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The ADVANCE, July 14, 2021/Page 6A
(51?e Ahumtce
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
—Walter Lippmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
"The Democratic position seems to be ev
erything is going to be free. Free education.
Free health care. Free housing. Free love.
Free kittens, I don't know."
John Kennedy, US Senator, Louisiana
Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D, former Lt.
Governor of New York State and author of
Beating Obamacare: 'Democrats' plans to
make election cheating easier.
Since Thursday's decision, Democrats
and the media have ramped up demands
to end the filibuster and pass the bill with
a simple majority, The New York Times de
clared that "the ball is in Congress's court
and time is fast running out,"
The Times claims H.R. 1 would "restore
the heart of the Voting Rights Act," Non
sense. Discrimination against minority voters
is already illegal, as it should be.
Let's get real. HR 1 is a corrupt scheme
to make cheating widespread.
Chase Martin, legal affairs director for
the Foundation for Government Account
ability: The Supreme Court bars third parties
from using voting rights act to infringe on
election integrity.
Clearly, Arizona's reforms protect the
vote of every American regardless of their
race, color, or membership in language mi
nority group by striving to eliminate the risk
of bad actors tampering with the ballots
of those who do not have the resources or
ability to return them on their own.
The DOJ Civil Rights Division should take
notice of this clear signal by the Supreme
Court: states have the authority to imple
ment common-sense voting reforms and
that's not going to change anytime soon.
Leah Barkoukis is the online features ed
itor at Townhall.com: Critics blast 'danger
ous' and 'unconstitutional' expansion of US
Capitol Police.
The U.S. Capitol Police are planning to
expand outside of the District of Columbia,
opening regional field offices "to better
protect lawmakers" against threats in the
wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, reports The
New York Times.
But the expansion of the Capitol Police's
power is raising eyebrows for a number of
reasons, including its secrecy, given that
USCP are not subject to Freedom of Infor
mation Act requests.
"This is always what "defund the police"
meant. The federalization of policing in
America continues," states a Twitter user.
Silvio Canto, Jr., writer for American
Thinker: Leave the country if you hate it that
much.
I am tired of this nonsense. It's time to
start asking these people a few questions:
1. What other country would you rather
live in? What country in the world has done
more to correct its mistakes of the past?
2. Why don't you leave the county and
find your rainbow elsewhere?
The bad news is that these people are
obnoxious. The good news is that there is a
backlash, and it won't be pretty.
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Republicans Should Bail
on Infrastructure Deal
So far, the bipartisan
infrastructure deal is going
through the normal life cycle of
such proposals — alive, dead,
revived, uncertain.
For Republicans, the best
answer should be dead.
They have nothing to gain
by blessing a portion of
President Joe Biden’s spending
plans, when an ungodly amount
of money is going to go out the
door regardless of whether they
vote for a chunk of it or not.
The conventional wisdom
is that the Senate has to prove
that it can work, and the test of
its functioning is how much of
Biden’s spending Republicans
endorse.
This is a distorted view of
the Senate’s role, which
shouldn’t be to get on board a
historic spending spree for
which Biden won no mandate
and which isn’t justified by
conditions in the country (it’s
not true, for instance, that the
nation’s infrastructure is
crumbling).
Besides, if bipartisan
spending is the test, the Senate
just a few weeks ago passed a
$200 billion China competition
bill by a 68-32 vote. It used to
be that $200 billion constituted
a lot of money, but now it
doesn’t rate, not when there’s
$6 trillion on the table.
The infrastructure deal
lurched from gloriously alive to
dead when Biden explicitly
linked its passage to the
simultaneous passage of a
reconciliation bill with the rest
of the Democratic Party’s
spending priorities in it.
Then, it revived again when
Biden walked this back, and
promised a dual track for the
two bills.
The fierce Republican
insistence on these two tracks
doesn’t make much sense and
amounts to asking Democrats
to allow a decent interval before
going ahead with the rest of
their spending — Democrats
are going to try to pass a
reconciliation whether the
bipartisan deal passes or not.
In other words, at the end
of the day, there’s only one
track.
The calculation of
Republicans supporting the
deal is that a significant
bipartisan package can take
some of the heat off of Sens. Joe
Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema
in their resistance to eliminating
the filibuster.
A deal that passes and is
signed into law will certainly be
a feather in their caps, but it’s
hard to believe they’d change
their minds on the filibuster if
the deal fell apart.
They are both so
extensively and adamantly on
the record in favor of the
filibuster that a climb-down
would be politically
embarrassing and perilous.
Republicans supporting
the deal also think that it will
make passing the subsequent
reconciliation bill harder. First,
the parts of infrastructure that
have the widest support —
roads and bridges — will be in
the deal and not in the
reconciliation bill. Second, the
unwelcome tax increases
excluded from the bipartisan
deal will be in the reconciliation
bill.
This isn’t a crazy
calculation, although it’s not
clearly correct either. The
higher the top-line number is
for the reconciliation bill, the
harder it will be to pass. By
allowing Democrats to cleave
off some spending into a
bipartisan deal, the overall
number for the reconciliation
bill gets smaller. In other words,
the bipartisan deal could make
the partisan reconciliation
easier, rather than harder, to
pass.
It’s not as though Biden is
fiscally prudent on all other
fronts except in this one area,
which he considers a
particularly important national
investment with unmistakable
Please see Lowry page 8A
GRITTY
The Costs of
Biden’s Big
Government
It is one of the
unfortunate ironies
coming out of the
Biden
administration that,
with all the
obsession about so-
called equity,
policies they are
putting forth will
only hurt the very
low-income Americans they pretend to
want to help.
The Biden administration is growing
government at a record pace.
If what they want is opportunity for
every American, government policy
should aim to encourage economic
growth. Bigger, more intrusive
government achieves the opposite. It
stifles economic growth.
The Biden administration submitted
its first 10-year budget to Congress last
month.
The budget projects average annual
economic growth for 2023 through 2031,
after they’re done with all the stimulus
spending in 2021-22, of 1.9%.
What does 1.9% growth mean?
Economist John Cochrane, of
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution,
notes that from 1950 to 2000, the U.S.
economy grew at 3.5% per year. Average
real income over that period grew from
$16,000 per person to $50,000.
Suppose instead of 3.5%, growth over
that period of time was 2%, asks
Cochrane.
With average growth of 2% instead of
3.5%, a $16,000 income would have
grown over the 50 years to $23,000 rather
than $50,000.
In recent years, since 2000, average
growth has been more sclerotic, in the
range of 2%.
Please see Nitty page 9A
By Star Parker
COMMENTARY
Are We Witnessing The Death Of
America’s Democratic Republic?
By Barry Shaw
Although this journal is called
the American Thinker, it can be
useful to hear the observations of a
non-American thinker on what
appear to be bewildering and
growing problems in America.
Public safety is perhaps the pre
eminent responsibility of
government. If a government cannot
protect its citizens against criminal
members of its society, or even
against the unlawful behavior of
government itself, that nation no
longer deserves to call itself a
functioning democracy.
Has the United States reached
that point?
The Constitution, which is the
primary document of the United
States government, begins, “We the
People of the United States, in Order
to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the general
Welfare....”
These provisions are the basic
tenets of the need to maintain civil
order and public safety in a nation in
harmony with itself. It means
providing law and order, protection,
and safety for each lawful individual
citizen.
The Founders wrote the
Constitution that way because it was
known that there will be people, or
even tyrants, who do not respect
their fellow citizens and who are
willing to take the law into their own
hands. This is especially true if the
government fails to provide
mechanisms to police against crime
and punish it when it occurs.
The outcome of defunding or
dismantling law enforcement must,
inevitably, lead to a sharp increase in
lawlessness and violence. In those
parts of America that have
aggressively defunded or dismantled
their law enforcement, areas that are
almost exclusively Democrat-
governed states and cities, the social
fabric has indeed broken down.
Public safety is too important to
be used as a political tool; or as a
political excuse to change society
with one political party imposing
biased policies over its citizens; or as
a weapon for the ruling political
party to enforce oppressive policies
over a population. This is true even if
that breakdown in safety is delivered
under the guise of benefiting some
or all of the population.
If the government’s general
misrule, deliberate acts, or
incompetence, puts citizens at risk
and puts beyond their reach the
freedoms and liberty necessary for
them to thrive, the inevitable
outcome will be that some segment
of society becomes lawless.
Democrats try to deflect by pointing
to “root causes.” Currently, they say
that police and guns are the “root
causes” of violence. Yet those states
with active police forces and readily
Please see Guest page 9A