Former US Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut sat down with Washington Post newsletter The Early, in mid-July to answer questions about the new organization he co-chairs. It calls itself “No Labels,”  and it’s in the process of lining up ballot access for … well, something.

“Democratic strategists and anti-Trump Republican operatives have concluded,”  David Corn writes at Mother Jones,  “that its effort could siphon more votes from President Joe Biden than Donald Trump.”

Cue the Election 2024 season premier of Spoiler Theater!

The TL;DR on “spoiler” worries:

Votes don’t belong to, and can’t be “siphoned from,” candidates. Your vote belongs to you, and only you, until you cast it. Only then does it belong to someone else, and that someone else is the candidate you cast it for. Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump is magically entitled to it. If you decide to vote Libertarian, or Green, or even write in my name (yes, really), that other candidate isn’t “stealing” your vote from Biden, nor are you “spoiling” the election of Trump.

That said, No Labels is not a typical third party or independent campaign. In fact, it’s not even a campaign yet. Lieberman refers to it as an “insurance policy project” that congressional candidates might use and that could, but won’t necessarily, “be the basis of a campaign by a bipartisan unity ticket that No Labels would offer its ballot access to.”

Who, precisely, is No Labels an “insurance policy” for? It advertises itself as “centrist,” which is code for the existing political and policy establishment.

This isn’t Joe Lieberman’s first “third party” rodeo.

In 2006, after having occupied one political seat or another since 1970, he lost the Democratic primary for re-election to a fourth term in the US Senate.

So he formed a third party to stay in the race. He named it “Connecticut for Lieberman” — rather a Freudian slip, in my opinion. Candidates usually go with e.g. “Smith for California” to pretend that they’re there to “serve” their states. Lieberman’s opinion was, quite obviously, that the great state of Connecticut existed for the sole purpose of providing him with an office, a paycheck, and a pension.

No Labels is pretty much Connecticut for Lieberman writ large. Its purpose is to extort the Democratic Party into sticking to a “centrist” campaign platform: If Joe Biden  colors outside those lines in a “progressive” direction to coalition-build with, for example, a less aggressive foreign policy, they’ll run some half-Republican, half-Democrat “centrist” (prime suspect: Joe Manchin of West Virginia) on their line as a “spoiler” candidate.

They’d rather have a Republican in the White House for four years than a Democratic Party that rocks the policy boat or even, horror of horrors, stops providing cushy Capitol Hill sinecures exclusively to the members of an elite club. No wonder, as Corn notices, that “media reports have identified several major donors with GOP ties.”

But their prospective candidate is still exactly as entitled to your vote as any other, which is to say not at all.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

“Democrats in Congress, the New York Times reports, “are making a fresh push for the nearly century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be enshrined in the Constitution, rallying around a creative legal theory in a bid to revive” it.

Interesting, but what’s so “creative” about “a joint resolution …  stating that the measure has already been ratified and is enforceable as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution?”

On January 15, 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, crossing the threshold — “when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States” —  for adding an amendment to the Constitution.

It’s over. It’s done. There’s a 28th Amendment, no joint resolution required.

That’s what the Constitution itself says, anyway.

But Congress — the same institution US Representatives Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO) want to pass the joint resolution — has already proven that it doesn’t care what the Constitution says.

When Congress sent the ERA to the states in 1971, it also  tried to arrogate to  itself the power to set a 1979 deadline for ratification; if the deadline wasn’t met, its proponents would have to start from scratch.

The Constitution delegates no such power to Congress. Which, per the Tenth Amendment, means no such power exists.

QED, no deadline. The amendment HAS been ratified and IS in effect.  It’s long past time for Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, to do her job (her predecessor,  David Ferriero, refused to do his) and incorporate the 28th Amendment into Constitution’s official text.

But if she did, would it matter?

Time to trot out the Lysander Spooner quote you’ve seen many times if you read my column regularly: “[W]hether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

Constitutionalism might or might not “work” if actually practiced. I think otherwise, but opinions  vary.

The question isn’t that important, though, because constitutionalism ISN’T practiced. Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court ignore the Constitution whenever they find it inconvenient, making it “powerless to prevent” anything.

So why even bother with the ERA? It’s just more verbiage for them to ignore as they please, right?

And if they’re going to ignore its restrictions on their power, why shouldn’t we ignore the orders they shout at us?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“The White House,” Politico reports,  “offered measured support for the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming …”

Such geoengineering solutions to “global warming” might range from injecting sulfates into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space (as happens naturally with large volcanic eruptions) to placing gigantic  “sunshades” at key points in space.

Eyebrows, naturally, rose.

While suggesting that there are only two sides to the “climate change debate” is an over-simplification, there seem to be two MAJOR sides to that debate, both opposing “solar radiation modification” on principle.

Side A: The typical “environmentalist,” who believes that human activity is responsible for an undue warming trend that will ultimately lead to catastrophic results for both humanity and other species if something isn’t done.

Side B: The typical “climate skeptic,”  who believes that the warming isn’t happening, or that the warming is a natural cycle not caused by human activity, or even that the warming is a good thing that will, for example, increase the amount of arable land in areas currently too cold for farming.

It’s pretty obvious why Side B isn’t interested in engineering solutions for reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the planet’s surface and warming it. If it’s not happening or is a good thing, why try to fix what ain’t broken (and  possibly end up  causing real damage by interfering with natural cycles)?

As for Side A, its loudest voices tend to share convictions above and beyond concern for the environment as such.  They’d be against the activities they blame for environmental damage whether those activities actually caused said damage or not. They don’t like people flying around in airplanes and driving gas-guzzlers, mega-corporations producing cheap goods in smog-belching factories, large farms producing  “monoculture” food  (as opposed to the multi-crop/multi-stock small farms of days past). They gear their environmental prescriptions toward changing an economic system they oppose (and, to be fair, most on Side B support). They don’t want  “environmental problems” solved in any way that doesn’t involve drastic deindustrialization, depopulation, and a command economy.

Then, of course, there’s me, on neither of those sides.

I suspect “anthropogenic global warming” is a thing.

I suspect it’s damaging/dangerous to humanity and other life forms.

As, for that matter, “natural cycles” can be.

I’d like to see something done about it.

But it’s not like we’ve been living in an anarchist society until just now, and suddenly need that new-fangled government invention to ride in and save the day.

We are where we are either because centuries of government got us here, or because centuries of government failed to prevent us from getting here. So why should we expect government to be either able, or inclined, to fix things?

But if it’s going to be a government thing, I’d prefer the most easily reversible/changeable government thing possible. So I guess put me down in lukewarm support of a giant, remote-control “sunshade” at Earth/Sun LaGrange Point L1.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY