11/03/2021 – SPECIAL SESSION FINAL DAY –

My fellow legislator said it pretty well so I am sharing his post. Unfortunately protecting big business was far more important than protecting our citizen’s God given rights. What they forget is it is the people that make up the businesses. I am not sorry we had the session as we have to fight for the people, I am just sorry that the outcome was hijacked by political games.
—Representative Mark Jennings

I am not proud to tell you that the Wyoming Legislature failed to pass any meaningful legislation during the 7 days that we were in session. The House sent HB1001 to the Senate last week that we worked on for 4 days but they killed the bill on 3rd reading yesterday. This was a meaningful bill that would have protected individuals as well as businesses in Wyoming while pushing back against the federal governments’ unconstitutional mandates.

Both the House and Senate approved HB1002 and sent it to the Governor for his signature or veto. It appears that we have enough votes to override a veto if needed, but the bill really doesn’t do much to protect our freedom or individual rights. This bill gives $4 million dollars to the governor’s office to try and entice him to start fighting federal mandates. The rest of the bill is mostly just a resolution that says we don’t like mandates. It is for optics without making any meaningful stand like Tennessee and Iowa did with their recently passed legislation. As we adjourned last night, I heard some of the more moderate republicans congratulate each other that the session did no good, neither did it do any harm. It was obvious that their intention was to obstruct as much as possible from the beginning.

I make no excuses for the outcome as I am a member of this legislature. The conservative members fought hard to protect our liberty and freedom, but many members of the legislature do not feel that the state should do anything and opposed everything we tried to do. It was a hard and spirited fight, but unfortunately, we did not win this one. The only good thing that came out of the special session was that we were able to put some focus on the damage the federal mandates are causing in Wyoming as many individuals are losing their jobs as a direct result.

Please do not lose hope. We will continue to fight for unconstitutional overreach and protect our individual rights and freedom. As I have said on numerous occasions, we need a few more conservatives in our state legislature to be able to win some of these close votes. I am hopeful that with your continued support, we will be able to do this soon.
—Representative Scott Heiner

UPDATE AFTER WEEK – 1

10/26/2021 – 10/29/2021 – Special Session Update after Week 1 – This week we spent 4 days debating HB1001 – “COVID vaccine employer mandates”. There were nearly 50 amendments to the bill over the course of 4 days and 3 readings of the bill. I don’t think we have ever seen a bill changed and altered as much as this bill has been. Some of these changes watered down the bill and made it less enforceable. From a positive side, as it stands right now this bill allows employers to require vaccine mandates but employers must accept exemptions including medical, religious, and natural immunity. Religious exemptions would not require certification from clergy, but only a strongly held belief. Medical exemptions would require a signature by a licensed physician. An exemption for medical contraindication (natural immunity) would require written evidence that the individual has fully recovered from COVID.

On the negative side, an amendment (HB1001H3007) was added on Friday to HB1001 that allows employers to demote and reduce wages of any employee that does not get the vaccination. We fought hard to prevent this from happening but did not have the votes to stop it in a close vote. Hopefully, our friends in the Senate will strip this amendment from the bill next week as the entire bill has now been sent to the other chamber. This bill passed the House 38-20 and was sent to the Senate.

HB1002 prevents a public entity from enforcing a federal mandate until the mandate takes legal effect (the federal government has not finalized the rules yet). The bill prevents a public entity from requiring proof of COVID vaccination for the person to receive or qualify for any public benefit. It also sets aside an additional $250,000 for legal action by the Executive Branch against the overreaching federal mandate. This bill passed the House 41-14 and was sent to the Senate.

SF1003 failed in the Senate on 3rd reading 13-15. This bill was to prevent vaccination passports and discrimination practices. No COVID-related bills were passed out of the Senate.

— Rep Scotte Heiner

If a new bill that has been introduced in Congress eventually becomes law, the 2nd Amendment will still be in the U.S. Constitution, but for all practical purposes the rights that it is supposed to guarantee will be dead and gone. H.R. 127 was submitted on January 4th, and if you have not read it yet you can find the full text right here. It contains a lot of technical language, and so in this article I am going to try to break down what it means very simply. Now that the Democrats control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is going to be a major push to ram through some form of gun control legislation. If it is not this bill, it will be another one, so we need to be diligent.

February 1, 2021 by Michael Snyder

One of the biggest things that H.R. 127 would do is that it would create a national firearms registration system that would literally be accessible by anyone…

HR 127 establishes a federal firearms registration system that will be accessible by federal, state, and local governments, including the military – even the GENERAL PUBLIC! The system will track the make, model, and serial number of all firearms, their owners, the dates they were acquired, and where they are being stored.

So if your neighbor, a co-worker, or someone that just wanted to rob your home wanted to know how you were armed, all they would have to do would be to look it up in the firearms registration system.

This bill would also apply retroactively.

Within three months, you would have to report to the government where you bought all of your guns, when they were purchased, and where they are currently being stored.

Needless to say, if the government knows where all of your guns are being stored, it would make it that much easier to grab them from you at some future date.

That would mean that owning a gun would no longer be a right.  Instead, it would be reduced to a “privilege” that the government could take away at any time.

According to the bill, the licensing procedure would include “a psychological evaluation”…

The licensing requirement mandates that the license applicant undergoes a criminal background check, and then submits to a psychological evaluation to determine whether the person is psychologically unsuited to possess a firearm. Successful licensees must show they have an insurance policy which will cost $800.

know a lot of guys out there that would definitely not want to go through any sort of a “psychological evaluation” by a government-approved psychologist.

And it wouldn’t just be you that would get interviewed.

According to the bill, spouses and other family members would be interviewed as well…

For the psychological evaluation, a licensed psychologist will interview individuals’ spouses and at least two other family members or associates to “further determine the state of the mental emotional, and relational stability of the individual in relation to firearms.” Licenses will be denied to individuals hospitalized for issues such as depressive episodes; no duration for license disability is specified, and it does not matter whether the individual sought help voluntarily.

Democrats figure that if they can put up as many barriers to gun ownership as possible, a lot less people will end up owning them.

Thirdly, this bill would also greatly restrict the type of ammunition that you can own…

Finally, HR 127 also criminalizes the possession of “large-capacity magazines” (those carrying greater than 10 rounds) and “ammunition that is 0.50 caliber or greater.”

I know that all of this sounds utterly ridiculous, but the restrictions in this bill actually sound very, very similar to what Joe Biden has been publicly proposing…

During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden promised a long list of gun control regulations. There is a reason that Michael Bloomberg spent $125 million helping Biden in Florida and something over $600 million nationally in the general election.

The agenda includes: classifying many semi-automatic rifles and magazines holding more than 10 bullets as Class 3 weapons (which can require nine months or more for approval and a $200 fee), national gun licensing, “red flag” laws that let judges take away people’s guns without a hearing, background checks on the private transfer of guns, and bans on some semi-automatic firearms that happen to look like military weapons.

Gun control is very high on the list of things that Joe Biden wants to get accomplished during the next four years.

So like I said, if it isn’t this bill, it will be another one that is similar.

They are coming for your 2nd Amendment, and they aren’t going to stop until they get what they want.

Meanwhile, this is all happening at a time when murder rates all across America are going through the roof…

“Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 relative to rates from the previous year,” the report states, calling the 30 percent surge “a large and troubling increase that has no modern precedent.”

We have never seen major city murder rates jump by an average of 30 percent in a single year.

Things are getting really crazy out there, and many believe that 2021 will be even worse.

For almost a year, there has been civil unrest in our cities on an almost nightly basis.  As I write this, civil unrest has erupted in Rochester, New York.  We live at a time when rioting, looting, arson and vandalism have become commonplace, and the senseless violence that we have witnessed so far is just the leading edge of the storm.

Millions of Americans can see what is happening to our society and they are quite concerned.  2020 was a record year for gun sales in the United States, and dealers have reported that demand is extremely strong so far in 2021 as well.

The Democrats do not like this one bit, and they are going to do their very best to put a stop to it.

Please let your friends, family and contacts know about H.R. 127, because an all-out attack on the 2nd Amendment is coming, but at this point most people are not even aware that it is about to happen.

Appeared in part February 1, 2021.
Credits: Michael Snyder

February 1, 2021 by Michael Snyder

…Due to the media picking and choosing of what is allowed on there platforms it was decided to post this important information to you here. Follow the links on the page to access more information while it is still available.

Have you heard about H.R. 1? If not, I would urge you to read the text of the bill immediately. It is called the “For The People Act”, and you can find it right here. The text of this bill specifically states that Congress has the “ultimate supervisory power over federal elections”, but of course anyone that is familiar with what the U.S. Constitution actually says knows that this is not true. The states are supposed to have final authority over their own election laws, and H.R. 1 is a blatant attempt to usurp that authority. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the riot at the U.S. Capitol there are very few…

politicians in Washington that still have a willingness to stand up for election integrity. H.R. 1 is almost certainly going to get through the House of Representatives, and it has a really good chance of getting through the Senate as well.

If this legislation is approved, it will fundamentally change the nature of our federal elections forever.

And not in a good way.

I do not think that Tucker Carlson was exaggerating by very much at all when he warned that “Democrats will control the federal government for decades” if H.R. 1 becomes law…

Democrats will control the federal government for decades or more if a sweeping new proposal touted as comprehensive government reform becomes law, Tucker Carlson said on Monday.

Carlson warned of the many dangers of “H.R. 1.,” the “For The People Act,” a nearly 800-page bill sponsored by Maryland Democrat John Sarbanes of Baltimore.

In essence, this bill would make elections all over the country just like elections in California.

If that statement sounds terrifying to you, that is because it is terrifying.

Democrats introduced the same bill last year, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate.

But now Democrats control the Senate, and they just need a handful of Senate Republicans to go along with them so that they can overcome any potential filibuster.  The following comes from Zero Hedge…

In the House, Democrats have revived sweeping election reform legislation that died in the Senate during the previous session, perhaps hoping they can browbeat enough Republicans into going along with them. If that happens, the “Grand Old Party” of Abraham Lincoln might as well disband, because Republicans would never have any hope of regaining a congressional majority or controlling the White House under the rules that HR 1 would put in place.

Although the Constitution explicitly places state legislatures in charge of managing federal elections, HR 1 seeks to use the power of the purse to bludgeon the states into conforming to a centralized system pioneered in California and other deep-blue states. Congress can’t technically compel the states to change their voting laws, but seasoned politicians know that the states have become dependent on federal money to run their elections, and can’t afford to pick up the tab themselves.

Inevitably, there would probably be a few red states that would attempt to defy this new law, but the threat of reduced federal funding would force most red states to submit to the new mandates.

So exactly why are many Republicans so deeply alarmed by this bill?

Well, the good people over at Pundit Press have put together a list of some of the things that this new law would do…

1) Internet-only registration with electronic signature submission.

2) Banning the requirement to provide a full SSN for voter registration.

3) Nationwide ‘Motor Voter’ registration.

4) 16 year olds required to be registered to vote.

5) Nationwide same-day registration.

6) Grants ($25M) for using minors in election activities.

7) More children voters.

8) Prohibiting attempts to clean voter rolls of non-residents.

9) Murderers and rapists can vote.

10) Mandatory early voting.

11) THE BIG ONE – NATIONWIDE VOTE BY MAIL, BAN ON BALLOT PROTECTION MEASURES, LEGALIZED LIMITLESS BALLOT HARVESTING.

If you are a Republican and you live in a state that already allows “ballot harvesting”, than you probably already know how devastatingly effective it is.

When ballot harvesting is legalized without any limitations, it becomes exceedingly difficult for Republicans to win except for in the most conservative areas.  During one of his recent shows, Tucker Carlson explained why…

“Under H.R. 1, [people] could freely go house to house and apartment to apartment collecting unknown thousands of ballots and then dump them all in a ballot dropbox. No one would have any idea if those ballots had been tampered with at any point along the way or would there be any way to prove it if they had been tampered with,” he continued.

Not only that, but H.R. 1 would also reportedly allow people “to print out their ballots at home”…

For example, HR 1 would allow ballot harvesting on steroids. Voters would — for the first time — have the ability to print out their ballots at home, creating a gaping security hole that could easily be exploited by either domestic or foreign interests. The legislation also allows third parties to collect ballots from an unlimited number of absentee voters and submit them through ballot drop boxes, dramatically increasing the risk that vulnerable Americans could be bullied, bribed, or blackmailed for their votes without the protection of election workers.

Can you imagine what would happen if we actually allowed tens of millions of people all over the country to print out their own ballots?

It would be utter madness, and we would never have a legitimate election ever again.

Of course everything in this nearly 800 page bill is designed to help Democrats, and their plan all along has been to set the stage for one party rule for the foreseeable future.

And that is what this “trial” in the Senate is all about too.  They want to destroy Donald Trump and the movement that he started so that nobody like him can ever come along again.

Sadly, it doesn’t even look like it will be a fair trial.  The Democrat that will be presiding over the trial is also one of the jurors, and we already know how he is going to vote.

The key for the Democrats will be to find 17 Republicans in the Senate that also want to convict Trump so that they can get to the magic number of 67.

I believe that if 67 votes can be confirmed, Mitch McConnell and other prominent Republicans will pull the trigger and will vote to keep Trump from ever running for office again.

But if they can’t find 67 votes to convict, I believe that Mitch McConnell and his close allies will back off.

There will be high drama in D.C. in the coming days, and the outcome of this trial in the Senate has enormous implications for our future.

Of course even if Trump is acquitted and he decides to run again in 2024, he definitely will not win if H.R. 1 becomes law.

This bill has the potential to change everything, and so I would encourage all of you to get information about this insidious legislation out to everyone that you know.

Appeared in part January 25, 2021 by Michael Snyder

by Michael Snyder .
Credits: Michael Snyder

January 25, 2021 by Michael Snyder

…Due to the media picking and choosing of what is allowed on there platforms it was decided to post this important information to you here. Follow the links on the page to access more information while it is still available.

These face-offs between states are part of a larger national debate that has intensified this year as new Democratic governors in California, Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey push to raise taxes even higher. They say higher taxes are necessary to pay for better services. But it’s far from clear that the already-high taxes in these Democratic strongholds have created better government and happy residents. People in states with high taxes are more likely to say they are eager to move elsewhere, and polls show residents increasingly questioning whether they are getting value for government “investment.”

Seven of the eight states with the highest percentages of people who want to move elsewhere are solidly Democratic in party affiliation, according to Gallup polling. Most are high-tax environments. “Even after controlling for various demographic characteristics including age, gender, race and ethnicity, and education, there is still a strong relationship between total state tax burden and desire to leave one’s current state of residence,” Gallup concludes.

When Monmouth University’s poll asked New Jersey residents why they wanted to leave, 30% listed taxes. But 24% said the overall high cost of living soured them on the Garden State, and 28% listed quality-of-life issues, including corruption, traffic and lack of economic opportunity.

In most polls, infrastructure—roads, bridges and airports—ranks high among the basics that citizens and businesses expect government to provide. This should be an area in which rich, high-tax states vastly outperform their peers, but the opposite is true. In CNBC’s annual ranking of the best and worst states for business, seven high-tax states were among those ranked lowest in infrastructure quality—Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

Even more startling, Texas ranked as having the best infrastructure. Also scoring high were Tennessee, which has the third-lowest tax burden as a share of state personal income, and Florida, ranked fourth-lowest in taxes. There seems an almost inverse relationship between the resources that state governments take in and quality of infrastructure.

J.D. Power polling shows that the U.S. airports ranked lowest among travelers include New York’s LaGuardia and JFK, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty, Philadelphia International, Chicago O’Hare, Los Angeles International, Honolulu Inouye International and Boston Logan. Almost all serve high-tax blue states.

A major driver of these failures is the alliance between left-leaning politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats) and public unions. As state and local budgets have fattened, public employees have captured a growing share of the rising revenue. Connecticut, the state with the second most heavily unionized public workforce, introduced an income tax in 1991. According to a Yankee Institute report, state revenue has since expanded 71% faster than inflation. The fastest growth has been spending on employee benefits and debt payments—aptly termed “nonfunctional spending.”

Labor-friendly laws make it tough to restrain these costs. Illinois’s pension woes, among America’s worst, keep deepening because of powerful state protections prohibiting government from altering the rate at which public workers earn retirement benefits, even for future work.

Infrastructure building costs have become stratospheric thanks to union-friendly policies. While Europe and Japan typically build rail and subway tunnels for between $160 million and $480 million a mile, according to calculations by Israeli transit writer Alon Levy, New York’s

Second Avenue subway line cost $2.8 billion a mile, and its No. 7 subway-line extension cost $2.1 billion a mile. Unionized tunnel workers, so-called sandhogs, receive $111 an hour in New York, compared with $38 an hour in Detroit and less than $40 an hour in Germany.

Costly regulations also plague the blue-state-model. Metro markets where residents are most dissatisfied with the availability of affordable housing are overwhelmingly high-tax Democratic locations, including Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Blame regulations. “High prices have little to do with conventional models with a free market for land,” wrote Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and Wharton’s Joseph Gyourko in a 2002 paper. “Instead, our evidence suggests that zoning and other land use controls, play the dominant role in making housing expensive.”

Blue-state failures are so grave, they outweigh occasional successes. High-tax Democratic states spend from 50% to nearly 100% above the national average per student in public schools. That’s paid off in quality, according to a study by the financial website 24/7 Wall St., whose list of top public schools by state includes Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.

But even as these states educate young people, they’re losing them. From 2011 through 2015 the three top states exited by millennials were New York, Illinois and New Jersey, according to a study of census data by the think tank Illinois Policy. Texas attracted the greatest number of young adults.

That’s a problem, Gov. Murphy would no doubt say, that Jersey could fix with a few billion dollars’ more government investment.

Appeared in the February 26, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

Democrats claim they will pay for their cradle-to-grave welfare state by soaking the rich but progressive states are now graciously showing that they will eventually try to dun everyone. Witness how Democrats are nickel-and-diming taxpayers like budget airlines without the service.

Like predecessor Dannel Malloy, new Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont promised not to raise taxes. So much for that. Mr. Lamont got off to a fast start this week by proposing a slew of new taxes to close a $3.7 billion deficit swollen by labor contracts and pension obligations. Mr. Lamont says he merely wants to “expand” the tax base.

And is he ever expanding it. His budget ex-tends the state 6.35% sales tax to nearly all services, hair salons, veterinarians, parking, boat storage, campground rentals-digital down-loads and non-prescription drugs. It doesn’t make sense “to tax the materials you need to repair or renovate a home, but not on the architect, engineer, or contractor who do the work,” Mr. Lamont says.

The Governor has a point that tax exemptions can create economic distortions, and it would be worth broadening the base as part of a reform that lowers tax rates. But Mr. Lamont’s sole aim is to grab more revenue. Hence, he also wants to tax newspapers, textbooks and magazines.

A Puritan at heart, Mr. Lamont also calls for “sin taxes” on wine bottles, liquor containers, e-cigarettes, plastic bags and sugar-sweetened beverages. “These are the sins of the 21st century,” the Governor says. Since driving too is apparently a sin, he wants to toll all cars and trucks that traverse state highways.

• Why not raise the gas tax? Perhaps because Connecticut already has the second highest gas tax in the Northeast (43.8 cents a gallon) after New York (45.8 cents), and commuters could avoid it by filling up in other states. Though Mr. Lamont last fall proposed tolling only trucks, that won’t raise nearly enough revenue to fix roads and bridges that have deteriorated as the state shovels out ever more for pensions.

Speaking of disrepair: New York Gov. An-drew Cuomo is pushing a “congestion tax” to fix the city’s broken subways-an $11.52 surcharge for cars, $25,35 on trucks and $5 on for hire vehicles on every trip into Manhattan’s central business district. This is on top of a dozen or so other subway taxes and a $2.50 to $2.75 surcharge that Democrats imposed last year on taxi and Uber rides that is raising only enough revenue to offset declining subway and bus ridership.

Mr. Lamont drew his toll inspiration from Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, who has lately been scrounging for cash to finance “free college,” universal preschool and Medicaid. Last month she proposed extending the state 7% sales tax to Netflix, e-books, iTunes, interior decorating, landscaping, shoot-ing ranges, beach parking and more.

She also wants to reimpose the Obama Care penalty for individuals without health insurance. And she’d create a new $1,500 penalty on large “for-profit” employers for each employee who enrolls in Medicaid. This new tax is loosely based on legislation proposed by Bernie Sanders and would essentially punish businesses for hiring low-income workers.

Ms. Raimondo did yeoman work eight years ago fixing the state’s public pensions, so it’s a shame she’s now driving off businesses like Democrats in Connecticut and Illinois. Speaking of the Land of Public Unions, retirement costs consume a quarter of Illinois’s budget and would eat up half if the state were paying as much as it should. The state is still running a $3.2 billion deficit this year.

New Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s plan? Refinance the pension debt and tax plastic bags, marijuana and sports betting, which will supposedly cover the shortfall until voters approve a referendum next year replacing the state’s flat 4.95% in-come tax with a progressive tax. Mr. Pritzker says a progressive tax will spare the middle class, though there may be a reason he hasn’t proposed a specific higher rate.

Research outfit Wirepoints calculates that the top rate would have to rise to 11.2% on millionaires and at least 8.5% on everyone earning more than $50,000 to finance Mr. Pritzker’s spending proposals. The progressive model is California, where individuals earning more than $56,000 pay a top marginal rate of 9.3%.

Tax the rich? Right. The problem with progressive governance is that eventually Democrats run out of everyone’s money.

Appeared in the February 22, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

Democrats rolled out their Green New Deal last week, and by all means let’s have a national debate and then a vote in Congress—as soon as possible. Here in one package is what the political left really means when it says Americans need to do something urgently about climate change, so let’s see who has the courage of those convictions.

Thanks to the resolution introduced last week by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, there’s already official language. While it’s nonbinding, the 14 pages give a clear sense of direction and magnitude in calling for a “10-year national mobilization” to exorcise carbon from the U.S. economy.

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan looks modest by comparison. The 10-year Green New Deal calls for generating 100% of power from renewables and removing greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and transportation—to the extent these goals are “technologically feasible.” Hint: They’re not.

The plan also calls for “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort and durability, including through electrification.” That’s all existing buildings, comrade.

Millions of jobs would have to be destroyed en route to this brave new green world, but not to worry. The resolution says the government would also guarantee “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” Good that they’re starting small.

Sorry to mention unhappy reality, but renewable sources currently make up only 17% of U.S. electric-power generation despite enormous federal and state subsidies. Wind and solar energy have become more competitive over the last decade as costs have plunged. But without subsidies, solar costs remain about 20% higher than natural gas while offshore wind is two-thirds more expensive. The bigger problem is solar and wind don’t provide reliable power, so backup plants that burn fossil fuels are required to run on stand-by.

Germany has been gracious enough to show what can go wrong. Despite aggressive emissions goals, Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat for most of the last decade as the country had to fall back on coal to balance off-shore wind generation. Last year Germany derived 29% of its power from wind and solar, but 38% from coal.

Meantime, taxes and rising power-generation costs have made Germany’s electric rates the highest in Europe, slamming small manufacturers and consumers.

“The drag on competitiveness is particularly severe for small and middle-sized firms,” Eric Schweitzer, President of Germany’s Chambers of Commerce, told Bloomberg News last year. German manufacturing has become less competitive due to soaring energy costs. Electric and natural gas prices in Germany are two to three times higher than in the U.S.

By contrast, the U.S. is having a modest manufacturing renaissance as shale drilling has created a cheap source of lower-carbon energy. Natural-gas prices have plunged by half over the last decade as production has increased 50%, mostly in the Marcellus and Utica formations in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Carbon emissions from power generation have fallen by 30% since 2005, mostly due to the substitution of coal with natural gas.

Meantime, oil production in Texas’s Permian and North Dakota’s Bakken shale deposits has soared 80%. Demand for drills, pipelines and other mining equipment has also boosted U.S. growth.

The Green New Deal means that all of this carbon energy and all of these jobs would have to be purged—at least in the U.S. China would suffer no such limits on its fossil-fuel production. Conservatives have long suspected that progressives want to use climate change to justify a government takeover of the free-market economy, but we never thought they’d be this candid about it.

Yet, remarkably, the Green New Deal has been met with hosannas from liberal interest groups and in Congress. It already has 67 co-sponsors in the House and the support of 11 Democrats in the Senate including presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

So let’s not hesitate. Take the Green New Deal resolution and put it to a vote forthwith on the House and Senate floor.

Post your comments on our Facebook page

…Credits: Wall Street Journal

Now that Donald Trump has criticized the “new calls to adopt socialism in this country,” Democrats and the media are already protesting that the socialist label doesn’t apply to them. But what are they afraid of—the label or their own ideas? The biggest political story of 2019 is that Democrats are embracing policies that include government control of ever-larger chunks of the private American economy.

Merriam-Webster defines socialism as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

The U.S. may not be Venezuela, but consider the Democratic agenda that is emerging from Congress and the party’s presidential contenders. You decide if the proposals meet the definition of socialism.

• Medicare for All. Bernie Sanders’ plan, which has been endorsed by 16 other Senators, would replace all private health insurance in the U.S. with a federally administered single-payer health-care program. Government would decide what care to deliver, which drugs to pay for, and how much to pay doctors and hospitals. Private insurance would be banned.

As Senator Kamala Harris put it recently on CNN, “the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care, and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us has not had that situation, where you’ve got to wait for approval, and the doctor says, well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this? Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”

If replacing private insurance with government control isn’t socialism, what is?

• The Green New Deal. This idea, endorsed by 40 House Democrats and several Democratic presidential candidates, would require that the U.S. be carbon neutral within 10 years. Non-carbon sources provide only 11% of U.S. energy today, so this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.

Oh, and as imagined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of this would be planned by a Select Committee For a Green New Deal. Soviet five-year plans were more modest.

• A guaranteed government job for all. To assist in this 10-year transformation of society, the Green New Deal’s authors would “provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”

Appeared in the February 7, 2019, print edition.

…Credits: Wall Street Journal

— 2/1/2019
As lawmakers, you carry a special burden to protect freedoms of religion, speech, free association and conscience as you exercise your authority. These concepts are fundamental and predate our country’s founding. They are embedded in the US and Wyoming constitutions.

The concept of equality before the law for each of us is just as fundamental as these freedoms.  Your burden of protection here is just as great.

HB230 is described as an “anti-discrimination law”. But the fact is that any anti-discrimination law discriminates against somebody or some group in favor of someone else or another group. Special protections for any group diminish the rights of everyone else not in that group.

Supporters of HB230 bill want to extend special employment rights to people with non-heterosexual inclinations and confused sexual identities. Once these special rights are Wyoming law, which new groups will demand special rights tomorrow? Polygamists? Relatives attracted to relatives? Adults attracted to children? Fathers wanting to marry daughters? These are all “sexual orientations”.

Where do you draw the lines? How do you reconcile the inevitable conflicts? Why aren’t heterosexuals with normal inclinations specially protected too?

People who disagree significantly in important areas like sexual predilections generally choose not to associate with one another. I’m not interested in commercially hosting a same-sex wedding. If I own the local Hooters restaurant, should I be forced under threat of a discrimination charge to hire a trans-gender male who has remade himself into a woman? If my customers who want to be waited on by sexy, buxom women don’t come back, who compensates me and my family for loss of my business?

This proposed change in law holds every potential to force association on those who are uninterested in associating. An accusation of discrimination against a business, whether justified or not, will ruin reputations and  lives and bankrupt families. To what agency does a wrongly accused employer turn in order to restore a ruined reputation or recover legal costs of defense?

Would the supporters of this law support  expanding special group protections to Christian, Jewish, or  Muslim employers whose beliefs govern their behavior in matters of sex? Of course not. They would say “ there is no discrimination against Christian employers”. To the contrary, I would reply that passing this law will assure discrimination against people with traditional religious views about sexuality and sexual behavior.

Why seek to divide us instead of unite us? There’s not 1% of the population of Wyoming that holds animus toward others with different sexual orientation. That doesn’t mean all of us want to associate with everybody else. We should remain free to choose those associations without fear of persecution or prosecution.

The wise course is to live and let live, not to force feed associations of neighbor to neighbor under threat of law. Please vote wisely and defeat this bill.

DB – Teton County