeth are necessary? When do you think that they are unnecessary? I ask this not just with regard to government, but also to home and community situations.

Categories
culture politics

Massive Do-Over

I have been thinking and reading about political issues like congressional seats for Utah and Washington DC, where America currently stands on abortion, and the complexity and complaints about unfairness in our tax system. I’d love to write a post about almost all of these topics, but then I got to thinking – what if we just started over.

Pretend that we put a freeze on federal law and started a constitutional convention to rewrite our government from the ground up. We would rewrite the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. All federal agencies would be scrapped although the military and others employed by the current agencies could probably expect that many of them would have similar opportunities under the new system. We would appoint a fresh slate of leaders – no consideration of when their terms would have ended under the current system because we might not even have the same positions available in the new system.

Now I’m not saying that we should do this, I’m asking what might happen if we did.

My own suspicion is that we would keep the structure of a bicameral legislative branch as well as an executive branch and a judicial branch. Beyond that, what would be said of issues like abortion or who has what kind of representation? What new balance of power would emerge between federal and state governments? At least two Constitutional amendments would disappear (because they cancel each other out) but would more go? What social issues might show up as new amendments?

Help me out here – what do you think this would produce? Does it differ from what you think it should produce?

Categories
politics

The Electoral College

I have found Oval Office 2008 to be a great place to go for commentary on the 2008 Presidential elections. Normally they don’t get into politics outside of the presidential candidates, but today they made an exception. They reported that Maryland had enacted a law which would assign their electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of who wins in Maryland. The only catch is that the law will only go into effect if states representing at least 270 electoral votes enact similar laws. There are a number of states that have considered doing something like this. Who knows what will happen.

There is an interesting discussion in the comments of that post about the constitutionality of this move. My own feeling on the subject is that I would always oppose this type of move. I think that the founding fathers did not create the electoral college on a whim and I don’t buy the argument that it was because they could not count the popular vote without a computer. Then again, I think that each state should award their electoral votes proportional to the results of the popular vote in their state rather than block voting. That would make it so that candidates would find some value in appealing to states with small electoral vote constituencies. It would also mean that they could not afford to ignore a large state where they have no chance of winning outright.

I have argued before that under the current system it does not matter if you are from Utah or New York, your vote does not count in national elections because the electors in your state are predetermined. The current system has its flaws, but I’m not sure the system of just going with the winner of the popular vote is better. We are a republic after all and not a democracy. This was by design so lets be careful before we redesign the system.

Categories
politics

The Beltway

I heard a story on Talk of the Nation today about the firing of federal prosecutors(Blog of the Nation post). The thing that caught my attention was that they were going to discuss how different the coverage on this story was “outside the beltway.” If anyone is unfamiliar with the term – “inside the beltway” is Washington D.C. (specifically the politicians) and “outside the beltway” is the rest of us. Unsurprisingly the conclusion was that this story was getting much less coverage from the rest of us. As I heard that I think I know why that is. I believe that most people outside the beltway hear about these kinds of stories and think “oh boy, another stupid move by a politician – why am I not surprised.”

I then wondered why this should be so newsworthy inside the beltway. Surely they are even more aware of the constant stream of questionable decisions by politicians. My best guess is that they find it newsworthy not because they are surprised by the news, but because they enjoy the circus they live in. They do not care about the latest poor decision so much as they care about how the whole political establishment will react and what the outcome will be. They just want to know whose job is on the line and who will benefit politically from the mess.

Perhaps I’m cynical, but if I’m right it’s no wonder nothing really serious can get done in Washington D.C. for the right reasons anymore.

Categories
culture politics

Partisan Playground

Three days after the elections I get an email calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. It sounded a lot like playground politics. “You impeached our president so now that we are in control of congress we will impeach yours.” I thought it was typical of staunch partisans that they would exaggerate their position from the outset. The email started with:

“On Election Day, the American people voted overwhelmingly for change.” (emphasis mine)

I wonder about the threshold they use for “overwhelming.” The fact is that if every race that remains undecided were to fall to the Democrats there would be 42 seats that changed hands in the House and the Senate combined. That is only 8% of the 535 seats in Congress. Only 6% of the Senate changed and 10% of the House. That sounds like a vote for change, but not an overwhelming vote for change. In fact, 25% of the seats that changed were still in doubt after 24 hours. (All the numbers I am using assume that every seat still in doubt goes blue.) To make this vote less overwhelming, the talk now is how the incoming Democrat representative are pragmatic and populist more than liberal. We really don’t know what to expect from this new Democrat controlled congress. See Update

I visited the forum where the email originated and found more level-headed thought being expressed. Things along the lines of, “President Bush deserves to be impeached, but it won’t accomplish anything positive in the country, so don’t bother.”

Nancy Pelosi, likely the next Speaker of the House, has indicated that she will not pursue impeachment. Level-headed people from across the political spectrum will agree with her that impeachment is not a good course of action for the country at this time. The partisan impeachment proceedings against President Clinton should serve as proof of why we should not go down that road right now. At least when the Republican congress impeached Clinton they could be forgiven for having no memory of the last time we had an impeachment. This Democratic congress has no such excuse.

I looked around the forum site and they had a poll for people to vote on what they would like to see happen in the first 100 days of the new congress. They categorized the various suggestions. I discovered an interesting trend as I read the options. I found that I agreed or disagreed with them on a category by category basis.

  • Constitution & Courts
    • I disagree heartily with almost every option
    • I especially disagree with the constitutional amendments they propose
  • Economy, Business, Labor
    • I agree with some of the options
    • I am undecided on some of the options
    • I disagree with a couple of the options
  • Elections
    • I agree with almost all the options
    • I disagree with one option and think a couple of options are redundant
  • Energy & Environment
    • I am undecided on the majority of the options
  • Foreign & Military Policy
    • Many of the options sound like vague ideals rather than solid plans
    • I agree with their positions on torture
  • Government & Congress
    • I agree with most of the options
  • Investigations
    • Lots of redundancy related to the Iraq war
    • Many of the options sound like they are living in the past
  • Media
    • Sounds like a bunch of ways to expand government
  • Social Policy
    • Sounds exactly like the Democratic party line

This got me wondering what kind of people were running the forum. The answer came in a different poll they had. This one asked who they would vote for in 2008 for president. The answer was overwhelmingly Al Gore. He got more than 1/3 of the votes with 13 candidates in the poll. Hilary Clinton (supposedly the front runner) was not even in second place on this poll, she got less than 1/8 of the votes. So these are Gore Democrats. This is nothing against Al Gore, he merely represents one faction of the Democratic party. The question is, what do the Pelosi Democrats think, or what do the Dean Democrats (the official party leadership) think? Lest anyone see this as bias, Republican factions include the McCain Republicans, Frist Republicans, and Mehlman Republicans.

UPDATE 11/14: I just found confirmation of what I had said about how overwhelming this vote for change was.

The scale of this loss was on par with the post-war average for such elections: close to 30 House seats versus the average of 32, and likely six Senate seats compared to the average of eight.

In elections during which the president’s popularity was low because of war, scandal or recession, however, the average is 47 House seats and eight Senate seats.

This “overwhelming vote for change” was about average, if not a little below average for the current situation.