The Monster in the Senate Closet: The Filibuster

Imagine the innocence of childhood.  No fears of tomorrow.  No concerns about mortgages, taxes, illnesses, broken families.  Yet, even into the innocence of childhood, monsters will creep.  In my childhood, the boys in our family shared to large rooms in the basement of our Falls Church, Virginia home.

I love basements.  There is a moldering smell due to dampness.  There are crevices and hideaways to explore.  They are indoor playgrounds of manifold opportunities.

When the night comes, though, and the lights go down for bed time, a basement, just like a bedroom with a closet, becomes a place of great danger to a child's active imagination.  I am not ashamed to admit creeping from the bed to our little half-bath when I had to relieve myself.  Creeping along the basement walls and ducking low as I passed underneath the high set windows that were, as much as anything else, a means of ventilation, since they were at ground level outside the home.

Why did I creep so softly and gingerly?

For fear.

Fear of what was outside that might be looking in.

Others had the same experience of fear, but their childhood spent in bedrooms with closets, they feared the boogeyman in the closet. Movies are made in the horror genre that feature the child's bedroom closet because so many know that gripping fear of the closet.

Of course, we grow up and realize the true horror of what is in the closet:  handme down clothes, stinky socks, the odd spider, toys.  Nothing to fear. Now we laugh at our childhood fear.

The United States Senate has lived under the grip of a mortal terror for nearly two centuries.  Far too long, the Senate, a mature institution of popular sovereignty and governance, has laid about under the grip of that monster in the closet.  Oddly, at a time when we, who belong to the fellowship of former closet monster victims, are long past being held hostage to the imagined monster, the Senate continues to quake in fear and inaction.  And it appears that even removing the Democratic majority in the Senate will not snap the Senate out of the grip of its terrorized paralysis.

Here are a couple examples drawn from the headlines:

At the beginning of the new Congress, socialist Bernie Sanders summoned up the boogeyman in an effort to prevent adoption of the Keystone pipeline legislation:



Not to be outdone, New York Democrat Chuckie "Where's the Camera" Schumer and other Democrats threaten a filibuster of the separate funding legislation for the Department of Homeland Security:

During the tenure of George W. Bush, the Director of the nonprofit where I worked asked me what could be done about the filibuster being used by Democrats to block confirmation votes for Bush's judicial nominees.  There was, of course, talk about the "nuclear option" but what was that option, how would it work, how could it be given effect and why should it.  These were his questions to me.  That set me to the task of reviewing the Senate's filibuster practice, the Senate Rules governing that practice, and the political wisdom of that practice.

Based on my research and study, I concluded that the Senate, at any time a majority of those present and voting wished to do so, could amend the Senate Rules and eliminate the filibuster by the vote of a simple majority.  I also concluded that eliminating the filibuster was a sound political decision that our organization, The American Center for Law and Justice, should support.  I have not waivered from that view since then, even when the Senate filibuster allowed Republicans in the minority to hold the Senate hostage to their demands.  (While the document bears the names of two other ACLJ attorneys, it is solely the product of my research and writing).

Today, we are once again being terrorized.

Yes, terrorized.  Just as when parents soundly sleeping are startled awake by the nightmare screams of their child, whose horrified screams simply embody their fear of the monster in the closet.  Our body politic is disturbed by the pretended fear of Republicans that they will be held hostage to Democrats in minority through the device of the filibuster.

The problem for Republicans is that the monster in the closet no longer terrorizes those who were minding the legislative store during the last session of Congress.  Then, in a fit of pique, the Democrats finally pushed through a change to the Senate's ridiculous and time-honored practice. Harry Reid bullied those changes through to accommodate Obama's petulant demand for judicial confirmations and Republicans' skillful play of the filibuster rule to prevent votes on certain judges. Because Reid, via a simple parliamentary procedure, changed the filibuster rule and practice as applied to judicial and executive nomination votes, we now know a parliamentary truth:

A simple majority vote of the Senate -- taken at any time the Senate is in session -- can be used to amend the Rules of the Senate.  Such amendments may change even long practiced senatorial privileges as the filibuster.

Once you have gone into your closet with a matured judgment ... and with the lights on ... you begin to realize the infantilism in your night terrors.  You chuckle at how you were held in rigid paralysis by the certainty that a monster would leap out and take you wherever it is that closet monsters take their unwitting victims.  And so it is here.  We know that the only reason that Democrats can obstruct the Senate Republican majority is if the Senate Republican majority chooses to play terrorized child, captive to a rule that has no more merit or substance in this era than does the closet monster of our childhood in our adult lives.

While the horror genre provides entertainment, and perhaps even serves a psychological purpose of providing manageable doses of fear that we can conquer by confronting, it is a poor framework for the exercise of, or for preventing the exercise of, political will.  The Republicans should overthrow the vestiges of the filibuster, and legislate apace.

The Idiots We May Yet Prove to Be

Do you understand how you were duped?

Do you understand why it was convenient to get you to think that we could give everyone that didn't have health insurance that health insurance they didn't have, and that we could give you more extensive coverage than you had, without TAXING you?

You do see, don't you, that this is precisely what happened with the enactment of ReidPelosiObamacare?

They told you 40 million American were going without health insurance.  They talked about insurance issues at the margins. By this, I mean, the issues of pre-existing conditions exclusions and life-time caps on coverage. 

They omitted emphasizing to you that the 40 million included millions that CHOSE other approaches to health care than to have a health insurance policy. 

They omitted reminding you that many instances of "pre-existing conditions exclusions" were not LIFETIME DENIALS of coverage, but were, instead, limited periods of 90 days or 6 months, at the beginning of an insurance policy's coverage, for existing, diagnosed medical conditions. 

Instead, they relied on your willingness to believe the most horrible things about INSURANCE companies ... something you are willing to do because, GOD CURSE THOSE COMPANIES, they are for-profit companies, designed and intended to provide a return on investment to their shareholders.  And, as you might be willing to admit, you don't like the idea that someone creates a business, builds it up, sustains it, even in the face of close, scrupulous regulation (insurance companies are among the most closely regulated business), and make a profit from that business.  Why should they profit off of the misery of others? You may have even asked yourself that question.

So, when the idea of increased cost got hidden behind the idea of imposing additional layers of taxation of insurance companies, and further regulation of those companies, you kept quiet.  After all, you didn't have skin in the game.  You had Boyking's promise, "If you like your coverage, you can keep your coverage.  If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."  Obviously, with promises like that, you were smugly satisfied to know that the evil insurance companies were being brought to heel, reigned in, and forced, essentially to disgorge profits they were unjustly creating by their scheme of pre-exclusionary denials and lifetime coverage caps.

Of course, it was a scam. 

No provision of ReidPelosiObama compels PRICE CONTROL on insurance companies.  The laws of economics in a free economy authorize a producer of a product to include in the retail price of the product it sells the costs of producing the product.  For example, media coverage suggests that the McDonalds Corporation maintains a pricing structure that produces a profit margin of 15 %.  To clarify what that means, think about that dollar menu.  If you buy a McDouble, and it if is priced to support a 15 % profit margin, McDonalds all-in cost for the McDouble is about $ 0.85.  Selling the burger for a dollar would produce a $ 0.15 profit.

Now, imagine a bovine disease killing 1/10th of America's cattle herds.  The price of beef will increase due to reduced availability and unreduced demand.  Or, imagine a spike in fuel costs, fuel being necessary for transporting cattle to slaughterhouses and beef to market.  As a consequence, do you see how the all-in cost to produce a McDouble could easily increase to $ 0.95?  What will McDonalds do?  It can absorb the cost, of course, and businesses often make a business judgment that it is necessary to reduce their margin of profit.  In the long run, however, if McDonalds Corporation's earning expectations are going to be met, if its shareholders are going to be rewarded for investing their nickels and dimes, then the price of the McDouble will have to come up.  In fact, to maintain McDonald's profit margin, it will have to rise to $ 1.10.

Set aside the supposed MORAL question of whether health insurance companies should be in the business of making profits.  I know some of you will say that the obvious answer is that they should not, and I'm not writing this post to challenge that decidedly unbiblical notion.  This post simply reaffirms what, in the absence of driving notions of greed and jealousy, you would have seen as obvious when this whole debacle of ReidPelosiObamacare was pushed through the legislative process.

For now, we have an economic system that has not converted fully to a statist, command control mode.  To be sure, we are far closer to socialist control of the market than we are to free market principles; likewise, to be sure the teaching value of ReidPelosiObamacare -- for the Statist -- is that you have agreed with their wisdom, risen from your stupidity, and begun to accept as a certain truth a principle that just isn't so:  namely that producers of a product can be forced to absorb additional costs of production of a product or provision of a service, while not increasing the PRICE YOU PAY. 

Of course, to the dismay of Democrat Party faithful, like Senator Mary Landrieu, who supported ReidPelosiObamacare and soon to be former Senator Kay Hagan, the Making Health Care Unaffordable Act actually began to take effect.  When it did so, it operations immediately began to deform the market from the shape it had taken when operating on principles closer to free markets. 

Individual choices on health care funding were immediately restricted.  This reduction in liberty was accomplished by reducing your ability to reduce personal income tax liabilities by shifting some earnings from your paycheck to medical expense accounts.  In a previous job, I was able to set aside $ 7,000.00 a year for unplanned but predictable medical expenses.  Yes, you see, even with existing health coverage a family of ten will incur predictable but uncovered costs, including co-pays on office visits, prescriptions, and specialty diagnostic services such as MRIs.  By deferring that income into such an account, I did not pay income tax on it.  Of course, I also did not have access to that money to buy McDoubles, or to purchase a new car, or the like.  But I could meet the regular, dependable additional costs of health care that we faced as we raised our family. 

Why would there be a scheme that allowed you to earn money, not receive it in your paycheck, and spend it only on medical related expenses?  Well, obviously, it was a system that rewarded careful thought, consideration, and forward planning.  We knew, for example, with our brood, that broken arms, cavities, eyeglasses, sniffles and sneezes, would be a recurring part of life. We also knew that only an all encompassing and impossibly expensive health care insurance plan could meet every eventuality of life. The tax avoidance scheme didn't reward us with a Cadillac Escalade (or with the health insurance version of one).  It didn't reward us with a week vacation to Disney World.  Instead, it "rewarded" us with the ability to meet some of those marginal expenses of health care that insurance -- if it was to be priced reasonably -- simply could not cover.

But ReidPelosiObamacare ended that program.  Well, it reduced it so that the amount an individual could defer from taxation into such accounts was reduced to about $2000.00 a year.

What is the net effect of doing that?

The net effect of that is to reincorporate any amount exceeding $2000.00, amounts previously excluded from income back into one's income.  Do you follow?  In other words, it INCREASED THE TAXABLE INCOME of persons that had, previously, avoided taxation by directing some income into forward-thinking, sensible approaches to provide for health care uncertainties.  As a result, additional REVENUES were generated to the government.  By the way, doing this, FORCING EARNINGS back under taxation, did not reduce contingent medical expenses for us or for anyone else.  Eyeglasses still cost money ... until the next Boyking or Girlking takes the throne and tells optometrists and opticians that they have to give eyeglasses away.  MRIs still carry costs and co-pays.  So, to fund other activities of the federal government, ReidPelosiObamacare ended that program.

Marginal plans were identified as not meeting minimum requirements of ReidPelosiObamacare; those providing them were required to make changes.  A hard-working young man of my long acquaintance, my son, James Henderson, lost his health insurance coverage previously available to him through his employer.  In fact, millions did, and that is even before the "employer mandate" takes effect.  Companies like Home Depot, Walgreens and Trader Joes, that had provided health insurance coverage for its less-than-fulltime staff had to come to grips with the new Statist reality and dumped their employees out onto the market.

The reality immediately smacked Democrats in the face. THEY FOISTED THIS STATIST IGNORANCE on the Nation, and had already taken a beating in the 2010 Congressional elections, where Republicans were swept into control of the House.  The boyking immediately began a self-preservation program of changes, deferrals, delays, exclusions and limitations to the LEGAL REQUIREMENTS of ReidPelosiObamacare.  These actions were not taken because the Boyking realized the error of his way.  They were done only in a failing effort to "preserve future political viability" for himself and for no other reason whatever.

And all this happened because, in fact, Americans often do not closely tend the garden of our society.  In fact, over time, Americans have oddly begun to treat the vegetable plants in the garden -- businesses that produce goods and services -- as weeds, and the weeds in the garden -- government regulation that stifles growth and opportunity -- as prized petunias.  The "weeds" of government talk about how selfish the tomato plants are, and you begin pinching off the plant, thinking that somehow it will continue to grow the fruit you love -- blue ray players, low profile tires, hot and ready low calorie entrees, or the like.  And you manure the weeds of government, tolerating their encroachments in the garden, their noxious capacity to steal life from other plants, their demand, always increasing, for growing room.

The cure exists. 

It isn't easy, to be sure.  But the weeds have to go.  Government intrusions have to stop.  They have to be torn up out of the garden, root to tip.

For this reason, you have to rise from your slumbers.  You have to educate yourself to the present danger.  And you have to hold Republicans, now coming into command of the entire Congress, accountable.  They must undo ReidPelosiObamacare.  Not by dribs and drabs.  To do a piecemeal repair of the travesty is to admit the inadmissible, that such encroachments are wise or warranted.  They are not.  This is a ground upon which we can stand.  This is a ground on which the Congress can stand.  This is a ground on which we can judge our own collective wisdom in giving them this great responsibility.

Or we can prove Mr. Gruber correct and proceed like the idiots he thinks we are.

Senate Prefers Pandering Over Responsibilities of Office

Today's Jacksonville Daily News carried the story on legislative activities in Washington, DC.  Through the unjaundiced eye of the author, Charles Babington, we had the chance to see through the hubbub of votes and speeches to the realpolitik at play in these humid days of a Washington summer:  Democrats, who control the Senate, are floating legislative proposals that will not become law, that they know will not become law, because the proposals cannot pass muster in the Republican Party controlled House of Representatives.  Babington puts a tidy bow on what actually is occurring as statist Democrats in the Senate conduct their theater of the bizarre.In Babington's words, the bills being brought to the floor are only being brought to the floor to force Republicans "to vote on sensitive matters that might rile women this fall."  

One wishes it were otherwise, that Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House would attend to the actual business of the Congress.  The actual responsibilities of the Congress pertain to the legislative aspects of the responsibilities of the central, federal government.  

James Madison, writing in The Federalist No. 41, neatly summarized the responsibilities assigned by the States to the federal government under the Constitution proposed by the 1787 Philadelphia Convention.  Explaining his view that the States did not grant too much power to the federal government, he wrote, to 

"form a correct judgment on this subject, it will be proper to review the several powers conferred on the government of the Union; and that this may be the more conveniently done they may be reduced into different classes as they relate to the following different objects: 1. Security against foreign danger; 2. Regulation of the intercourse with foreign nations; 3. Maintenance of harmony and proper intercourse among the States; 4. Certain miscellaneous objects of general utility; 5. Restraint of the States from certain injurious acts; 6. Provisions for giving due efficacy to all these powers."  

A complete review of The Federalist No. 41 (and Nos. 42 and 43 that complete his thoughts on the topic) is not possible here.  It suffices that he has identified in a single power the essence of the responsibilities of the federal government as securing the Nation from external dangers, regulating relations with foreign nations, insuring harmony and intercourse among the States, and preventing the States from undertaking certain acts injurious to the People.

The Senate has all the time in the world, apparently, to conduct "show" votes on issues designed to inflame the passions of various interest groups.  What the Senate does not have time to bring to the floor for a vote are appropriations bills, program authorizations bills and agency authorization bills.  Not much of a surprise for students of the Senate's behavior under the leadership of Harry Reid.  The Senate has failed, consistently and continuously, to bring appropriations bills to the Senate floor throughout his tenure.  The pinch of sequestration, the pinch of forced shut-downs, these all flow from the battle that follows after the failure to timely prepare, consider, and approve appropriations legislation.  The House of Representatives has done this job consistently and timely year after year.  The Senate brings to this essential task the speed of the slow loris, the wisdom of a clown, and the earnest sincerity of a used car salesman.

And, though one may wonder how appropriations legislation fits within the essential responsibilities of the federal government described by Madison in The Federalist No. 41, the answer, it turns out, is direct and clear.  The actions of the federal government are accomplished through human intermediaries.  Federal troops, federal bureaucrats, federal law enforcement agents, these are paid employees; they work in offices, buildings and campuses that require heat, light and power.  They are employed to accomplish the objectives (constitutionally legitimate or otherwise) designated in federal legislation and regulations as their responsibility.  The failure to develop, consider and approve an appropriations bill to fund the activities of the Department of Defense is, in its essence, a decision to risk or cause the discontinuation of the activities of that Department.  The dread, or silly, Environmental Protection Agency may run on scientific fumes but requires real cash to do its work.  So the Senate's consistent failure to conduct appropriations and authorizations legislative activity is gross negligence of duty.

Worse, it is this naked pandering.  Pandering that assumes that women do not know that they can obtain birth control of any kind authorized by the FDA simply by spending their own funds for them, and that they will prefer that the Senate force these kinds of show votes rather than do its duty.  

Listen in to the Democratic Caucus as it ponders how to proceed with its legislative agenda in the Senate:  "We need to distract voters from Barry's catastrophic Obamacare rollout," Senator So and So opines.  "Heck, folks," the hen's tooth rare Southern Democratic Senator drawls, "we need to distract voters from Barry's catastrophic Obamacare legislation."  "The problem, my learned colleagues," Harry Reid trumpets, "is that if we actually do what we were sent here to do, we won't have gotten the special interest groups we need on November 4th worked up to a frothy frenzy."  The clopping sounds of the tennis-shoed Patty Murray approach, "This isn't about November!  This is about the injustice of a Supreme Court decision that leaves women exactly where they were before Obamacare:  paying for their own contraceptives, rather than being able to shift those expenses onto others."  Reid, interrupting, "Senator Murray is correct.  We can, we should, we must bring to the floor for an immediate vote legislation overturning the Hobby Lobby decisions."

Not heard in the background of that noise are the soft crunching of gravel under boots as American service members walk into, through and beyond dangers on virtually every continent.  Ignored in the press to do this entirely sophistric act of legislative Kabuke theater are the pleas of communities along the southern border to act to reduce the tidal wave of illegal entries into the United States, along with the warnings of those with reason to know that the flood is not just of those seeking a better life here, but also includes, or is at risk of including, those who meld into the flood, so that, on entry into the best and brightest hope of mankind on earth, they can bring terror to the people whose interests have been sacrificed in the Senate in the interest of partisan politics.

Will women respond as hoped by the Democratic Party cabal in the Senate?  I do not have a crystal ball.  I do have a grasp of history.  How this fall's election goes depends greatly on the love of liberty or the preference for personal interest.  If women who love liberty vote accordingly, then the Senate will pass out of the hands of those who have fecklessly and recklessly ignored their actual duties.  If women who prefer personal interests fattened by the largess of government, then our long struggle to make a way forward out of continuing economic malaise and social agitation needs must will continue.