Tag Archives: Republicans

Justin Amash trashes “No Budget, No Pay” as unconstitutional

Earlier this week Darryl Perry wrote here at Hammer of Truth that the No Budget, No Pay Act (H.R. 325) was an unconstitutional measure, and a sure sign of Republican weakness to boot:

The 27th Amendment reads, in part, “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of the Representatives shall have intervened.”

Despite the fact that the compensation is not changing, the bill could still be unconstitutional as it alters the scheduled dates of pay, which would be “varying the compensation.” It is unlikely any of the Republicans will challenge the bill, and the Democrats reportedly see “the legislation as a white flag on the part of the GOP, something that allows Congress to skirt the debt limit issue and move on to other fiscal arguments.”

On Tuesday, Justin Amash — a second-term, libertarian-leaning, Republican Congressman from Michigan — posted his take on facebook:

I voted no on H R 325, No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013. The bill has two parts.

First, the bill suspends the debt ceiling through May 18, 2013. In other words, it allows the government to operate as though there is no debt ceiling. On May 19, the debt ceiling will automatically increase by the amount borrowed during the suspension. Because the government borrows about $4 billion per day, this bill will likely increase the debt ceiling by $400 billion or more, without any cuts or reforms to reduce future spending. see more…

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We will move quickly to the left in Colorado this year

Here are the numbers in the Colorado State Legislature.

House: 37 Democrats, 28 Republicans

Senate: 20 Democrats, 15 Republicans

Those in the Colorado State Legislature will pass any legislation they want and Democrat Governor John Hickenlooper will sign it. Anything is possible in the next few months so brace yourselves. Legislation that is sure to be passed without much effort are: Gun control; Homosexual marriages/civil unions; In-state tuition rates at state colleges and universities for illegal immigrants.

What else will be passed? Anything they want to pass and ram down our throats. I predict TABOR will be ignored with plenty of new taxes (they will call them fees or maybe not this session). This will be history in the making this year.

There is no stopping them this time, even in the courts, because most of the local State Courts, the State Appeals Court and the State Supreme Court are all controlled by progressive/leftist/socialist judges.

The only Colorado State offices still controlled by Republicans are the Secretary of State, State Treasurer and State Attorney General. They are all up for re-election in two years. Unless something huge happens in the next two years all those offices will go Democrat.

What do I think? It does not matter. What matters is the majority of voters in Colorado want this and are excited with the unlimited possibilities this brings for a socialist Colorado.

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Stephen Gordon’s “2013 Congressional Liberty Team Lineup”

Stephen Gordon — the highly acclaimed expert Libertarian/Republican strategist, consultant and commentator (and HoT alumni) — posted his picks for who to watch in the 133th’s Congress. As stolen from his facebook page:

Senate Starters:
Rand Paul
Jeff Flake
Mike Lee
Ted Cruz		 Senate Second String**:
Ron Johnson
Pat Toomey
Tom Coburn
Marco Rubio
House Starters:
Justin Amash
Tom McClintock
Steve Stockman
Thomas Massie
Walter Jones
Adrian Smith
Scott Garrett
Kerry Bentivolio
Ted Yoho
Steve Chabot
Jason Chaffetz
Jimmy Duncan		 House Second String**:
Tim Huelskamp
Jim Jordan
Dave Schweikert
Michael Fitzpatrick
Raúl Labrador
Mick Mulvaney
Tom Price

* This is just the preseason lineup, which will obviously change through this congressional session. It’s my best guess, at this moment, of who is most likely to carry the freedom football in the proper direction for a touchdown for liberty.

** These players have demonstrated some potential ability, but have thrown too many interceptions, fumbled the ball too often, or otherwise made too many mistakes on the field to be included in the starting lineup. However, with enough constituent coaching, liberty workouts and freedom scrimmages, they have the potential to help move the ball towards the liberty goal line.

For all the naysayers who buy into the malaise and believe the endless propaganda asserting that the libertarian message of fiscal responsibility, freedom and liberty is dead in Congress, there’s twenty-seven representatives who are apparently working hard to disprove that notion.

Of course it’s a little awkward to note that there’s no women in this liberty team lineup, so hopefully the 2014 elections will see some females putting on some makeup and running serious campaigns.

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Ron Paul’s new year’s resolutions for Congress

As I prepare to retire from Congress, I’d like to suggest a few New Year’s resolutions for my colleagues to consider. For the sake of liberty, peace, and prosperity I certainly hope more members of Congress consider the strict libertarian constitutional approach to government in 2013.

In just a few days, Congress will solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against ALL enemies, foreign and domestic. They should reread Article 1 Section 8 and the Bill of Rights before taking such a serious oath. Most legislation violates key provisions of the Constitution in very basic ways, and if members can’t bring themselves to say no in the face of pressure from special interests, they have broken trust with their constituents and violated their oaths. Congress does not exist to serve special interests, it exists to protect the rule of law.

I also urge my colleagues to end unconstitutional wars overseas. Stop the drone strikes; stop the covert activities and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations. Strive to observe “good faith and justice towards all Nations” as George Washington admonished. We are only making more enemies, wasting lives, and bankrupting ourselves with the neoconservative, interventionist mindset that endorses pre-emptive war that now dominates both parties.

All foreign aid should end because it is blatantly unconstitutional. While it may be a relatively small part of our federal budget, for many countries it is a large part of theirs–and it creates perverse incentives for both our friends and enemies. There is no way members of Congress can know or understand the political, economic, legal, and social realities in the many nations to which they send taxpayer dollars.

Congress needs to stop accumulating more debt. US debt, monetized by the Federal Reserve, is the true threat to our national security. Revisiting the parameters of Article 1 Section 8 would be a good start.

Congress should resolve to respect personal liberty and free markets. Learn more about the free market and how it regulates commerce and produces greater prosperity better than any legislation or regulation. Understand that economic freedom IS freedom. Resolve not to get in the way of voluntary contracts between consenting adults. Stop bailing out failed yet politically connected companies and industries. Stop forcing people to engage in commerce when they don’t want to, and stop prohibiting them from buying and selling when they do want to. Stop trying to legislate your ideas of fairness. Protect property rights. Protect the individual. That is enough.

There are many more resolutions I would like to see my colleagues in Congress adopt, but respect for the Constitution and the oath of office should be at the core of everything members of Congress do in 2013.

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The republican (establishment) has failed the nation

Erick Erickson writes at Red State:

Over the next couple of years, Barack Obama wants to raise the national debt to $18.9 trillion or so.

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the congressional Republicans want to raise the national debt to $18.4 trillion or so.

The present leadership of the Republican Party has gone from making the case that government is the problem and the American people are the solution to making the case that Democratic controlled government is the problem and Republican controlled government is the solution.

By giving up on making the case that government is the problem and pivoting to “Democrats are the problem,” the Republican Party has failed the American people. Historically, when parties lost, their leadership went and hid for an appropriate amount of time under a rock after an acceptance of blame and a resignation.

The present Republican leaders in Washington, instead of hiding under a rock, have taken to standing on the rock and demanding conservatives self flagellate. Neither John Boehner nor Mitch McConnell are visionaries. They are survivors. They survive by recognizing the biggest threat to them and trying to befriend it or neutralize it.

Right now, both see conservatives as their biggest threat, not Barack Obama. Why? Because while Barack Obama maintains the White House, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell maintain their positions of power. They exist for power, not for vision. The visions they articulate are routinely backpedaled. Remember the pledge to nowhere the House Republicans concocted in 2010 as a second coming of the Contract With America? Within two months of returning to the majority they’d already ditched their pledge faster than a frat boy fleeing a one night stand. Only conservatives wish to hold them accountable for their breach of trust, thus conservatives are the threat.

The very same Republican leadership who paved the way for the rise of the Democrats in 2006 through moral opaqueness on the role of government in the lives of Americans now seek to shut up and shut out the conservatives who continue to loudly point out that the size and scope of the federal leviathan has grown too unwieldy.

I joined the Republican Party in 1964 and voted for Barry Goldwater, a man ahead of his times. The Republican Party was not what it should have been for years after the Goldwater nomination for President and his loss.

Finally it appeared the Republican Party got its act together with Ronald Reagan. We had eight very good years. The economy was so strong even Clinton could not undo it during his eight years. Then it was downhill again.

In 2005 I quit the Republican Party and became unaffiliated and dabbled with the Libertarian Party. After Obama was elected I was convinced to rejoin in 2008, shortly after his inauguration, and really got involved, close to a full time unpaid volunteer for the tea party grassroots movement and the Republican Party internal politics.

We appeared to have momentum in our favor with our wins in 2010. We, a bunch of amateurs, did not have the Republican institutional establishment professional politicians and operatives as allies. They were our enemies and we had an uneasy alliance with them and yet I did not realize how much they rejected us as part of the process until now.

Now, here we are, could not get a grassroots candidate nominated for President, lost ground at the state and local levels, lost the Colorado House, failed to get some grassroots Congressmen re-elected, and had to live with a presidential candidate many of us did not support in the primaries but choked it down anyway and worked hard on his behalf.

In two years the odds of keeping the Colorado State Attorney General’s office, the Colorado Secretary of State and the Colorado State Treasurer may be dismal. If the Democrats succeed in taking those three offices the transition of Colorado to a socialist state (think California) will be complete and nearly perfect.

Look what we have. The big dogs in the Republican Party are having a discussion on moving to the left of center, far left, not just a tad. NO, NO, UNACCEPTABLE. If they do, that will for sure end any alliances we grassroots common, hardworking citizens have with them.

I do not blame myself or any grassroots Constitutional conservative libertarian Republicans. I blame the institutional establishment old line Republicans for being ready, willing and able to destroy the Republican Party so they could destroy us and teach us a lesson. It was a political suicide bombing of the Republican Party by Republicans with them destroying themselves to destroy us.

Now what? Quit? Never, ever quit, just figure out another strategy even if it does not include the Republican Party or mainstream politics. I predict many of us who placed everything political in working within the Republican Party are going to transition and morph into something different, what that is I do not know but it will not be the same old politics. It may be peaceful, it may not. We will see. I know I will not again make the same mistakes twice.

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Today, we fucking vote

So… go find your fucking polling place.

This has been a helpful message from the fucking Hammer of Truth, where we haven’t said “fuck” in a while. We know you missed the needless profanity and make a promise (non-campaign, so it’s legit) to put in more swearing.

Please let us know in the fucking comments what candidates and issues you think are going to fucking win.

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The Republicans are the real socialists

Commie Romney

“The Republicans are a bunch of communists.“

For years, this statement has been my way of pointing out to people that my Libertarian beliefs place me to the right of Atilla the Hun. Lately though, I have realized that the statement is true.

With their full throated support of the military industrial and prison industrial complexes, the Republicans are the originators and protectors of all the cushiest government jobs in the country. The Democrats are of course 99% as bad as the Republicans are on these issues, but at least some of them, occasionally, try to find non-lethal ways to waste our tax dollars. You shouldn’t vote for any of them.

The Northrup Grumans and the Corrections Corporation of Americas of this world are the true welfare queens. You can put a Gingrich-ian gloss on it, and claim that these companies are in the private sector because they work for corporate structures, but you would be fooling yourself. If an entity makes all of its money selling things to the government, then it is functionally a branch of government. It might be easier to fire people than it is at the Department of Education, but the folks at the top of the DOE don’t take home tens of millions of dollars a year.

This is socialism in practice. Our defense industry is make-work on a scale that would make FDR blush. At least his Works Progress Administration didn’t do anything. Since 1989, our defense industry has worked tirelessly to make us less secure, and invent reasons to send our soldiers off to die in deserts. What the defense industry does to our soldiers, and Islamic weddings, the prison industry does to the rest of us. It turns poor pot smokers of color into violent criminals, and poor white people into the commandants of rape camps.

These industries have locked whole regions of our country into a culture of dependency. Munitions workers, prison workers and their representatives in congress continue to vote for these depraved policies. Anyone who looks honestly at the results of our war on drugs, and our absurd policy of militarizing the world, can see that their effects are malign, but these policies are too entrenched to stop. Too many good government jobs depend on them.

So yes, when Republicans say that we are in danger of becoming a socialist country, they are absolutely right. This process did not start four years ago, however, it has been going on for a lot longer, and both parties are its authors and (hopefully not) finishers. Let me leave you with a little Abraham Lincoln*

From Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the Armies of Europe and Asia could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio River or set a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by suicide.

*Sadly I am not enough of a Lincolnologist to come by that quote honestly, all credit is due to Titus Andronicus, an awesome band, for making me aware of it.

Robert Morris has written at some length on US foreign policy and the drug war. His videos and writings can be found here.

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EPA trying to enforce minimum “E15″ gas purchases

What’s the best way to get people to stop bitching about ever-higher gas prices and their fallout in the ethanol market? The EPA seems to think it’s to just jack up the minimum amount people are allowed to buy — to four gallons:

With prices at the pump worrying Americans, Republicans have railed against the Environmental Protection Agency’s new gas mandate that requires consumers to buy at least four gallons when purchasing from stations with hoses containing 10 percent and 15 percent ethanol-blended fuel.

On Monday, Republicans on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Chief Administrator Lisa Jackson criticizing the agency’s approval of the sale of gasoline containing 15 volume percent ethanol.

Specifically, the EPA will require that consumers purchase a minimum of four gallons when buying from a gas station that sells gasoline containing 10 percent ethanol and 15 percent ethanol — also known as “E15″ — out of the same gas pump.

A black market will undoubtedly emerge for people who just need less than four gallons. I look forward to seeing the skeezy onesies pushers, stinking of petroleum as they rush to your car with liters of gold liquid sloshing around in their large jackets.

Ultimately, the EPA will have only themselves to blame when customers find themselves caught between two unfree markets (the gas station tasked with enforcing silly federal laws and the bootleggers ignoring them) and it starts to slowly dawn on them who the lesser of two evils really are in that hilarious instance.

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HBO’S Newsroom Finale: Republicans in name only

Newsroom, starring Jeff Daniels as anchor Will McAvoy, isn’t pulling punches. But with hindsight super-abilities comes the flip side of preaching to new audiences who were first unaware of any of the facts (quasi-history).

Maybe they were tuned into TMZ, I mean TMI and not the issues of deficits run up by the imperial and christian alliance. But those audiences will look at this and think: “hmm, this looks about right.” Maybe they’ll get interested in getting up and giving a damn about their country direction — realizing it’s they who control that course.

Or maybe they’ll just hate news people a little more and realize what unhappy pathetic people they also are (fictional: feeling sorry for yourself after a hit piece in New York Magazine, oh boo hoo don’t console yourself with your millions… swallow pills).

Sadly enough, Sorkin has done a terrible job giving Ron Paul any credit for his true role as godfather of the tea party (before it was hijacked by every interest group and became a reactionary nationalist movement), relegating him to brief quips on economic issues and once again trudging through the racist views of others that were published under his banner without his knowledge. In a recent episode, going so far as to ironically have the only black man in the newsroom play Paul during a mock debate. The humor and jabs at everyone in the truth industry is indeed the most ironic thing about this show.

Still, I love them for trying to understand the republican narrative that’s developed since the 2008 crash and Obama’s presidency, but that’s the power of a hindsight fictional show far flung from the actual power centers covering the screwups in the news: even they won’t get the story right.

Newsday reviewer Verne Gay writes on the season’s finale:

But I was struck in a couple of instances by what some viewed as the series’ chief virtue — that it offered a candid look at how editorial decisions are made in the newsrooms of major television networks.

I didn’t have the heart to tell those readers, but . . . no, that is not the series’ chief virtue. That doesn’t even belong on the list of virtues. “The Newsroom” is a fairy tale, almost wholly disembodied from the real world of television journalism, even with its real world takes on newsmakers as diverse as Casey Anthony and Grover Norquist.

But Aaron Sorkin, in his defense, isn’t seeking verisimilitude as much as (if I may coin a new word) quasi-similitude, in which viewers are lulled into thinking this is a real world when in fact all Sorkin wants to do is mount an entertaining series and score a few points at the same time.

“The Newsroom” is kind of a Trojan horse of a series, ingratiating itself and then — once inside your head — unleashing its hordes of Sorkian notions of fairness, Democracy, the Tea party, threats to American life (as he sees them), and so on. Verisimilitude be damned.

That’s another way of saying there’s not much accuracy, but it’s entertaining as hell.

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Are men ruining the Republican Party?

Kathleen Parker writes at the Daily Beast:

“It is noteworthy that so many Republican men are focused on women’s reproduction and issues of the hearth, while veteran Republican women leaders are riveted on the economy and jobs. Could it be that the liberal goal of reversing sex roles finally is manifesting, most vividly within the party least likely to have advanced the cause of evolution? If only men could get pregnant, then we’d really have a rollicking debate. If only…”

“Meanwhile, Romney had better speak often and with conviction about his own disagreement with some of his party’s platform, or the anti-woman narrative will become so entrenched that the 2012 GOP may go down in history as having sacrificed the nation’s economy to protect the rights of human embryos.”

I had this poop that was so bad one time that it felt like childbirth. If only…

But seriously though, this is one of those ruinous wedge issues that runs through every party because of its religious intonations and of course paternalism. The only thing missing is for the media to conveniently trot out some young women who have had abortions and are incidentally the daughters of powerful Republican men.

I agree wholeheartedly with the “scientifically proven” fact that “77% of Americans believe birth control shouldn’t be part of the national political debate.” But reality doesn’t just wish itself away.

In conclusion: keep making babies fill up the earth so we overflow into the stars.

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GOP to Ron Paul: No endorsement, no speech

Ron Paul — because he’s a libertarian republican and not the other way around — is being discriminated against by the GOP bigwigs once again:

Mr. Paul, in an interview, said convention planners had offered him an opportunity to speak under two conditions: that he deliver remarks vetted by the Romney campaign, and that he give a full-fledged endorsement of Mr. Romney. He declined.

“It wouldn’t be my speech,” Mr. Paul said. “That would undo everything I’ve done in the last 30 years. I don’t fully endorse him for president.”

Mr. Paul’s campaign chairman, Jesse Benton, acknowledged the frustrations that the Paul high command had been forced to manage.

Some true believers want to “dress in black, stand on a hill and say, ‘Smash the state,’ ” said Mr. Benton, who is married to one of Mr. Paul’s granddaughters. But “it’s not our desire to have floor demonstrations. That would cost us a lot more than it would get us.”

Just eight years ago, “it was fringy people in the John Birch Society” who were espousing Mr. Paul’s ideas for taking on the Federal Reserve system, Mr. Benton said. “Now it’s the Republican Party” that has drafted a platform plank calling for auditing the central bank.

The purity of the movement’s principles has long left it in a form of self-imposed isolation. The minimalist role it envisions for government repels a vast majority of Democrats; its noninterventionist foreign policy and live-and-let-live social views repel most Republicans.

It’s not self-imposed when you’re being told to endorse X or not be allowed to attend Y, dipshits.

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Bruce Willis dishes on Romney/Obama

Esquire writer Tom Chiarella is counting how many times Bruce Willis relieves himself in this article. Also he counts a lot of other stuff, like pears. By the time we finally get to page three of this awkward pee and pear prose, we’re given the political purview:

The fourth urination follows. He returns, walking around the large hotel bed — it’s a nice Beverly Hills hotel, but the furniture is drabber than you’d think — phone in hand, gets his balls broken for having a small bladder, ticks out a laugh and says, “Don’t judge.”

Why so much preparation for today? Why so little apparent fun in talking about his life, his work, the people he loves?

This brings on the second Willis stare — eyes narrowed, brow wrinkled. “I’ve been through enough of these,” he says. Just that — enough of these, not “enough of these to know.” Enough of these. Then he explains: “I get cranked up, I start talking about Hollywood and what’s wrong with what. Or politics. I might start in on Mitt Romney.”

Romney?

And with that one simple follow-up, Willis gets mildly cranked up. “Yeah, Romney. He’s just such a disappointment, an embarrassment. Chin up, hair up. He’s just one of those guys, one of those guys who says he’s going to change everything,” he is saying. see more…

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Obasm over for Obamacare

The Associated Press follows a headline with a good punchline:

And how perfect is it that the Urban Dictionary already defined this way back in 2007, “The pleasure that a liberal-leaning journalist gets when writing a fawning story about U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). An “obasm” is a story so gushy and so fluffy, bereft of objectivity, that one imagines having to clean up after the writer with a mop and bucket.”

Consider the Supreme Court the current mop and bucket sent in to clean up the legislative mess.

I’m not fretting over the buckets of joy some are gushing over what is actually the Supreme Court’s almost guaranteed decision to push the reset button Obamacare. The requirement to buy insurance is just one facet of contention being reviewed now by the third branch of the checks and balances on that convoluted rush-job of legislature. see more…

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