You’ve got to hand it to the Democratic Party. They have a slick operation going. Four years ago, they hatched a plan to circle the wagons around Joe Biden and somehow convinced all the other contenders for the presidential nomination to step aside. Joe, a notably undistinguished but loyal party apparatchik, had great name recognition and seemed safely normal compared to, say, Bernie Sanders. Sure, he was visibly failing even back then, but with COVID as a cover, they could keep Joe in his basement and hide the truth of his condition. As we know all too well, that strategy was successful. And now, in 2024: Round Two of the — what, mysterious, unconventional? — Democratic strategy for selecting a presidential candidate. They pulled the plug on Biden, instantly installed Kamala Harris as their candidate, and have already gone through the motions of nominating her democratically via a virtual vote before the Democratic convention. Unsurprisingly, the polls showed that the odds for the Dems winning the November election improved hugely. What else would you expect from a vibrant, photogenic, lively candidate replacing the listless, semi-coherent man who seems more suited for life in a retirement home than the White House? Ah, but who exactly are “they”? Who has orchestrated these machinations, giving the American people first Biden, now Harris? It must be a small, tightly knit cabal, for large committees are too unwieldy (dare we say, too democratic) to choose presidential candidates so smoothly, quickly, and quietly. I mean, does anyone really think that either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris has in any meaningful way been leading the Democratic Party? No, they are puppets and figureheads, nothing more. I suspect that many of us have a pretty clear sense of who comprises “the cabal” staging these political dramas, but rather than take educated guesses here about who they are, let’s examine what their agenda is. In short, the agenda of the Democratic cabal is to terminate the American Republic as established by our Constitution. The Democrats want power. The Founders sought to protect us from the depredations of unchecked political power. The whole purpose of the Constitution was to place limits on the powers of government and to defend the rights of individuals to live freely and decide how to maximize their well-being under a system of impartial laws. The addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution underscored the Founders’ emphasis on rights. That emphasis drew upon the Declaration of Independence, the fundamental principles of which are that each human being is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the sole purpose of government is to uphold and protect those rights. If you want further confirmation of the priority of individual rights over government powers, take a look at the 9th and 10th Amendments. The 9th basically states that any right not specifically spelled out in the Constitution is presumed to belong to the people, while the 10th states that any power not explicitly delegated to the government is assumed not to be a legitimate power. A main feature of the design of the Constitution was the separation of powers between three distinct branches of government — the legislative, executive, and judicial. For the past three and a half years, Team Biden has worked overtime to usurp the legislative prerogative of Congress by issuing a flood of regulatory edicts. This tendency is nothing new. For many years, it has been common practice in Washington for unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch to issue 18 or 20 regulations with the force of law for every one actual law passed by Congress. The Supreme Court has attempted to slow this regulatory onslaught in decisions like West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, but Team Biden has been playing whack-a-mole, promulgating regulations with far greater rapidity than the court will ever be able to keep up with. And now, for trying to preserve our constitutional order and defend us from executive supremacy, the Democratic cabal is attacking the Supreme Court, blustering about bogus ethics concerns and threatening to impose term limits. How blatantly anti-constitutional! The Founders deliberately gave lifetime tenure to the Supreme Court to insulate them from popular political passions. The Supremes were never supposed to be popular or well liked. It was their job to throw cold water on any attempt by the other two branches of government to subvert the Constitution and arrogate more power to themselves. The cabal saw that Biden could still throw mud at the Supremes. Having already achieved a large degree of dominance over Congress, neutering the other branch of government — the remaining check on executive power — became the next logical step in the cabal’s strategy to achieve rule by fiat for a Democratic elite. The Dems talk a lot about Donald Trump being a threat to democracy, but their actions speak louder than their words. By hand-picking their figureheads and by their agenda of defying the Constitution to grab ever more power, the Democratic cabal is the true threat to democracy. READ MORE: Behold, Tampon Tim Woke? Nope. Back to Sleep. Hunting Where the Ducks Are The post The Secret Democratic Cabal’s Openly Anti-American Agenda appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Anyone born after 1970 may find it strange to consider a political landscape in which powerful corporations do not have influence over legislation, campaigns, and elections. However, this was actually the case for a considerable portion of our nation’s history. From the so-called Progressive Era that saw the government’s breakdown of previously unfettered monopolies, to the New Deal reforms enacted during the Great Depression, Big Business was not only constrained but was also politically uninvolved. In their book, The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, Brody and Luke Mullins expound the fascinating history of one of the most significant and underreported political transitions in modern American history and the development of modern lobbying. During the early 1970s, a “nearly century-long tradition of relatively evenly matched political debates between the forces of Big Business and the interests of ordinary citizens vanished.” Largely inspired by businessman and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and fueled by major lobbying dynasties in both parties, “industry leaders resolved to crush their political adversaries” by dismantling the political leverage of labor unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates. Thus, James Madison’s vision of competing interests was abandoned. “Instead,” the Mullins write, “during the 1970s, Washington entered a new era: a nearly four-decade-long stretch in which the corporate capitalists of Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Silicon Valley exercised as much control of the political system as did their Gilded Age predecessors — with far less risk of accountability and reform.” The Mullins brothers combine in-depth research and intriguing storytelling to narrate the undertakings of the individuals behind the “pro-business influence-peddling machine by the downtown thoroughfare along which many of the city’s marquee lobbying firms were located, K Street.” The book opens with a prologue on the death of Evan Morris, a Big Pharma lobbyist and one of the “most gifted operators” in Washington, who committed suicide. This sets the tone for the rest of the narrative and reveals the paradoxical contrast between the seemingly idyllic life of golf clubs and Petrus wine and the catastrophes that are reaped when corruption is sowed. Morris began his career as a lobbyist in the early 2000s, more than 30 years after Washington’s powerful lobbying industry adopted corporate America’s interests for its own. He had been the pupil of Tommy Boggs, “[t]he patriarch of the first Democratic lobbying dynasty.” Tommy was the son of Democratic congressman and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a southern New Deal Democrat, long-time admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a man with a strong record of supporting labor unions and legislating on behalf of workers’ interests. Although Tommy never left his father’s party, his work as a lobbyist directly undermined many of Hale’s achievements. Together with Tony Podesta, a lobbyist for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Boggs helped “unify a previously fractured business advocacy community, ignite an explosion of political spending in Washington, develop close ties to the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and lead the Democratic Party away from its old friends in organized labor and toward a new set of allies in corporate America.” Democrats are not solely responsible for the development of K Street. The Mullins write about four operators who worked together to form the Republican lobbyist dynasty of the Reagan era: Lee Atwater, Charlie Black, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. They explain how the four men were largely responsible for the uprooting of “the nearly half-century-long tradition of New Deal liberalism, and assisting the reorientation of federal policy making around a new set of pro-business ideals.” By the 1990s, corporate America had a strong foothold in both parties and the fate of American politics seemed bleak — that is, for those paying enough attention to the silent neoliberal consensus in Washington. The Mullins write: While Tommy Boggs drew his clout from the old-line establishment of New Deal liberals, this new dynasty of Republican influencers amassed its power through the conservative revolution. In this sense, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater became to Republican Washington what Tommy Boggs was to Democratic Washington. Now, regardless of which party was in power or their political persuasions, anyone with enough money could find a talented lobbyist to help them get what they needed out of our democracy. In subsequent decades, while the two parties pretended to disagree on substantive matters of economic policy, their track record proved to be strikingly similar, especially in the Obama and Bush eras. Disagreements on social and cultural issues were eventually reduced to mere rhetoric, as powerful corporations in Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry became more left-wing than the average American family. As Rachel Bovard wrote in a recent First Things piece, “Conservatives lost the culture war decades ago, and as a result we are living not just under the political but also the corporate and cultural power of left-leaning CEOs, entertainment figures, and political leaders, many of whom do not have children, do not want them, and who adhere to an ideology that is either indifferent to or actively hostile toward traditional family life.” In the last chapter of their book (arguably the most politically relevant section in terms of the upcoming general election), the Mullins concede that “it was the rise of Trump that finally shattered Washington’s pro-business policy consensus.” In the years following his election in 2016, the Republican Party reshaped itself to fit the Trump base, as evidenced by unusual partnerships like those between Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the increasingly pro-worker policies being advocated by other Republican senators like Marco Rubio (Fla.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), and vice presidential nominee JD Vance (Ohio). This is not to say that the Mullins are partisan in their reporting, or even particularly hopeful for the Republican Party’s chances of enacting real change. Quite the contrary. They manage to do what far too many journalists are either unable or unwilling to do these days: They maintain a consistent tone of moral seriousness without descending into petty partisanship. In the concluding pages, the Mullins admit that Big Business will always find a way to insert itself in Washington’s influence-peddling machine, even if it takes a “new set of power brokers and lobbying dynasties to define a new era. New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.” The book ends on a bleak note. As much as one may have cringed or cried during the Jan. 6 riots, the people we saw in the Capitol that day are by no means the “biggest threat to democracy,” as the mainstream media contends. The real threat lies closer to those who were far from the Capitol, watching live news coverage from a comfortable living room. The post The Wolves of K Street: A Real Threat to Democracy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

One sunny day, I and my traveling companion, Peter Phillip, a German journalist, drove into the U.S. Marine Corps installation at Beirut airport in Peter’s fun-size Suzuki Jeep looking for something to report. It was October 1983, when anybody could drive in unchecked. The Americans had arrived to keep the peace. You saw them catching beneficial rays and cutting the grass and pumping iron, each Leatherneck with his Walkman and not a weapon in sight. Peter and I introduced ourselves to the press officer, a major with a tent of his own, and he said, “Are you here for the cheerleaders?” Before I could ask, “What cheerleaders?”, Peter said yes. “There’s a bird leaving now,” the major said. “Run get on it.” We did. A crewman gave each of us a pair of earmuffs for the noise, and before you could say foreign correspondent, we’d been hoisted a thousand feet over the Shi’ite slums, the Palestinian refugee camps, the Commodore hotel where most of the foreign press slept and drank, and the campus of the university whose president, Malcolm Kerr, father of NBA standout Steve Kerr, would be killed the following year by either Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, and were zooming over the Mediterranean, where ships of the Sixth Fleet, including the USS New Jersey with her fearsome guns, were strung out like the Revell models I’d put together in boyhood. Peter grinned and shrugged. Down the bird touched on the deck of the helicopter landing ship USS Raleigh. The ship was sitting low in the water, because on her must have been half the sailors of the fleet and many of the Marines from on shore — 4,000 or so young American males packed together like expectant sardines. They clung to the Raleigh’s spars, hung from the bridge, and shinnied halfway to the top of the superstructure where the radar dishes rotated under the Stars and Stripes. A lieutenant took me and Peter in hand. He brought us to the wardroom where the Dallas Cowgirls were mixing with officers and getting their USS Raleigh caps. Most of the ships of the fleet, the lieutenant explained, had sailed from Norfolk more than four months previous. There’d be no shore leave for another month — shore leave, by the way, in Haifa, not Beirut. It seemed like a good idea to have some entertainment for the men before then. Back on deck, I asked a sailor why he’d been sent to the Middle East. “We’re here to keep the sides apart while they reason with each other,” he said. “We’ll have to kick some ass, maybe.” He was from Nebraska. “This show is just going to be one big prick tease,” he forecast. And indeed, when they appeared, the redhead, the brunette, the soul sister, and the five blondes had on virtually nothing and were more perfect than anything Hugh Hefner had dreamed of as a Chicago high schooler. Yet the show wasn’t hot. The young ladies did what they did, they gave it everything they had for 90 minutes, but it wasn’t hot, wasn’t apocalyptic. It was just good clean fun a long way from home. “You men,” said the Black girl into the microphone, “are good-looking, you’re built, and we love what you’re doing for America!” The Raleigh shivered with cheers. The Cowgirls performed a hoedown, slapping rock-hard, silky thighs. They did a cancan. They sang a Pointer Sisters song — “I want to wrap myself around you.” They turned cartwheels under the blades of a chopper. An encore, then another. The show, viewed and enjoyed by some of the 241 Marines who’d be crushed to death in their sleep by an enormous Hezbollah bomb one quiet Sunday morning not long afterwards, couldn’t have been a greater success. Update: Last week, the 60-something Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah operative and commander, was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut. According to Israel, he headed Hezbollah’s rocket development, deployment, and firing program and was responsible for the attack earlier last month in Majdal Shams, a Druze village on the Golan Heights that killed 12 children and wounding dozens more. Some people believe the Israelis make things up. But the New York Times reports that Shukr planned and ordered the bombing of the Marines and for years had had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head. The paper of record hasn’t said whether Israel will be claiming it. Edward Grossman has reported for TAS, Wall Street Journal, Les temps modernes (Paris), Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo) and Shefa (Jerusalem). The post Better Late Than Never appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Social Security is facing enormous shortfalls. It is insolvent. Within the next 10 years, no one will be able to avoid this reality — despite decades of politically expedient denial. Yet as of today, both presidential candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, have announced they won’t touch the program. In fact, Trump wants to make it even more insolvent by lifting taxes seniors pay on benefits. Don’t get me wrong, I love lower tax rates. I also believe the current tax structure on benefits creates a large incentive for seniors who may want to reenter the workforce to choose not to do so. And these types of work disincentives in the tax code are bad. While reducing Social Security taxes may encourage some seniors to go back to work, it will in turn cause more dramatic problems if not paired with reform to Social Security benefits, something neither Trump nor Harris cares to recognize. Social Security is in a big financial mess as it is. Current benefit taxes bring in about $87 billion in revenue each year, in addition to the payroll tax revenue. Even still, Social Security is insolvent. Currently, it is projected that the main Social Security trust fund will dry out by 2033. According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, exempting Social Security benefits from taxation would move that date forward to 2032 (it will also dry up the Medicare trust fund six years sooner). Why should you care? Because law requires that when insolvency happens, Social Security benefits will have to be cut by 23 percent unless Congress reforms the program. If Congress and the administration decide to maintain the benefits and pay for them with borrowed funds, the U.S. Treasury will have to borrow $39 trillion over 30 years (on top of $77 trillion borrowed for Medicare). This, of course, will be in addition to the already large deficits and debt we have incurred. That shortfall will be even larger without taxes on benefits. It is worth remembering that insolvency is in fact the reason why these taxes were adopted in the first place. The decision to tax benefits didn’t happen until 1983, when the program was already in financial trouble. Additional taxes, and an increase in the payroll tax, were seen as necessary means to keep the program solvent. Congress, however, should have reformed the program more fundamentally back then. The way the program was initially designed baked in eventual insolvency. But Congress took a more politically convenient, less responsible route. Today, we are paying the price for this political cowardice. Lifting taxes on Social Security benefits would also be very unfair. Contrary to common belief, seniors are overrepresented in the top income quintile. As Brian Riedl wrote, “Seniors have the lowest poverty rate of any age group, and their average household incomes have grown four times as fast as the average worker since 1980.” Comparatively, younger people currently paying for seniors’ benefits are more likely to be in the bottom of the income distribution. In this way, Social Security redistributes benefits from lower- to higher-income Americans. Lifting taxes would make this inequality even worse. Besides, seniors are already getting more in Social Security benefits than they paid in. According to an Urban Institute calculation, a married couple with two average earners retiring in 2025 will receive $831,000 in benefits over their lifetime but will have paid “only” $783,000 into the program — all adjusted into net present value. The bottom line is that some seniors could absolutely absorb a reform in benefits. Lifting taxes on these relatively well-to-do seniors instead is a slap in the face for younger and poorer current workers. The bottom line is that exempting Social Security benefits from taxation is a bad idea. So why propose it? Because politicians get rewarded when they promise to enrich voters, including showering them with cash. A new paper by the American Enterprise Institute’s Stan Veuger, University of California, San Diego’s Jeffrey Clemens, and University of California, Los Angeles’s Julia Payson looks at pandemic-era spending and shows that politicians are rewarded at the ballot box for doling out deficit-financed benefits and making future generations pay the price. Whatever role voters play in this mess, the greatest threat to Social Security isn’t the current tax structure — it’s willful political denial of the program’s impending insolvency. By addressing these challenges head-on sooner rather than later, we can preserve the integrity of the system and uphold the intergenerational compact that has long been at the heart of Social Security. The time for meaningful reform is now, before the financial realities force far more drastic and painful measures in the future. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: America Needs a Rational Energy Policy JD Vance and the Bipartisan Itch to Tax Behavior The post Social Security Can’t Afford Tax Cut to Benefits appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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