Tag: politics

Jeff laments the fact that a compromise used to be a good thing. My response has always been, “It depends on the particular compromise.” The Senatorial filibuster agreement, made without the consent of the Republican or–and please correct me if I’m wrong–the Democratic Senate leadership, is not the sort of compromise one would find virtuous. Today’s OpinionJournal shows why:

This ballyhooed “compromise” is all about saving the Senators themselves, not the Constitution. Its main point is to shield the group of 14 from the consequences of having to cast difficult, public votes in a filibuster showdown. Thus they split the baby on the most pressing nominees, giving three of them a vote while rejecting two others on what seem to be entirely arbitrary grounds, so Members of both parties can claim victory. Far better to cashier nominees as a bipartisan phalanx, rather than face up to their individual “advice and consent” responsibilities.

[…]

And it’s cynicism squared in the case of the three nominees who will now finally be confirmed. Yesterday, 81 Senators voted to give Priscilla Owen a vote on the floor, after four years of Democratic filibusters. Apparently she isn’t such a grave “extremist” threat after all. The same also applies to Janice Rogers Brown (22 months in the dock) and Bill Pryor (25 months). Monday’s deal exposes the long Democratic campaign against them as “extremists” as nothing more than a political sop to People for the American Way and their ilk.

[…]

But there is a cynical irony here, too. To defeat a Supreme Court nominee, liberal interest groups will now be obliged to manufacture the very “extraordinary circumstances” that would give Democrats among the Gang of 14 an excuse to filibuster. Thus they will have even greater incentive than before to dig through a nominee’s personal and professional life for any mud they can throw against him. In the name of consensus and comity, in short, these 14 “moderates” have increased the chances that the Senate will witness a future, bloody Borking.
If anyone thinks this filibuster-busting “agreement” is going to grease the skids for judicial nominees beyond the next few months, they are living in a fantasy world.

I think today’s Cox & Forkum amply shows how worthless the fourteen-Senator filibuster agreement will ultimately prove to be.

I’ll have to look in to the Constitution Party, or something, because it’s official: the Republicans have no spine.

In yesterday’s Political Diary, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. reminds us that the recent pension ills at United Airlines are, well, the fault of its employee owners.

Pundits on the weekend talk shows lamented Corporate America’s “breaking of faith” with workers at United Airlines, whose pension plans were gutted in a bankruptcy proceeding last week. Expect more of the same from politicians, and not just Democrats, as Big Labor exploits the issue to promote its opposition to private Social Security accounts and its support for national health care. The political reaction, like yesterday’s pundit reaction, can also be expected to betray perfect and pristine ignorance of what actually occurred at United.

United represents not so much a corporate failure as a labor failure. No industry is as strongly controlled by its workers as the airline business is, and United was the ultimate case in point. The company was 55% owned by its unions; the union bosses controlled three seats on the board and effectively hired and fired the CEO. Labor was sitting on both sides of the table in the 1990s, in short, when workers decided to boost their compensation with unfunded, and unfundable, pension promises while also extracting maximum dollar in current wages and benefits. The same “employee-owners,” in other words, who looted the company by awarding themselves the richest pay deal in the industry also effectively voted to loot the federal government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which they knew would be the ultimate guarantor of United unfunded pension bennies.

Keep all this in mind as the labor campaign gears up, especially when angry, red-faced pilots go on TV to blame their troubles on Corporate America and fatcat CEOs.
American Airlines is headquartered in Fort Worth, and Southwest Airlines in Dallas, so the airline industry is closely monitored here in the DFW metroplex. What amazes me is the amount of whining that comes from the majority of the airline industry, when in the face of all of the economic woes the airlines have been subject to of late, Southwest is still turning a profit.
The reasons for this are many: they offer outstanding customer service, they only service short routes, they do not have a union influence. Southwest employees are enthusiastic, sometimes annoyingly so. However, I’d rather be annoyed by someone’s cheeriness than by someone’s grumpiness (hello, American?).
I am, for the most part, anti-union these days. There was a time and place in our history when workers’ unions were needed, and needed badly. Many perks and benefits workers enjoy in today’s workplace came about as a result of union influence.
But the time of the union sticking up for the little man is over with. More often than not these days, my perception is the unions are harming their members, and the companies which employ those members, more than they are helping them, and only the union bosses have anything to show for it. United’s employees only have themselves to blame.
[Emphasis added in quoted text.]

Best of the Web Today:

What we wonder is: How come it never occurs to liberals or Democrats that the very terms in which they phrase the question are part of their problem? These, after all, are people who are obsessed with politically correct terminology, from “African-American” to “fetus.” Yet somehow it never dawns on them that “working class” is an insult.

Think about it: Would you call a janitor, a secretary or a carpenter “working class” to his face? The term connotes putting someone in his place: Your lot in life is to work. Thinking is for the higher classes. The questions the Democrats ask about the “working class” reflect precisely this contempt: What’s the matter with these people? Why don’t they understand that we know what’s good for them? Why do they worry about silly things like abortion and homosexuality? If they must believe in all that religious mumbo-jumbo, can’t they keep it to themselves?

Every time the Democrats lose an election, they make a big show of asking questions like these. Then, the next time they lose an election, they once again wonder why the “working class” has forsaken them. Maybe it’s as simple as: because they were listening.