-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! CONGRESS ACTION: August 19, 2001 ================= CAMPAIGN REFORM RESURRECTED: "As part of his relentless effort to get big money out of politics, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) spent more than $1.1 million from his Straight Talk America political action committee during the first six months of the year." That opening sentence from an August 13 article in Roll Call newspaper pretty much sums up the debased status of politics today. Spending big money to achieve a political result is evil, according to conventional wisdom, unless it is John McCain doing the spending, and only on a goal with which the major media agrees. It turns out that the reported demise of the campaign finance "reform" travesty was a bit premature. Under the Discharge Petition procedure, proponents of the Shays-Meehan campaign "reform" bill (H.R.2356) must obtain the signatures of 218 members of the House to force the bill back onto the legislative calendar for a vote. They currently have 205 signatures. It will be recalled that in July, procedural maneuvering temporarily killed H.R.2356 in the House. Democrats wanted to add numerous amendments ("loopholes" in the currently popular parlance) to the bill to induce votes from their wavering supporters, and got mad when the republican leadership proposed following standard House procedure of holding votes on individual amendments one at a time. The bill's proponents knew they didn't have enough votes to keep the legislation intact, so they voted against the rules of the debate and killed their own bill. And with the help of media disinformation, succeeded in blaming republicans for the dastardly deed. How dare those wily republicans demand votes on individual amendments -- it's only democrats who are allowed to demand individual votes on hundreds of individual amendments that they introduce in order to destroy republican sponsored legislation -- and to add insult to injury, in this case it was the democrats' own amendments that they didn't want individual votes on! In 1997, a CATO Institute Policy Analysis (Campaign Finance "Reform" Proposals, A First Amendment Analysis) concluded, ".current proposals for new regulation of federal election campaign finance practices are constitutionally indefensible. In their general conception, they are nothing short of a practically complete rejection of individual and associational rights of expression and political participation that the First Amendment guarantees." Bradley A. Smith, Constitutional scholar and now a member of the Federal Election Commission, while testifying before the House of Representatives, Subcommittee on the Constitution, on February 27, 1997, said, "The House should reject simplistic proposals such as Shays-Meehan, or efforts to amend the Constitution to destroy the right to free political speech, and move generally to deregulate political speech. It ought not be a crime to 'commit politics' in America." Have those so-called campaign finance "reform" proposals -- McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan -- improved over the intervening years? Are those bills that our elected legislators are pushing today, with the connivance and blessing of the national media, any more Constitutionally defensible than they were five years ago? According to the American Civil Liberties Union: ".the McCain-Feingold bill is a recipe for political repression because it egregiously violates longstanding free speech rights in several ways: It stifles issue advocacy in violation of the First Amendment; It criminalizes any constitutionally-protected contact that groups and individuals may have with candidates (through bans on so-called "coordination"); It virtually destroys political parties in an unconstitutional fashion." Further, "Clearly, the authors and supporters of McCain-Feingold despise any form of issue advocacy that has the audacity to mention candidates for federal office by name. The bill virtually silences issue advocacy. . Speech which comments on, criticizes or praises, applauds or condemns the public records and actions of public officials and political candidates -- even though it mentions and discusses candidates, and even though it occurs during an election year or even an election season -- is entirely protected by the First Amendment. . The Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2001 is not reform at all, but is a fatally flawed assault on First Amendment rights." When the Congress returns from its August recess, that assault on the First Amendment will resume. GREEDY TAXPAYERS: "We face the very real prospect that your tax cut, coupled with an economy that is slowing significantly, will have exhausted all of the surplus in the near term and leave no way to fund other functions of government without tapping into Medicare and Social Security." -- Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO), in a letter to President Bush. "The Bush administration has authored a budget and tax plan that does not add up and that will hurt our country. . Bush's fiscal mismanagement has driven us into a ditch." -- Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND). "I am glad we did what was right in 1993 [raising taxes], and I'll do it again, because I believe in being fiscally responsible with the taxpayers' money." -- Dick Gephardt. According to democrats, because of that measly $300 that taxpayers are getting back (part of $1.3 trillion tax cut over the next ten years, which democrats want to repeal), our country faces financial catastrophe. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was more accurate when he warned that congressional spending was more of a danger to the budget than the tax cut. "They only way Social Security will be touched is if Congress spends too much money.'' According to Citizens Against Government Waste's (CAGW), ".during the next five years the U.S. government will flush at least $1.2 trillion down the drain in uncorrected waste, fraud, and abuse [nearly double the total amount of the tax cut]. So, to tell the American people that government can't pay its bills and has no choice but to raise taxes -- during a near-recession no less -- takes real brass. But that is just what House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt recently did. For playing politics against the president's barely-in-effect tax cut and defending the Washington waste status quo, CAGW names Rep. Gephardt its Porker of the Month for August 2001." While you read the following from CAGW, keep in mind that leftists claim it is your puny tax cut -- not their own wasteful spending -- that "has driven us into a ditch." a.. Federal agencies make at least $20 billion annually in improper payments. b.. Corporate welfare costs $65 billion annually. c.. Total discretionary spending increased by 11% in fiscal 2000 and 8% in 2001, well above inflation, with 2002 increases expected to be in the same range. d.. The Pentagon is currently storing 618,000 Chinese-made berets, valued at $4 million, while it decides what to do with them. (DoD officials banned the berets after protests because they were made in a communist country). a.. A $100 million Earth-observing spacecraft pushed by former Vice President Gore will soon be placed in storage. The spacecraft Triana was designed to study Earth's climate and monitor global warming, but budget matters forced NASA to cut back on missions. Triana, nicknamed GoreCam, was not deemed a scientific priority. b.. According to a General Accounting Office (GAO) report, the Pentagon made $615 million in illegal and improper accounting entries last year for contractor bills. a.. The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved a 4.6% salary increase for government employees even though the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says the bill will cost approximately $900 million more than the 3.6% pay increase President Bush requested. The raise passed the House by 334-94. b.. A senior systems accountant at the Department of Education, fired during the Clinton Administration after reporting security problems in a grant management system, said that the system could lose between $6 and $15 billion. The Department of Education still uses the system. c.. The United States Postal Service paid out $197 million in bonuses despite a $199 million deficit for last year. d.. The federal government spent $32 billion on direct payments to farmers last year, despite the failure of these payments to remedy rural poverty and environmental concerns. Big government types (on both the left and the right) truly believe that all money belongs to the government, not to the people who earn it. Thus Joe Lieberman recently lamented that the tax cut would "jeopardize our prosperity" -- because he, like most politicians, measures "our prosperity" as government receipts, not as private wealth. When spending money that's not theirs, fiscal responsibility (not to mention Constitutional restraint) is irrelevant. So what if they waste a few billion dollars? They can always blame you and demand that you fork over more money for them to waste. Cutting their spending is a main objective of a tax cut. But of course the idea of having to trim their profligacy in any way, because you are getting back a small pittance of your own money, has congress outraged. It is the taxpayer who should be outraged, watching government take $2 trillion of our money every year, seeing the outrageous ways in which they spend it, then hearing them whine that it isn't enough and that you are harming their prosperity. BILL CLINTON, ENVIRONMENTALIST?: To hear radical environmentalists and other assorted leftists tell it, our environment was heading for catastrophe under 12 years of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Reagan, it was said, instituted a "radical project" of using the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment to stifle federal and state regulation of business and property (enforcing the Constitution has become "radical" to the left). Reagan's policies, according to enviro wisdom, endangered the quality of life for all Americans. According to the left, the price, in terms of public health and public safety, was disastrous. We were "saved" just in the nick of time by Bill Clinton and his sidekick Al "Earth in the Balance" Gore. While running for president, Gore once boasted that one of the Clinton administration's top achievements was that it stopped an effort to "roll back 25 years of environmental progress." That, at least, has always been the left's mantra regarding Clinton/Gore environmentalism. Dissenting environmentalists, however, were less than enthusiastic, but not very public in their criticism. Explaining why he was supporting Ralph Nader instead of Bill Clinton in the 1996 election, a Sierra Club board member wrote, "President Clinton has done more to harm the environment and to weaken environmental regulations in three years than Presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years." The public propaganda campaign to demonize republican environmental policy continues against the current administration, with the Defenders of Wildlife proclaiming that President George W. Bush is "on track to become the most anti-environmental president in modern times. . He's waging war on the environment, and he's just getting started." In June, the bipartisan AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies issued a report examining the Clinton/Gore environmental record, and concluded, "Environmental quality improved overall during the decade, continuing a trend that began in the 1970s, although improvements were much less than during the previous two decades." (emphasis added) Those "previous two decades" encompassed the presidential terms of republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, a brief stint by democrat Jimmy Carter, followed by republicans Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. So as assorted leftists and democrats attack the environmental policies of the current Bush administration and pine for the "good old days" of Clinton and Gore, it bears remembering that attacking republicans on the environment is just political sport for the left, and that their claims don't bear any relationship to reality. FOR MORE INFORMATION. ======================== CATO Institute Policy Analysis # 282: Campaign Finance "Reform" Proposals, A First Amendment Analysis: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-282.html National Environmental Policy During The Clinton Years: http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract.asp?pID=152 Citizens Against Government Waste: http://www.cagw.org/index.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mr. Kim Weissman [EMAIL PROTECTED] *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? 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