Green New Deal: Great New Deal for Illegals

In the days following the unveiling of the Green New Deal, Democrats have been scrambling to make their proposal seem less than the socialist manifesto that it clearly is. Rather than admitting that the Green New Deal [GND] is a dictate, the Democrats pretend that the proposal is merely a list of suggestions that — maybe, if we are in the mood and aren’t too busy; no pressure — we can perhaps achieve.

Despite the most common descriptors from the left to describe the GND, it is neither “affordable” nor “realistic” but rather “aspirational.” To paraphrase Senator Cory Booker, the Green New Deal is “bold . . . like saving the world from the Nazis or flying to the moon.”

It is rather odd how the same Democrats who were “too fiscally responsible” to allow the one-time expenditure of $5.7 billion dollars for “Trump’s border wall dream” would support spending more than $400 billion a year on a program for which “aspirational” is the kindest descriptor.

Perhaps the most prominent current defender of the Green New Deal is Cornell University Law School Professor Robert Hockett, an adviser to the resolution’s co-author Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Professor Hockett has achieved some recent notoriety for “fact-checking” Tucker Carlson on air by falsely saying Congresswoman Osasio-Cortez would “never” propose providing economic security for those unwilling to work, which she clearly did.

According to Professor Hockett, the GND does not issue requirements but rather merely gives the consumers additional options.

He says:

We’re really talking about expanding optionality here. We’re not talking about getting rid of anything. We’re talking about basically making it cost-effective to move into more modern forms of technology, more modern forms of production, which would then enable people to actually cost-effectively to transit to that stuff. We’re not talking about requiring anything or prohibiting anything.

In other words, according to Professor Hockett, the purpose of the Green New Deal is to merely do what the free market has always done, which is to seek to give the consumer better options. However, under the GND resolution, the government will use its force to make one of the options as undesirable as possible. This is all very reminiscent of the option Senator Obama once promised the coal industry, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

Unfortunately, it appears Professor Hockett may not have not read the actual Green New Deal document, which states that “the goals described in subparagraphs (A) through (E) of paragraph (1) . . . should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization . . . that will require the following goals and projects.“ (Emphasis added.)

One of the listed goals required by the GND is “(C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

So clearly the GND both “requires” — not “suggests” or “encourages” — and prohibits the consumer from getting that big, white, gas guzzling Jaguar SUV with the panoramic sunroof he hopes to buy as soon as AACONS pays him enough money to do so. If it did, the Green New Deal would be derelict in meeting its requirement for 100% zero-emissions.

This unwillingness to be honest and forthcoming about the demands of the Green New Deal by supporters is troublesome. Despite being the one who tweeted a document that contained a promise for “Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.” for example, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez subsequently accused Republicans of “circulating false versions” of the plan. This accusation was then followed by the claim from the Ocasio-Cortez office that the document tweeted by her that contained the “unwilling to work” language was an “unauthorized draft” leaked by a rogue staffer.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez also said that the Green New Deal requires “massive government intervention” yet only hours later said that “one way the Right does try to mischaracterize what we’re doing as though it is some kind of massive government takeover.”

Clarity is clearly not a priority here. As Vox admits, “The appeal of the Green New Deal is in part how vague it is.”

In all, the phrase “all people of the United States” is repeated seven times in the official Green New Deal resolution. The word “citizen” is not mentioned once.

Along these lines of deliberate vagueness, it is interesting to note that the Green New Deal lists a series of benefits for “all people of the United States.”

It says, for example, that it will provide “(i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security and (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature” to “all people of the United States.”

It adds that it will “provide unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States” and “create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.”

It will also require — not “make available” but “require” — “resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities, so that all people of the United States may be full and equal participants in the Green New Deal mobilization.”

In all, the phrase “all people of the United States” is repeated seven times in the official Green New Deal resolution. The word “citizen” is not mentioned once.

It would be foolish to assume that phrase “all people of the United States” is not meant to mean everyone who happens to be in the country — even those who happen to be here in violation of our immigration laws — rather than the people who are actual citizens of this country.

In fact, the Democrats have been subtly arguing that “all people of the United States” includes illegals for some time now; therefore, they conclude, those here illegally are entitled to the same rights and benefits as everyone else.

Although President Obama said in a 2009 joint address of Congress that the Obamacare “reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” for example, Obamacare has nonetheless been used to cover healthcare for illegals.

New York’s socialist mayor Bill de Blasio recently declared that “Everyone is guaranteed the right to health care, everyone” while pledging that “New York City will spend at least $100 million to ensure that undocumented immigrants and others who cannot qualify for insurance can receive medical treatment.”

In fact, according to Rep. Ocasio Cortez, anyone who is of Latino heritage is, in effect, an American regardless of their place of birth: “Because we are standing on Native land, and Latino people are descendants of Native people. And we cannot be . . . criminalized simply for our identity or our status.”

If anyone who is Latino is by definition among those considered to be included as “all people of the United States” and entitled to all the great benefits of the Green New Deal, then the approximately 600 million Latinos who currently live outside America in places like Honduras, Mexico, and Brazil are deserving of “high-quality health care; housing; economic security and clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature” courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

If all people of the United States is to mean all legal and illegal residents of the United States, as well perhaps as all Latinos worldwide, who exactly won’t be eligible for Green New Deal goodies?

Democrats should be pressed to answer if their Green New Deal would include an expensive array of new benefits for Americans only, or will anyone who manages to sneak over our border or overstay their visa would be guaranteed housing, health care, and income regardless of their willingness to work.

The Democrats should not be allowed to continue their deliberate vagueness on this issue. The answer may very will determine the long-term survival of this nation, much more so than climate change.

–DK

Dems Speak Honestly About Abortion

I shall be long grateful to Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran for her part in exposing “the unfruitful works of darkness” that is abortion.

For decades we have been told a lie about abortion. We were told that those who supported it were not actually in favor of killing babies — no one would ever support such a horrid thing, of course — instead, they merely supported the right of women to remove an unwanted mass of tissue from their bodies. Rather than killing an unborn child, they say, think of it as “a crappy dentist appointment or something.”

Politifact, a supposedly nonpartisan “fact-checking website,” even labeled the comments of a Texas state representative that abortion “kills as many as 1,000 black children every day” as “mostly false,” largely because of his “characterization of abortions as killing babies is disputed.”

However, most of those who put forth this argument were lying the entire time.

How can they pretend to believe that the baby isn’t a baby when they are introducing “legislation [that] would allow a woman to receive an abortion even while she was going into labor”?

Are we to believe that even when a mother is dilating and the baby is crowning in the vaginal opening that the child still isn’t a living being?

It was a lie all along, and not one held by all of those in favor of abortion. For example, Barack Obama, as an Illinois state senator, opposed a bill that would have essentially criminalized the killing of children who have been delivered and who are living independently of their mother’s body.

As FactCheck put it:

As originally proposed, the 2003 state bill, SB 1082, sought to define the term ‘born-alive infant’ as any infant, even one born as the result of an unsuccessful abortion, that shows vital signs separate from its mother. The bill would have established that infants thus defined were humans with legal rights. It never made it to the floor; it was voted down by the Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired.

Barack Obama was able to successfully lie about his opposition to protections for born alive children. However, few can lie as frequently and as successfully as the future 44th President.

Some even see no need to lie. Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams is such a person. In her infamous essay “So what if abortion ends life?” she admits that life begins at conception and that abortion is the taking of that life, but those admissions do not matter to her:

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late-term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

Yet most on the left are as hesitant (albeit increasingly less so) to admit they favor infanticide as they are to admit that they favor open borders or socialism.

Take Governor Northam of Virginia remarkably callus recent remarks. As described by ABC News:

The Democratic governor and pediatric neurologist was defending efforts to loosen abortion restrictions during a radio interview on WTOP-FM Wednesday when described a hypothetical situation where a severely deformed newborn infant could be left to die.

Northam said that if a woman were to desire an abortion as she’s going into labor, the baby would be “resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue” between doctors and the mother.

Yet the next day Governor Northam claimed, incredibly, that “Republicans were mischaracterizing his statement for political gain.”

Perhaps it is science that is forcing abortion supporters to increasingly abandon the premise that abortion is not the killing of an unborn child. It becomes harder to dismiss the notion that life exists inside of a pregnant womb as the fantasy of a bunch of MAGA-hat wearing Bible-clingers who prefer watching football to MSNBC.

According to Emma Green of The Atlantic:

New technology makes it easier to apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a fetus as a creature with moral status. Over the last several decades, pro-life leaders have increasingly recognized this and rallied the power of scientific evidence to promote their cause.

They have built new institutions to produce, track, and distribute scientifically crafted information on abortion. They hungrily follow new research in embryology. They celebrate progress in neonatology as a means to save young lives.

New science is “instilling a sense of awe that we never really had before at any point in human history,” [pro-life activist Ashley] McGuire said. “We didn’t know any of this.”

However, regardless of the reason, it is important to be grateful to Ms. Tran for introducing legislation that would, by her own admission, allow abortion to occur even as the woman is in labor, even as she almost simultaneously introduced a bill to protect the “fall cankerworm.”

It is important because many of the proponents of abortion — even of what I call “fourth-trimester abortions” — tend to be the same who want to be part of the federal government as it grabs control of our healthcare.

Not all of us will ever be pregnant, but we are all getting older. Many of us are or will become senior citizens, requiring a great deal of healthcare. We must ask ourselves: how comfortable should we be in allowing those who would defend cankerworms, but call for allowing the killing of a child — even as this child is emerging from the birth canal — to care for us?

–DK

Marie Stroughter on School Choice

Recently, I was honored with the opportunity to speak with Dr. Carol Swain on the topic of school choice, on her podcast, Be the People.

From the episode notes:

“America’s educational system is broken and mired in politics. Black and Hispanic children are among the ones hurt the most, especially those in urban centers. Homeschooling and school choice should be viable options for the urban poor. Under President Bush, the District of Columbia had an opportunity scholarship program that gave urban parents choice. Although students achieved considerable success, President Obama who was beholden to teachers’ unions ended the program to the detriment of the students. Marie Stroughter, a conservative black activist and homeschooling mom, shares her views about what can be done to restore choice to black families and others who suffer from limited educational opportunities.”

What are your experiences with school choice? Shouldn’t parents have a say in their children’s education?

Border Wall: GOP Must Stand with Trump

On January 24, 2019, the U.S. Senate voted on two competing bills — one from each party — introduced to end the partial government shutdown.

While both bills roughly received the same number of votes, far short of the 60 votes required for the measure to pass, it is the Democrat bill that I would argue came dangerously close to passing. This is because the Senate Republicans are in the majority, so for the Democrat bill to get as many votes as the Republican bill indicates that Republicans are wavering on border security more so than the other side of the aisle.

This is distressing, for had the Democrat bill passed it would very likely have resulted in the end of hope for security at our borders.

As unfortunate as the shutdown is for the workers who are temporarily without pay, without it the Democrats would have no incentive to provide for any funds — not one dollar, as Speaker Pelosi says — for a border wall; and without such a physical barrier border security is impossible.

The Democrats’ argument, to the contrary, is transparently farcical. They claim that they are border security hawks; that the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning and the last thing they do before they go to sleep at night, is think about how they can best secure the border. But they argue that the best way to do so is with what they call a “Smart Wall” — drones, x-ray machines, cameras, and so forth — that would provide such great border security that a physical border wall would be a waste of money (and far be it for Congressmen to waste money).

As Representative Hakeem Jeffries — along with many other Democrats who were apparently told to recite from the same script — recently said, “What Donald Trump and the Republicans want to do is waste $5 billion in taxpayer money on an ineffective, medieval border wall that is a 5th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”

It seems reasonable to include these high tech measures as part of a border security package, since such tech would allow us to x-ray trucks going through legal points of entry, thereby slowing the flow of drugs into our communities. But this does not explain why Democrats demand that we fund a technological Smart Wall instead of — rather than along with — a physical wall.

The reason isn’t financial. Even if the final cost of a physical wall was, say, $100 billion dollars, after all the various expenses such as buying private property from landowners and so on, are factored in, this cost pales in comparison to what illegal immigration costs us.

According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR):

“At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens. That amounts to a tax burden of approximately $8,075 per illegal alien family member and a total of $115,894,597,664. The total cost of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers is both staggering and crippling. In 2013, FAIR estimated the total cost to be approximately $113 billion. So, in under four years, the cost has risen nearly $3 billion. This is a disturbing and unsustainable trend.”

So, as much as one may be appreciative of the Democrats sudden desire to squeeze every taxpayer penny until George Washington turns blue in the face, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that if the physical wall were to only partially reduce the cost of illegal immigration it would pay for itself very shortly.

The reason the Democrats have taken this position is simple: the Democrats demand a Smart Wall rather than a physical wall, or a Smart Wall and a physical wall, because a Smart Wall would not impede the flow of illegals across our southern border.

As columnist Byron York points out:

“. . . the problem is, a smart wall would not actually wall off intrusions. Indeed, the main feature of a smart wall — in past debates, it was often referred to as a virtual fence — is that it will not stop anyone from crossing the border into the United States. It can detect illegal crossers and alert authorities to their presence. But it does nothing to keep them from entering the country. ‘

Republicans should quickly abandon the vain hope that there is some sort of compromise to be made with the Democrats. The open borders credo has become an intricate part of their platform; as essential to their DNA as abortion, climate alarmism, or the government takeover of our healthcare system.

This is evident by how Democrats at the state and local levels are responding to illegal immigration.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, for example, has recently demanded that the citizens of his state, already one of the highest taxed states in the nation, as well as a state that pays more than $5 billion a year on expenses related to its high number of Illegal alien residents, now pay for financial aid and scholarships for illegals who wish to go to college.

The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, wants New Yorkers to provide free healthcare for illegals.

New York’s most famous congresswoman, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, has become a leading voice in the Democrat for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to be abolished.

Phil Murphy, governor of another overtaxed state overflowing with illegals, wants millions set aside to fight illegal immigrant deportations.

On the other coast, Oakland mayor, Libby Schaaf, made headlines recently by warning illegals of ICE raids.

There are approximately 500 sanctuary cities in the U.S., all of which are likely to be governed by Democrats, and at least one state, California, has officially declared itself to be a sanctuary state.

The examples that could be provided to illustrate their philosophy are numerous, but here is the bottom line: those who invite illegals into their communities with promises of free education, free healthcare, and freedom from deportation are not going to support the sort of border security necessary to prevent illegals into the country.

Democrats are, therefore, not likely to be steered away from their support for open borders with bargaining or concessions. President Trump has announced a three-week deal (until February 15th) to reopen the government while a border wall deal is being negotiated. At best, this will be a mere stutter step until President Trump declares a national emergency to essentially see if the courts will allow him to build the wall without Congressional approval. It will not be a pathway to a border wall. It does not matter how long the government stayed shut or how long President Trump negotiates with them, today’s Democrat Party will not bend on open borders. It is part of their DNA now.

Only one year ago, for example, Minority Leader Schumer was offered a sweetheart deal that would have given full legal status to millions of DACA dreamers (illegals who were brought to the U.S. as children). One would think Senator Schumer would have agreed to that deal as quickly as I would agree to a date with Halle Berry, given how long and often they promise to protect the DACA dreamers. Yet the most Senator Schumer would concede in return to secure immediate guaranteed amnesty of millions of illegals was a promise that he would talk about border wall funding at some later, unspecified, date.

If President Trump had agreed to this deal, the promised discussion about border wall funding would have gone as follows, “Thanks for helping so many get permanent legal residence here. So now let’s talk about your request for border wall funding. Our answer is ‘no.’ Not one dollar. Nice chat.”

As mentioned, it is worrisome that some Republicans do not seem to fully understand the Democrat position on immigration. Yet some — including the six Senate Republicans who voted for the Democrat funding bill — evidently do not.

If they did, and do not share the Democrats’ open border philosophy, then they would be as unwavering in their support of the president as the Democrats are in opposition to him.

–dk

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-SA

Conversation on Blackonomics

As discussed in a previous blog post, Professor Roderick Graham and I have embarked on a series of discussions on issues affecting Black America. Here is our latest effort, wherein we discuss economics and the Black community.

Give us your feedback; we’d love to hear what you think of these conversations!

— Marie