Congress

Two More Pieces of Evidence Supporting a Mandatory Retirement Age and Term Limits in Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I. Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), 79, was being wheeled into the House by a staffer when Politico photographer Francis Chung took his picture. Punchbowl News reports that the Congressman screamed, “Who gave you the right to take my picture, asshole?” Nice! The First Amendment gives him the right. Scott was in full public view, and has no expectation of privacy. He doesn’t know that? Why is anyone in Congress who doesn’t understand Bill of Rights 101? Scott has served as the U.S. representative of Georgia’s 13th congressional district since 2003. How can he not know this after 20 years in Congress? Did he once know it and somehow forgot? That seems plausible. Scott has chaired the House Agriculture Committee since January 2021, but colleagues in the House have expressed, all anonymously, of course, concerns about his fading mental abilities. They say he often reads from a script and has “trouble” discussing finer points of policy. Scott also frequently leaves Agriculture Committee meetings and does not return, even though he’s the chairman.

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Ethics Verdicts On Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s Outburst

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first verdict is “What an asshole!”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a freshman GOP Congressman from Wisconsin, walked in on a group of high school-age Senate pages lying on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda to take cellphone photos of the Rotunda dome. According to an alleged transcript of his outburst prepared by one of the pages, Van Orden said, “Wake the fuck up you little shits…Get the fuck out of here. You are defiling the space!” Van Orden also called the teenagers “jackasses” and “lazy shits” according to the pages.

Maddy Pritzl, a former Senate page, took to Twitter to claim this was a tradition that she had observed herself seven years ago. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, engaged in a bipartisan pile-on, condemning Van Orden for his treatment of the pages. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested that the incident may have been a “misunderstanding” and said that he planned on talking to Van Orden, who, for his part, refused to apologize or express regret for his conduct.

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What Should Ethics Alarms Call Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene After Her Hunter Porn Stunt? Ethics Dunce? Incompetent Elected Official?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I choose “disgusting.” The GOP Georgia representative embarrasses me as an American. And she’s incompetent and unethical.

A member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. Greene thought it was appropriate to use her allotted time during a hearing to display nude photographs of Hunter Biden in various situations that could not be put on non-porn television (except, in this case, C-Span, as in the photo above). A member of Congress was displaying graphic shots of the President’s son engaged in sexual acts with alleged prostitutes. “Here is proof Hunter Biden paid prostitutes through his law firm, OWASCO PC, and trafficked his victims across state lines in violation of the Mann Act,” she tweeted. “Not only that, IRS whistleblowers confirm Hunter Biden committed tax fraud by deducting payments to prostitutes from OWASCO’s taxes.”

The photos “proved” neither. In a trial, they would be excluded as prejudicial and irrelevant.

“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. That was thoughtful. The obscene photos shed no light whatsoever on any of the matters regarding the President’s sad and corrupt son that are legitimate topics of Congressional attention: whether he engaged in influence peddling with foreign governments that benefited his father or influenced his actions, and whether he has been shielded from the legal consequences a non-Presidential family member would face who engaged in the same activities. Greene claimed the photos were important supporting evidence regarding a tax fraud coverup and special treatment that resulted in Hunter cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.

Oh. Huh?

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Now THAT’S A Threat To Democracy!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“That” in this case, meaning the abysmal, irresponsible quality of individuals both parties present to the public for election to Congress, and the willingness of lazy, intellectually-stunted Americans to vote for them.

Let’s just look at two, a sitting member of the House and a candidate for the job, the former a Democrat, the latter a Republican.

First, the Congressman, Democrat Modaire Jones of New York (that’s him on the left, above). On the floor of the House yesterday, Jones stated that Officer Brian Sicknick was “bludgeoned to death” in the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. That’s an outright, calculated lie, and has been a lie ever since the news media belatedly corrected its false narrative and admitted that Sicknick died of a series of strokes the next day that no physician could tie to his experiences in the riot; the medical examiner ruled his a death of “natural causes.” True, President Biden continued to use the false narrative either because he’s dishonest or because he’s sliding into dementia, but Jones doesn’t have the latter excuse. He made a deliberately false statement to continue the absurd “the riot in the Capitol was the worst thing ever and proves we’re threatened by fascism” theme that Democrats hope will keep them from being wiped out in November. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC.) couldn’t let him get away with it, and corrected Jones on the spot. Continue reading →

Learning Curves: The Supreme Court Successfully Teaches Democrats A Crucial Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This is progress.

The lesson is: Legislate and pass Constitutional laws the public supports, and don’t depend on courts to do your job for you.

The House of Representatives, with Democrats being joined by 47 Republicans, voted yesterday to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, 267-157. The bill would codify same-sex marriage into federal law.

Good. That’s the way it’s supposed to be done, and that’s what should have been done with abortion as well, had not the activist Supreme Court of 1973 unethically contrived an abortion right that didn’t exist. Democrats frequently had the votes and White House support to codify abortion in the years between 1973 and 2022, but preferred to use “choice” as a wedge issue to hold on to the feminist vote. Good plan!

Of course, the vote yesterday is being framed in such a way that the public may never comprehend the good reasons to pass laws the old fashioned way rather than wait for a deliberately undemocratic and non-partisan referee—SCOTUS—to rule by edict. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blamed her Democrats having to step up and legislate on a single Justice’s outlying concurrence in Dobbs. “Make no mistake, while his legal reasoning is twisted, and unsound, it is crucial that we take Justice Thomas and the extremist movement behind him at their word. This is what they intend to do,”she said.

I don’t think there is a chance in the world that same-sex marriage will be overturned. One thing about reversing Roe: it didn’t magically undo millions of abortions so there were suddenly all of these unaborted kids running around. Only Thomas (and maybe Justice Alito) are so doctrinaire that they would advocate a ruling that would either undo existing same sex marriages or create the unstable situation where some gay Americans are married with all the advantages of marriage while others are blocked from marriage. Furthermore, the argument for same sex marriages does not rely on the unenumerated right of privacy alone, but also Equal Protection, which was the basis on which several state courts ruled that restrictions on same sex marriages were impermissible.

The speculation is that the new bill will fail in the Senate because of a filibuster by Republicans. Republicans would be wise (and ethical) not to use the filibuster on this issue, but any sentence that begins with “Republicans would be wise” is flirting with fantasy.

Democratic Senators Push Google To Limit Information In A Letter That Google Is Burying

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is a genuinely ominous story for several reasons. It’s also consistent with a recent theme on Ethics Alarms and in the Left’s increasingly anti-democratic philosophy of governing.

Reuters (and so far no other news source that I can find) is reporting that

U.S. lawmakers are urging Alphabet Inc’s leading Google search engine to give accurate results to people seeking abortions rather than sometimes sending them to “crisis pregnancy centers,” which steer woman away from the procedures. The request came in a letter, whose top signatories are Senator Mark Warner and Representative Elissa Slotkin, being sent to Google on Friday.

The letter was prompted by a study released last week by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. The study found that 11% of the results for a search for an “abortion clinic near me” or “abortion pill” in some states were for centers that oppose abortion.

…The letter to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and was signed by 13 senators and three members of the U.S. House of Representatives as of midmorning Friday. All are Democrats.

“Google should not be displaying anti-abortion fake clinics or crisis pregnancy centers in search results for users that are searching for an ‘abortion clinic’ or ‘abortion pill,'” the lawmakers wrote.

“If Google must continue showing these misleading results in search results and Google Maps, the results should, at the very least, be appropriately labeled,” they wrote…

So far, nobody, including Reuters (and definitely not Google), has made the full text of the letter public. If the Reuters report is accurate, however, this effort isn’t just unethical, it is sinister. Continue reading →

Gallup’s 2020 Trust In Occupations Poll

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I usually cover this interesting poll when it comes out in early January; somehow I missed it this year., and am getting it in right under the January wire. The results don’t change much from year to year, as you will see,  and this year was no different.

As the have for many years now, nurses, once again, top the list. Continue reading →

Wait, Why Was This News Not A Bigger Story? And What ELSE Have They Been Covering Up?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Apparently about  six weeks ago, the U.S. Navy finally publicly admitted that the government is aware of so-far unexplained aircraft that operate beyond mankind’s presumed technological limits, at least in this country. On September 18th, it publicly acknowledged that the advanced aircraft depicted in several recently declassified gun-camera videos are what have been referred to for decades as UFOs, though just to be contrary,  the Navy prefers to use the term “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” or UAPs.I guess this is so they can keep saying that various conspiracy theorists and “They’re out there!” kooks have been wrong about UFOs, as in, ‘UFO’s are all fiction and swamp gas. UAP’s, however, are another story!’

Got it.

Jerks.

We all owe  thanks to “The Hill” for posting a story about this yesterday for those of us—like almost everybody— who missed it:

The vehicles observed and recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots seem impervious to altitude or the elements; they are able to maneuver above 80,000 feet; they can hover and then instantly accelerate to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds; they have very low radar cross-sections and use a means of propulsion and control that does not appear to involve combustion, exhaust, rotors, wings or flaps.Since the Navy asserts these are not U.S. aircraft, we are confronted by the daunting prospect that a potential adversary of the United States has achieved the ability to render our most sophisticated aircraft and air defense systems obsolete.

The Hill article raised some of the questions I have about this: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

You know when I mentioned that Ted Lieu was NOT the most “foolish, dumb, frightening” member of Congress? Steve King was one of the people I was thinking of.

In case you haven’t heard the widespread mockery, King asked Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai  at this week’s House Judiciary Committee hearing about alleged bias and abuse of power by the tech behemoth,

“I have a 7-year old granddaughter who picked up her phone during the election, and she’s playing a little game, the kind of game a kid would play. And up on there pops a picture of her grandfather. And I’m not going to say into the record what kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather, but I’d ask you: How does that show up on a 7-year old’s iPhone, who’s playing a kid’s game?”

Pichai responded,  “Congressman, the iPhone is made by a different company.”

Kindly leaving out the obligatory, “You moron.” Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Rep. Chris Collins Insider Trading Indictment

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Three-term GOP congressman Chris Collins was indicted for insider trading after prosecutors determined that after Innate Immunotherapeutics  alerted him to the failure of company’s clinical drug trials for a promising multiple sclerosis drug, Collins tipped off his son, allowing him and others to  save hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling their stock in the firm before the news was made public. Now Collins faces prison time if convicted.

 Collins was a member of the company’s board until May of this year, and at one point was its largest shareholder.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has stripped Collins of his seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee and asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate the allegations of insider trading. Collins has ended his re-election bid, but maintains that he is innocent. Such statements are like the puzzle about the White Foot and Black Foot tribes that look and sound identical but have one difference: the White Feet always lie, and the Black Feet always tell the truth. If you ask a member of either tribe, “Are you a truthful Black Foot or a lying White Foot?”, you will always get the same answer no matter what tribe the individual belongs to: “I am a truthful Black Foot!” And whether an indicted Congressman is guilty or innocent, he will always say, as Collins did, that the charges are “meritless” and that he will fight them to have his “good name cleared of any wrongdoing.”

Until the plea deal.

Collins’s involvement with Innate dates back all the way to 2005, before he ran for Congress. He organized support from wealthy friends and neighbors,  many of whom would later become his political donors,  to help bail out the company, which was flailing at the time. In addition to Innate Immunotherapeutics,  Collins has held leadership roles in other biotech companies.  Until his indictment, he was chairman of the board of directors of ZeptoMetrix, a private lab company based in Buffalo that he co-founded. That one has received millions of dollars in federal contracts, according to government records.

Collins reported owning between $25 million and $50 million in shares of  ZeptoMetrix. In June, he sold about a million dollars of stock in Chembio Diagnostics, a medical tests and equipment manufacturer, according to his ethics disclosure forms.

The congressional ethics office found last summer that  Collins may have violated ethics rules by asking the National Institutes of Health for help with the design of Innate’s now-failed clinical trial.

Observations: Continue reading →