Category Archives: Law
Political Stunts
As Human Events put it, the president “denounced political stunts during a political stunt”. Obama called the possibility of a Republican filibuster a political stunt and then flew off with family members of Sandy Hook victims to lobby Congress on gun control.
No relatives of Fast and Furious “gun walking” victims were invited.
Udate: Here’s an interesting Politico story about how professional and effective the lobbying of the Sandy Hook families is.
Assault Weapons
Now that the it appears “assault weapons” won’t be banned the president is pushing for tougher background checks. Automatic weapons like machine guns where you spray lead all over the place with one pull of the trigger are already illegal . Semi-automatics require a pull of the trigger for each round. Assault weapons are semi-automatics that look scary.
Update: Musket, hell. Here’s a story by John Kass, with amazing video, of a Chicago store owner fighting off an armed robber with a baseball bat.
Obamascare
Health insurance rates are taking off under Obamacare, especially if you now carry a high deductible plan. Kathleen Sebelius agrees.
“Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don’t pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus,” she said. “They’re really mortgage protection, not health insurance.”
Megan McCardle at the Daily Beast thinks Sebelius is confused about what insurance is.
Sebelius’ response is apparently that catastrophic insurance isn’t really insurance at all–which is exactly backwards. Catastrophic coverage is “true insurance”. Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance at all; it’s a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan.
“This is not insurance anymore. This is regulation, this is government dictated rates, like the electrical company…”
Same Sex Supreme Court
Justice Kennedy isn’t homophobic, he’s Roe v Wade-phobic. He think’s “a democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say”.
Which is what happened in the Roe v Wade decision. Attitudes toward abortion were already changing and Justice Ginsburg says the court went “too far and too fast“ in removing the issue from the political process. Anger and frustration rages over abortion today with many attitudes shifting back the other way.
But nobody likes an abortion. Everybody loves a wedding.
Senate Budget
The 1974 Budget Act requires both houses to pass a budget every year. The senate is four years in arrears.
House Republicans hatched a plan on Friday to raise the debt ceiling, but only if each chamber passes a budget. If senators don’t pass a budget, they don’t get paid.
This sounds suspiciously similar to Charles Krauthammer’s Friday pitch in his Washington Post column, though he didn’t mention the pay part.
Kimberley Strassel, in the WSJ, details how Harry Reid’s rope-a-dope tactics “hide the party’s spending ambitions” and “casts the Republicans as the cause of every legislative crises”.
