Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Legislation’ Category

When the Founding Fathers issued the Declaration of Independence, they proclaimed: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, have made it clear that they are willing to operate without such authority in order to pass their “cap-and-trade” energy-tax legislation. For the sake of our representative government, they must be stopped.

On Nov. 2, the American people will give their consent to the candidates whose legislative agenda they support. Based on the discontent throughout the country, both sides of the aisle think the upcoming midterm elections will reduce the size of the current Democratic congressional majority. A widespread loss of Democratic seats would be an unmistakable condemnation of the far-left legislative agenda being pushed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Obama administration.

Incredibly, this forecasted repudiation of big government could be greeted by ousted politicians with a repudiation of voter intent. After the election, but before the newly elected Congress is sworn in in January, the current Congress may call a lame-duck session in November and December. During this session, congressmen and senators removed from power may still vote to enact new legislation. Some Democrats already are talking about their plans to exploit this session to address unpopular issues.

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman have been particularly unabashed about their hopes to advance the cap-and-trade bill in a lame-duck session where defeated congressmen and senators would be estranged from the will of people. This bill – which intentionally would raise the cost of energy produced by fossil fuels so we would use less of it – has not had enough support to pass. In fact, the bill was shelved recently by Mr. Reid, who clearly stated, “We know we don’t have the votes.” They don’t have the votes because congressmen do not want to vote for another expensive, unpopular bill just before a highly contested election. Of course, those congressmen who lose their election will no longer be accountable to the people in a lame-duck session.

Mr. Lieberman admits that “there is a certain awkwardness in a lame-duck session. But these are big and important issues. …” Perhaps it is the opening words of the Constitution are the cause of that “certain awkwardness.”

“We the People” speak with our votes and already have spoken out resoundingly against this energy agenda. If those who support cap-and-trade are voted out of office, Mr. Lieberman and his colleagues should respect that message.

Read more at the Washington Times

The Obama-Pelosi Lame Duck Strategy: Push through union ‘card-check,’ cap and trade, and more

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

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View on YouTube – Part 6

Attacks on Freedom

Way to buy off your voter blocks with taxpayer money!

President Barack Obama signed into law legislation providing $26 billion in aid to cash-strapped state governments amid fears the U.S. economy is stalling just months before this year’s midterm elections.

The House, taking a one-day break from the campaign trail, returned to Washington today to approve the measure 247-161 before lawmakers adjourned once again for their August recess.

The bill, designed to prevent thousands of layoffs of teachers and other public service employees, cleared the Senate last week after a pair of Republicans joined Democrats in breaking a filibuster.

Representative Mike Castle of Delaware, who is running for the Senate, and Joseph Cao of New Orleans were the only Republicans to support the bill. Three Democrats opposed the plan. Twenty-five lawmakers didn’t vote.

The bill became the latest flashpoint in an election year debate over jobs, the economy and the deficit. Republicans, who have attacked federal spending as one of their top election issues, called the legislation a costly bailout of government employees, a key Democratic constituency. Democrats, who have struggled to realize their jobs agenda, said the bill would keep teachers in the classroom and police on the beat while still cutting the deficit.

Read more at Bloomberg

Let us all now bail out the states?

The Next Big Crisis: State Bankruptcies

The Income Tax and Government Spending

Won’t protect our borders. Won’t protect our electrical grid. Building a mosque at Ground Zero. The Ruling Class has not only forgotten 9/11…they’re setting us up for another one.

The U.S. Senate has dropped a House-approved plan that would prepare the United States to defend itself from an attack from any electromagnetic pulse source – whether it would be from a natural solar flare or the detonation of a space-located nuclear weapon by enemies intent on destroying America’s infrastructure, according to a representative who has raised alarms over EMP.

U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., said it is “unfortunate.”

“While one part of the federal government was warning us of possible solar electromagnetic-pulse damage to our electric grid, a key Senate commission approved a bill to ignore this threat,” he said.

“It’s particularly ironic since the Senate amended a bill, H.R. 5026, approved unanimously by the House that would specifically protect the grid against solar EMP and other physical threats,” he said.

WND has reported for years on the devastating danger from an EMP attack that could be launched by a second-rate missile system against America.

The concern is that any nuclear detonation that could be launched into the atmosphere anywhere from 25 to 250 miles above the United States could decimate the nation’s electric grid, essentially transporting it instantly back to an era of mechanical machines and agriculture.

Read more at World Net Daily

Is your family prepared for an emergency?

We’ve gone as a nation, in less than two years, from Hope and Change to “hope we can change the stuff we hoped for.” Still, a question — one of pointed interest to Republicans — looms: change to what? Meaning, what are you all going to do, assuming you take the House and/or the Senate, to fix the problems you identified as reasons for throwing out the Obamacrats? People who push themselves as political saviors, like the Democrats two years ago, come to think of it, eventually find they have to start saving. It can be messy.

A Washington Post story by Perry Bacon Jr. underscores the GOP challenge: to wit, “Rep. Ryan pushes budget reform, and his party winces.”

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin’s First District, one of the smartest men in politics insofar as I can tell, goes around touting his brilliantly conceived free-market, limited-government approach called “Roadmap for America’s Future.” Whose main defect appears to be that in facilitating economic recovery it would change the ways Americans interface with federal social programs and the tax system that supports them. The prospect of that seems to disturb colleagues; thus … well, hear out Bacon: “[M]any Republican colleagues … even as they praise Ryan for his doggedness, privately consider the Roadmap a path to electoral disaster.”

In other words, do the right thing and the wrong things happen to you. Voters fume and rage. Some undertake to eject you from office, forcing you to resume the practice of estate law in Pascagoula or Pomona.

Read more at Townhall.com

Reservations with Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap”

Have the Republicans Learned Their Lesson?

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made it official: Illinois will have a special Senate election just for the lame duck session.  Thus Illinois joins Delaware and West Virginia (both having special elections) as the three states whose winners on election day will—barring a disputed election result—be seated for a lame duck session in December.  A fourth, Colorado, is less clear but may also be in play.

The lame duck session looks increasingly likely—and increasingly ambitious.  Sen. Kerry continues to stress that cap-and-trade will be on the agenda, and Sen. Harry Reid (who may be a lame duck himself after Election Day) confirmed it to the Netroots Nation audience, saying: “We’re going to have to have a lame-duck session, so we’re not giving up.”

Along with cap-and-trade, a lame duck will likely consider the recommendations of Obama’s deficit commission — a package that will include enormous tax hikes and could draw the support of some departing Republicans like Judd Gregg of New Hampshire George Voinovich of Ohio, and Robert Bennett of Utah.

And organized labor, seeing the lame duck as their last chance for a legislative return on their political investments for years, will also demand lame duck action.

While Sen. Tom Harkin is still promising some version of card check, more likely is Sen. Bob Casey’s proposed union pension bailout, S. 3157, which would relieve unions of their pension obligations – with a potential price tag for taxpayers in the hundreds of billions.  Democratic Whip Dick Durbin signed on as a co-sponsor yesterday, indicating this bill is a top priority.

The winners in Delaware, Illinois, and West Virginia could be the vital deciding votes on these major policy issues.

Read more at Big Government

The Obama-Pelosi Lame Duck Strategy: Push through union ‘card-check,’ cap and trade, and more

They’re just waiting until after the November elections.  Once they’re in a lame duck session, they can jam through all sorts of legislation like this without worrying about facing the music.

The U.S. Senate is shelving efforts to pass legislation that would limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to climate change, dealing a major blow to one of President Barack Obama’s top priorities.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said Thursday that neither he nor the White House had persuaded 60 senators to support even a limited proposal seeking to restrict emission from electric-power companies. Mr. Reid offered no timetable for action on such a bill, but said Democrats would continue trying to build support for such legislation.

Mr. Reid said the party’s leadership will push instead for more limited legislation, aimed at holding oil giant BP PLC “accountable” for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Specifically, he said the measure would include a provision to remove the cap on economic damages paid to residents and small businesses by oil companies after oil spills. Mr. Reid said the bill would also include incentives to encourage the production and purchase of vehicles fueled by natural gas, and to fund various land and water-conservation programs.

“This is what we can do now,” Mr. Reid said. He blamed the Senate’s failure to enact limits on greenhouse-gas emissions on Republicans, even though some members of his own party have for months objected to the idea.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

The Obama-Pelosi Lame Duck Strategy: Push through union ‘card-check,’ cap and trade, and more

Never let an oil spill go to waste

Obama’s “green” vision distorts his perception of reality

It should come as no surprise that Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, the bill’s primary authors, would fail to end the numerous government distortions of our financial and mortgage markets that led to the crisis. Both have been either architects or supporters of those distortions. One might as well ask the fox to build the henhouse.

Nowhere in the final bill will you see even a pretense of rolling back the endless federal incentives and mandates to extend credit, particularly mortgages, to those who cannot afford to pay their loans back. After all, the popular narrative insists that Wall Street fat cats must be to blame for the credit crisis. Despite the recognition that mortgages were offered to unqualified individuals and families, banks will still be required under the Dodd-Frank bill to meet government-imposed lending quotas.

While apologists for government-mandated lending are correct in pointing out that much of the worst lending was originated by state-chartered lenders, such as Countrywide, and not federally chartered banks, they either miss or purposely ignore the truth that these non-bank lenders were selling the bulk of their loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or the government corporation Ginnie Mae. About 90 percent of loans originated by Countrywide, the largest subprime lender, were either sold to Fannie Mae or backed by Ginnie Mae. Subprime lenders were so intertwined with Fannie and Freddie that Countrywide alone constituted over 25 percent of Fannie’s purchases.

While one can debate the motivations behind Fannie and Freddie’s support for the subprime market, one thing should be clear: Had Fannie and Freddie not been there to buy these loans, most of them would never have been made. And had the taxpayer not been standing behind Fannie and Freddie, they would have been unable to fund such large purchases of subprime mortgages. Yet rather than fix the endless bailout that Fannie and Freddie have become, Congress believes it is more important to expand federal regulation and litigation to lenders that had nothing to do with the crisis.

Read more at the CATO Institute

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

Financial Reform Bill: Big Brother’s Bureaucratic Absolutism

Gov’t pushing risky lending again?

The Dodd-Frank Assault on Economic Recovery

Bailout Bonanza: Why Dodd’s “Reform” Bill Makes the Problem Worse

Making the Housing Crisis Worse

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

“You can keep your own coverage and your own doctor.”  Obama, YOU LIE!

Obamacare DOESN’T lower costs and makes it appealing for businesses to dump their employees onto the government plan…and that’s EXACTLY what’s happening. This was a Trojan Horse for Single Payer, and they think you’re too stupid to recognize it.

The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.

Since April 1, the date many insurance contracts are renewed for small businesses, the owners of about 90 small companies terminated their insurance plans with Braintree-based broker Jeff Rich and indicated in a follow-up survey that they were relying on publicly-funded insurance for their employees.

In Sandwich, business consultant Bill Fields said he has been hired by small businesses to enroll about 400 workers in state-subsidized care since April, because the company owners said they could no longer afford to provide coverage. Fields said that is by far the largest number he has handled in such a short time.

“They are giving up out of frustration,’’ Fields said of the employers. “Most of them are very compassionate but they simply can’t afford health insurance any more.’’

Read more at the Boston Globe

Obamacare Side Effect: Top Corporations Consider Dropping Employee Health Insurance

The reality of Obamacare: nationalizing healthcare by proxy

Obama in his own words: Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance

Obamacare Deception – It’s Not About Choice

Barack Obama celebrated the passage of the new financial regulation bill yesterday.  So did Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.  And why not?  It’s not as though they’ll have to pay for the new bureaucracies and regulation imposed on the American financial system.  For that matter, it won’t be the bankers, either.  Who pays? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:

Big banks facing big drops in revenue are looking to Main Street to make up the difference.

Checking accounts, bank statements, even popping into your local bank branch could carry a hefty cost as the nation’s mega-banks scramble to offset expected damage from the sweeping financial overhaul. The uncertain future has overshadowed otherwise strong second-quarter earnings at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.

All three companies beat expectations this week with profitable results. Yet their stocks tumbled, helping send the wider market sharply lower Friday.

This is so basic that people inside the Beltway never learn it.  Costs imposed on businesses get passed to consumers. It doesn’t matter where those costs originate, whether they come from materials, labor, rent, taxes, or regulation.  All of those figure into the price paid by consumers for the product or service provided.

The AP focuses on the impact of the big banks, but to a certain extent, they have a competitive advantage.  Not only do they have a better economy of scale, at least some of the burden from the new regulations will be static rather than dynamic.  That means the costs will hit smaller banks and financial institutions harder, which will force them to raise prices higher than their larger competitors.  Eventually that will erode their competitive position and push more consumers into fewer institutions, which makes the entire system more vulnerable to a single point of failure.

How will consumers get hit with these new regulations?  Expect more fees on more transactions, including paying premium prices for doing business face to face with bank tellers and other employees.  Banks will start demanding higher minimum balances and start charging higher fees on accounts that don’t make the cut.  Bank of America will lose between $7 and $10 billion just on charges for debit and credit cards alone, money that will get made up by its customers somewhere.

Read more at Hot Air

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

Something’s happened to America, and it isn’t good. It’s become easier to get into trouble. We’ve become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

The National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained “undersized lobster tails” and was improperly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Honduran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed.

How about this one? Four kindergartners — yes, 5-year-old boys — played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: “Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you.” He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for “making threats,” a violation of their school district’s zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, “We cannot take any of these statements in a light manner.” District Superintendent William Bauer said: “This is a no-tolerance policy. We’re very firm on weapons and threats.”

Give me a break.

Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more — so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.

Read more at Real Clear Politics

One Nation Under Arrest: The End of the Pocket Knife

Stossel: Do We Really Need a License for Everything?

Democrats continued tearing the Constitution to shreds Thursday, voting to pass Obama’s tyrannical government takeover of Wall Street, which will impose hundreds of crushing new regulations on all the banks that drive our economy.

You think jobs are going overseas now? Just wait.

As I have noted, this latest economy-killing assault on the free market (which was made possible by a small handful of treacherous Republican sellouts):

• gives Obama the power to arbitrarily deem any financial institution he pleases a “threat” to the economy and dismantle it with virtually zero oversight,
• protects the interests of the biggest Obama campaign donors, like Goldman Sachs, while raking all the smaller banks–the ones that had nothing to do with the meltdown–over the coals,
• deliberately ignores the root cause of the collapse–Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which Democrats have spent the last decade protecting from any and all reforms so they could go on raiding them for campaign contributions on their way down)–even as their staggering losses continue to bankrupt the country,
• perpetuates this “too big to fail” culture while ensuring endless, massive bailouts,
• uses more government control to pretend to reign in the “recklessness” of Wall Street, which never even existed until Democrats forced banks to lower their lending standards while federally insuring their losses (i.e., turned Wall Street into a taxpayer-insured casino),

At least some Republicans are calling for this insanity to be repealed.

Read more at the Examiner

Financial Reform Bill: Big Brother’s Bureaucratic Absolutism

New Financial Reform Bill is Unconstitutional

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That wooshing sound in your ears is actually your 4th Amendment rights being flushed down the toilet.

Right Wing News reports:

It may take decades to discover all of the malignancies tucked away in the thousands upon thousands of pages of unread leftist legislation Comrade Obama & friends have been ramming through into law. Here‘s something that’s already come to light in their “comprehensive” attack on the financial sector:

A little noticed section (Section 152, page 63) of the Obama administration’s Financial Reform bill would create a new 1,000-employee office within the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Financial Research, which is raising alarm bells among Senate GOP staff, who say the entity would have broad powers to invade the privacy of American citizens and monitor their finances and financial activity at a level never before allowed by the federal government.

The OFR is a companion entity to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is also proposed in the legislation (section 1001, page 1030).

Under the bill’s current language, according the Senate Banking Committee sources, the OFR under the new federal law would be allowed to collect any financial data it chooses, whether from individual citizens or businesses. Under the language of the bill, the data center can collect and maintain “all data necessary” to monitor the financial system. Wall Street executives are also concerned, because of the kind of “competitive intelligence” such an entity could collect.

Informed Americans who liked living in a free country have been scared out of their minds since November 2008.

Perhaps more chilling, the data collected by these new entities would not be protected or necessarily confidential. Rather, Senate staff believe in reading the bill introduced and negotiated by Sen. Chris Dodd, data collected by the offices could be shared with other government agencies, including executive branch agencies such as the IRS.

That’s right, the infamously corrupt Chris Dodd will be helping himself to your financial data. But you can trust him; he’s from the government, and he’s here to help.

The New American observes:

Czarist Russia is looking better and better. Once a byword for bureaucratic absolutism, the apparatchiks of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and their endless rule-making seem positively enlightened beside some of the pieces of aptly named omnibus legislation emanating from Capitol Hill these days.

Nobody will be unaffected by this latest foray into federal micromanagement of the private lives of Americans. Among other things, the new bill will give vast new powers to the Federal Reserve, the secretive central bank that, more than any other single entity, has been responsible both for modern asset bubbles and the recessions and depressions that have followed them. Yet instead of being held to account for its role in creating the ongoing crisis, the Fed will now be responsible for overseeing large, interconnected financial concerns deemed large enough to pose a significant threat to the financial system should they fail. It will be the task of a separate 10-person council of regulators led by the Treasury Secretary to identify such concerns on behalf of the Fed.

Tellingly, the bill has nothing to say about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-government agencies deeply complicit in the subprime fiasco. The market meltdown has been consistently portrayed by Washington insiders as a failure of the free markets, not of government. It is therefore freedom, not government, that is erroneously held to account by Dodd-Frank.

Financial “reform” bill passes, despite alarming privacy infringements

Financial Reform’s Empty Promises

Finance bill favors interests of unions, activists

New Financial Reform Bill is Unconstitutional

As Finance Bill Passes, GOP Calls for Repeal

A bill full of government takeovers, massive expansion of unconstitutional powers, goodies for special interests?  Tell me something new!

The financial reform bill expected to clear Congress this week is chock-full of provisions that have little to do with the financial crisis but cater to the long-standing agendas of labor unions and other Democratic interest groups.

Principal among them is a measure to make it easier for unions, environmental groups and other activist organizations that hold shares to put their representatives on the boards of directors of every corporation in the United States.

The so-called “proxy access” provision, which activist groups say they will use to try to improve oversight of corporate financial practices, has provoked a backlash from the Business Roundtable, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other major non-Wall Street business groups.

“This legislation includes provisions totally unrelated to the financial crisis which may disrupt Americas fragile economic recovery” and lead to increasing political battles in the boardrooms, said John J. Castellani, president of the roundtable.

Business groups are also rankled that the legislation would impose costly new burdens on airlines, utilities and other non-financial businesses that were victims rather than villains in the crisis, simply because they use financial derivatives to hedge their businesses against risks such as fluctuations in oil prices, interest rates and currencies.

Such hedging practices played no role in the crisis, though they helped many businesses weather the financial turbulence and recession that followed in the aftermath of the Wall Street storm.

Other provisions of the financial legislation, which goes before the full Senate on Thursday for a vote and likely passage, favor Democratic constituencies directly by requiring banks and federal agencies to hire and do more business with them.

The bill would create more than 20 “offices of minority and women inclusion” at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other government agencies, to ensure they employ more women and minorities and grant more federal contracts to more women- and minority-owned businesses.

The agencies also would apply “fair employment tests” to the banks and other financial institutions they regulate, though their hiring and contracting practices had little or nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis.

“The interjection of racial and gender preferences into America’s financial sector deserves greater media exposure” before Congress debates and passes the massive 2,400-page bill, said Kevin Mooney, a contributing editor for Americans for Limited Government‘s daily newsletter.

Read more at the Washington Times

Congress’s Approval of Finance Bill Shifts Focus to Regulators

Boost for Big Labor in Wall St. bill

Bailout Bonanza: Why Dodd’s “Reform” Bill Makes the Problem Worse

Data Show Federal Policy Triggered Mortgage Meltdown

Democrats in their own words: Covering up the Fannie/Freddie scam that caused our Economic Crisis

Corporate or Government Takeover? Two Sides, Same Coin