To the People of the State of New York:
HAVING shown that no one of the powers transferred to the federal government is unnecessary or improper, the next question to be considered is, whether the whole mass of them will be dangerous to the portion of authority left in the several States.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would caucus with Senate Democrats if he wins Florida’s three-way U.S. Senate contest on Tuesday, a close advisor told Washington Wire Friday.
All told, the government has paid out funds to some 250,000 dead people, said Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on investigations.
"Washington paid for dead people’s prescriptions and wheelchairs, subsidized their farms, helped pay their rent, and even chipped in for their heating and air conditioning bills," Mr. Coburn's report said.
Among the payments to dead people were $18 million in stimulus funds from Social Security, $92 million in Medicare claims paid for treatments prescribed by dead doctors and $8.2 million for medical supplies prescribed for dead patients.
President Obama took steps in June to try to rein in those types of mistakes by issuing a memo asking that payments be checked against the Social Security Administration's Death Master File, though Mr. Coburn said that won't catch all of the errors.
Read the rest of the article here.
McConnell says it will be what he calls a "real stretch" to see Republicans take over the Senate.
Read the rest here.
Vice President Joe Biden is an affable fellow, which sometimes makes his tendency to exaggerate the truth somewhat amusing. However, Biden’s latest tall tale is as unamusing as it is wrong.
From the New York Daily News:
“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,” he said. “In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. … No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years.”I’ll go straight to the 19th century railroads issue by referencing the work of two Cato scholars who probably know a little bit more about the topic than Joe Biden.
Read the rest here.
People inside the Beltway seem to think that the only things worth being said and written are said and written in Washington. John David Dyche’s column today makes a good case for the quality of commentary outside the all-knowing capital.
A Republican senator has proposed rewriting the Espionage Act to target WikiLeaks.
Sen. John Ensign of Nevada yesterday announced a bill that would make it illegal to identify informants working with the U.S. military, which WikiLeaks did earlier this year when releasing files from the war in Afghanistan.
If you are a U.S. Senator or a Senate candidate, it pays to deny the science behind climate change, or at least to work against legislative action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the conclusion drawn by a report released yesterday by Climate Action Network Europe.
Read the rest of the article here.
Alvin Greene is right: he truly is the "best candidate that defines where we at in this country."
This man's too honest to serve in the Senate!
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller pressed executives of Facebook Inc. and MySpace Inc. for information about breaches involving personal information and vowed to write legislation protecting privacy.
If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?
There's a lot of truth to the argument that the enactment of the 17th Amendment undermined federalism. State legislatures have a greater institutional incentive to protect federalism than do the people of a state. The people of a state may want to expand federal program spending in order to get their share of tax revenues, even at the expense of greater national power over issues reserved to the states. Although they are also elected by the people, state legislators have more of an incentive to protect the original distribution of powers between the national and state governments.
These two amendments, of course, are income taxation (Am. 16 -- which must be repealed), and election of senators by the people-popular vote (Am. 17), rather than by the state congress as used to be done when our country was founded, thus giving states shared representation.
A common theme among those in the "tea party" movement is that ordinary citizens ought to participate more in the business of government. Yet some tea party activists — and likeminded politicians and commentators — are espousing a return to the election of U.S. senators by state legislatures rather than the people. That would require repealing the 17th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913.
With two weeks until election night, a lot of Senate races appear to be tightening. The Republicans need to gain 10 seats to win a majority in the 100-member chamber. Back in January, I blogged that gaining GOP control was possible but a long shot.
A look back at my assessments then shows that the political terrain has shifted largely, though not uniformly, in the GOP’s favour. In January, I assessed Arkansas, North Dakota, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California and Connecticut as possible GOP pick-ups. To varying degrees, that remains the case.
Many Americans were shocked by the debate over the 1st Amendment between Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell and her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons.
This time witchcraft was not the center of the zeitgeist, rather it was something much more central to American life. The 1st Amendment began showing up in Google Trends near the end of the day Tuesday, along with “separation of church and state.”
It lead many to wonder if people were fact-checking O’Donnell or brushing up for themselves on the Bill of Rights.
Ironically (or perhaps quite fittingly), the O’Donnell-Coons argument over the Constitution's exact wording occurred in a law school.
At Widener University Law School, the two candidates stumbled onto the topic of....
...“church and state” when they began talking about creationism -- Coons said that “religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”
From there, O’Donnell began to question where in the Constitution it ever said “church and state.”
Read the whole article here.
Is it fair to raise questions about a middle-aged Senate candidate's Christianity based on his behavior and associations in college?
In Florida’s three-way U.S. Senate race, poll numbers aren’t all that is going Marco Rubio’s way. The Republican nominee also has the most “friends.”
On his Facebook page, Rubio’s 128,800 followers far surpass those for Democratic rival Kendrick Meek and Governor Charlie Crist, who is seeking the Senate seat as an independent. The combined number of Facebook friends for Crist and Meek is about 51,600.
U.S. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) reported $551,000 in payments from his campaign fund to 12 different law firms in the third quarter of this year, and $118,000 to an e-discovery firm as the senator faces multiple ethics investigations.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Sunday that the uptick in payments results from an offer Ensign made to his staff, pledging to pay their legal fees if any of them get drawn into the ethics investigations. The Senate Ethics Committee and the U.S. Justice Department are investigating whether Ensign violated ethics rules or federal law in an attempt to cover up his affair with a woman who was then on his staff.
President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic has just given an important speech in Prague on Central and Eastern Europe and on the IMF. Among other lessons of the global financial crisis he points to the growing menace of the IMF:
America remains only holdout nation on the eve of Nagoya's momentous COP10 biodiversity conference that will dramatically affect the lives of billions and the environmental future of the world.
When Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina decided to endorse Pat Toomey’s GOP primary challenge to Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania last year, plenty of Republicans seemed eager to denounce him for shrinking the party. “Some conservatives would rather lose than be seen as compromising on what they regard as inviolable principles,” grumbled Texas senator John Cornyn, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine contributed an op-ed to the New York Times. GOP moderates, she warned, “often get the distinct feeling that [they’re] no longer welcome in the tribe.” Even DeMint’s fellow travelers at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal piled on: “Republicans shouldn’t follow South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and welcome Mr. Specter’s defection as an ideological cleansing.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vowed Friday to pass a $250 cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security beneficiaries when the Senate reconvenes in November.
Returning Thursday from a tour of the war zones, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse reported signs of “progress both real and potentially lasting” in the Afghanistan war effort.
Read the rest of the Providence Journal article here.
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch sees fewer prospects for bipartisanship in the next Congress and says he’s more conservative than fellow Utah Senator Robert Bennett, who lost renomination to Tea Party opposition.
Outside Groups Attempt to Buy a U.S. Senate Seat for Congressman Portman
Columbus –As Congressman Portman announces the big bucks he has raised from Washington lobbyists, Wall Street executives, and the insurance industry, third party groups continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy Portman’s way into the Senate.
While both candidates -- Sharron Angle and Harry Reid -- started out slow and tight in their debate this evening, by debate close it was clear: Angle mopped the floor with Reid.
She hit hard on a variety of topics; showed she had the fire to be a U.S. Senator; demonstrated a command of the issues; and, of course, stayed gaffe free. ...
Read the rest of the article here.
The only way to handle the cries of extremist is to be informed and know why some Tea Party members are taking the positions that they are. The Tea Party movement is about more than just taxes, it’s about the role of the federal government. When pundits say things like the tea party supports repealing the 17th amendment, and that is an extremist position, what they are doing is attempting stop any debate over the role of the federal government cold. The MSM doesn’t want to have that discussion, but we will.
A senate whose members were chosen by their respective states was envisioned as a constraint on federal power. Currently the states have no formal representation in the federal government. Prior to the 17th amendment, most state houses sent up a representative to ensure that the individual state’s interest were being represented. Programs like Medicaide, SCHIP, and unemployment insurance are federally mandated programs that are run by the states. There is no law that forces the feds to fully fund these mandates. Programs like the Clean Air Act are not funded at all. The simplest analogy is that the states are taxed without representation. ...
Read the whole article here.
The new Democrat ad against Paul Gosar is very interesting in light of statements previously made by Democrats. The charge is that Gosar wants to “change” the Constitution by repealing the 17th amendment.
Change the Constitution? I believe that the 17th amendment “changed” the Constitution. Eliminating the 17th amendment would “restore” the Constitution. A Constitution which worked fine until April 8, 1913 when this amendment was adopted during the Wilson administration. Democrat Wilson is also the one who “changed” the Constitution by instituting the Federal Reserve system. The Federal Reserve system is a private cabal of bankers who now do the job of Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clauses 2 & 5 of the Constitution with NO OVERSIGHT by your elected representatives.
Read the rest and see the video here.
Reading a piece on Think Progress I saw this little nugget of Constitutional dishonesty and actually had to laugh at what amounts to either ignorance on the author's part or a blatant disregard for the truth.
Senator Russ Feingold, co-sponsor of the Bipartisan Censorship Act of 2002 (otherwise known as the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 or “McCain-Feingold”), has publically stated that he does not want his party’s senatorial campaign committee to pay for TV ads on his behalf, asserting “That’s frankly not who I am. I don’t want to win that way.”
Well, great. That’s his choice to say “Please don’t speak out on my behalf,” but it’s also his party’s choice whether to run their own ads or not. It is also the choice of any other group to speak out about Feingold’s senate race. That’s kind of how the First Amendment is supposed to work. It gives all of us—not just politicians who are up for reelection— choices about whether to speak, when to speak, who to speak to and what we speak about. ...
Read the rest here.
It was pure coincidence that one of the key players in the U.S. legislative debate over China's currency policy was in town just as the Chinese government announced that its foreign exchange reserves -- a product of massive interventions to control the currency's value -- posted their largest quarterly increase ever.
The presence in Beijing of Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) on the day that the central bank said that foreign exchange reserves rose a record $194 billion in the third quarter, brought China's exchange rate policy into even sharper relief.
The American Spectator magazine has a balanced article, by Philip Klein entitled, “Is It Time for a Convention?,” about the pros and cons of calls for an Article V amendments convention. It includes this:
AT THE TIME of the founding, the ability of the states to call a convention to propose amendments was seen as a way to prevent the federal government from becoming too expansive. In essay No. 85 of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton cited the states’ convention option in his response to critics who feared that Congress would never allow any amendments limiting its power. The Constitution orders that “The Congress shall call a convention” if two-thirds of states demand one, he pointed out, and thus whether to call a convention isn’t up to the federal government. “We may safely rely on the disposition of the state legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority,” he predicted.
The government is preparing to seize the private 401(k) pensions of millions of Americans while enforcing an additional 5 per cent payroll tax as part of a new bailout program that will empower the Social Security Administration to redistribute pension funds in a frightening example of big government gone wild.
Public pension plans have been so aggressively looted already by the government that cities and counties face a $574 billion funding gap, according to a CNBC report.
That black hole is set to be filled by a new proposal that will “fairly” distribute taxpayer-funded pensions to everyone, by confiscating the private wealth of millions of Americans. Its proponents express staggering arrogance in thinking that they can just steal money people have worked for decades to accrue as if it’s their own.
Not only would the government confiscate 401(k) pensions, it would also impose a mandatory 5 per cent payroll tax payable by everyone, according to a hearing chaired last week by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.
Read the rest of Mr. Watson's article here.
Rick Santorum is fueling even more speculation that he is laying the groundwork for a possible 2012 US presidential bid in Iowa.
Listen to the weekly Community Currency radio show on Progressive Radio Network 5- 6 pm (EST), Thursday, October 14, 2010 – to hear more about the California 9/11 Truth Commission Initiative with former Senator Mike Gravel (U.S.Senator from Alaska 1969-1981), best known for his courageous effort to read the Pentagon Papers into the public record. (He is featured in the documentary- The Most Dangerous Man in America) Senator Mike Gravel’s passion has been Direct Democracy, which allows people to make laws, rather than allowing “elected representatives” exclusive ability to make the laws. He has also taken brave stances and spoken out against secrecy in government. ...
Read the rest here.
[W]e wanted to mention that Sen. John McCain had quite a senior moment during his stump speech to the crowd today.
“We’ve got make sure we cut no one’s taxes!” McCain roared. “No one needs their taxes cut and we will not, we will not cut people’s taxes and by the way, our first agenda item should be repeal and replace Obamacare!”
Perhaps realizing his blunder, McCain quickly added: “We will not raise anyone’s taxes! No one’s taxes should be raised!”
This is why it's helpful to have Sen. Joe Lieberman by your side.
U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman has two more years before his term expires, but his name appears on this year's election ballot — eight times.
Even though he's not a candidate, Lieberman's name is on the ballot for the Senate seat being vacated by his colleague, Christopher Dodd, and for seven state legislative races.
Why? Because the political party Lieberman created for his independent campaign in 2006 — Connecticut For Lieberman — is running candidates for office this year.
And many of those candidates aren't Lieberman supporters, but rather are critics who've hijacked the party name in preparation for 2012, when the senator would face re-election if he decides to run again.
Read the rest of the LA Times article here.
A United States Senator has asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be using money from foreign corporations to help fund its ad campaigns for the 2010 elections.
"I am profoundly concerned by recent reports that foreign corporations are indirectly spending significant sums to influence American elections through third-party groups, including 501(c)(6) trade organizations," wrote Sen. Al Franken, D-MN, to the FEC on Wednesday.
Colleges should adopt a code of conduct that prohibits bullying and harassment in the wake of the suicide of a Rutgers University student whose gay sexual encounter in his dorm room was streamed online, U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg said at a town meeting on campus.
As we have written plenty of times before, it's startling to see how fast the Anglo-American power elite is willing to move now toward a more specific and comprehensive global governance. When we read this article, even just the beginning, it was obvious to us what was going on. And then we came to this sentence: "It means a de facto obligation to provide unlimited liquidity in euros...but the IMF is not a central bank for the world," the official said. Exactly. Is there a sub dominant social theme in the article. Perhaps so: "Pushback will continue but the IMF's expanded role is inevitable.
The National Football League is whistling incumbent Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s campaign team for illegal use of film.
The campaign has been playing a commercial which includes footage of former Minnesota wide receiver Randy Moss’s pretend-mooning of Green Bay Packer fans during a 2004 playoff game, and is apparently doing so without the express written consent of the league.
During the course of his coverage of the situation, the Associated Press’s Dinesh Ramde demonstrates that he doesn’t really know the score of the game that is progress, namely the electoral contest for Feingold’s U.S. Senate seat. In that game, the scoreboard at Real Clear Politics has Feingold’s Republican opponent currently ahead by an average of nine points over four polls. The latest, from Rasmussen, has Johnson ahead by 12.
To Ramde, these polls indicate that Feingold is “slightly trailing” Johnson. ...
Read the rest of BizzyBlog post here.
Richard Curtis, the British director of Love Actually (2003), has produced a new climate-change awareness video that includes gruesome images of exploding schoolchildren. In the spot, students who refuse to comply with carbon-cutting standards are slaughtered by their teacher.The video — dubbed an “eco-fascist snuff movie” by James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph — has caused a stir across the pond. Due to public outcry, the video has since been removed from the web by its sponsor, the 10:10 group.
Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), the ranking member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, tells National Review Online that the clip is an “outrageous, last-ditch effort” by the green movement to “scare little kids into thinking that they could be killed if they don’t believe what they’re told to believe.”
More on the controversy here.
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Is Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller correct to suggest that the federal minimum wage is unconstitutional? And beyond that constitutional question, is this a wise political strategy?
My response:
Joe Miller is absolutely right: The federal government has no authority under the Constitution to set a minimum wage — or to do so many of the countless other things it does today. When Nancy Pelosi was asked where in the Constitution Congress was authorized to order Americans to buy health insurance, she responded, “Are you serious?” That’s a mark of how little America’s political elites today understand the document they take an oath to uphold.
Read the rest of the Cato post here.
Progressives are an impatient bunch. We fight for people who have waited too long already — for health care, for educational opportunity, for jobs to keep them in the middle class.
But for generations, conservatives have appealed to fear to protect the privileged and preserve the status quo — fear of immigrants, fear of diversity, fear of big government. For conservatives in 2010, it's easy:
"Stop."
"No."
4 October 2010
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)
Capitol Hill
Washington, DC
Dear Sen. Brown:
Your office is advertising for an unpaid intern – one whose responsibilities will be quite extensive.
But on your webpage you boast of your efforts to fight poverty by raising the national minimum-wage.
My FBN show tonight asked: "Do we really want everyone to vote?" Lots of people don’t know much at all about even basic American history. And why vote when we have such lousy choices? At the moment, the choice is between Democrats who gave us stimulus, Obamacare and a trillion dollar deficit... and Republicans who gave us prescription drug entitlements and the largest increase in federal spending since LBJ's Great Society. Whichever choice we make, the only result seems to be MORE government.
Surprisingly or otherwise, some big business groups like the Grocery Manufacturers of America have allied with consistent Big Government advocacy groups like the Consumer Federation of America and Center for Science in the Public Interest to push S. 510, the food safety bill pending before the Senate (which might win consideration in the lame-duck session). In a post at Cato at Liberty recently, I cited writer Barry Estabrook, an ardent critic of the food industry (“Politics of the Plate“), writing at The Atlantic, who says the bill could “make things worse”:
You needn’t go along completely with Estabrook’s dim view of industrialized agriculture to realize he’s right in one of his central contentions: “the proposed rules would disproportionately impose costs upon” small producers, including traditional, low-tech and organic farmers and foodmakers selling to neighbors and local markets. Even those with flawless safety records or selling low-risk types of foodstuff could be capsized by new paperwork and regulatory burdens that larger operations will be able to absorb as a cost of doing business.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a bill to regulate the volume of television commercials. That follows an earlier House bill to do the same. Meanwhile, Congress plans to adjourn without passing any legislation to prevent the tax hikes that will automatically occur on January 1, 2011. The economic stakes are significant. President Obama has proposed extending current rates for the middle class, while allowing the planned increases for high earners. But even that plan, according to Heritage Foundation research, will cost the economy $1.1 trillion over the period 2011-2020.
Republican Rand Paul continues to hold a double-digit lead over Democrat Jack Conway in Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Kentucky shows Paul earning 49% support, while Conway picks up 38% of the vote. Five percent (5%) favor some other candidate in the race, and eight percent (8%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The race is still Solid GOP in the Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 Senate Balance of Power rankings. Three weeks ago, Paul held a 54% to 39% lead over Conway, Kentucky’s current attorney general.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elec...
A months-long investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year found that the Army and Raytheon awarded a multi-million dollar sub-contract to a firm called Paravant for the training of Afghan troops. Paravant claimed to have “years” of experience performing such work. As it turned out, Paravant didn’t really exist. “Paravant had never performed any services and was simply a shell company established to avoid what one former Blackwater executive called the ‘baggage’ associated with the Blackwater name as the company pursued government business,” committee chairman Carl Levin said in March.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed a cloture motion on the beleaguered FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, according to Food Safety News.
As anyone who has been following the bill knows, this is not an insignificant development. Reid has said on several occasions that he wanted to take up the bill by this or that date – most recently before the Senate recessed for elections – but has failed to schedule debate or a vote.
The bill has support from Democrats, Republicans, consumer advocates, and the food industry. However, Reid had to file cloture on the bill, because Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) objected to an attempt to bring the bill to a vote under unanimous consent. Because of Coburn – who lodged his grievances with the bill only recently even though it cleared the committee stage in 2009 – the Senate will have to debate the bill and hold a procedural vote before passing it, a more time-consuming process.
Read the rest of the OMB Watch article here.
Congress has adjourned until after the November elections. But before they left town, Senate Democrats quietly introduced a comprehensive immigration bill. The leading House Democrat on the issue insists that it’s not a political move to attract Latino voters.
