p15, v9.17 — Left / Right & Legals

Left / Right & Legals

Mountain Views News Saturday, April 25, 2015

MVNews this week: Page 15

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

Mountain Views-News Saturday, April 25, 2015

HOWARD Hays As I See It

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GREG Welborn

“This is embarrassing.”

- President Obama on the Senate’s delay in confirming Loretta
Lynch as attorney general

Loretta Lynch (finally) is in the news again. Most of the
country was introduced to her six months ago, when President
Obama nominated her to succeed Eric Holder as attorney
general.

As the president remarked, Lynch has now been waiting for
confirmation from the Senate for longer than all previous
seven nominees for attorney general – combined.

In case you’ve forgotten, she’s a Harvard Law grad, originally
from North Carolina. Her preacher grandfather helped blacks
move north in the 1930s to escape Jim Crow laws. Her father,
also a minister, opened his Greensboro church in the early
1960s to organizers of sit-ins and protests, and she rode on his
shoulders as he stood with them.

She became a prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, handling drugs and violent
crimes. As U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District under President Clinton, she successfully
prosecuted NYPD cops for the beating and sodomizing of Haitian immigrant Abner
Louima.

Lynch was returned to the post by President Obama. Her prosecution of political
corruption was non-partisan; getting a guilty plea from now-former-Congressman Michael
Grimm (R-NY) and prosecuting Democratic members of the New York state legislature.
Following the 2008 financial meltdown, she got multi-billion settlements out of Citicorp
and HSBC.

Ironically (to those following the story) her office was also lauded for its success in going
after human traffickers. As reported in The Guardian, Lynch “has a prodigious history of
throwing sex traffickers in prison, breaking up prostitution rings, rescuing underage victims
forced to work as prostitutes and reuniting mothers held captive by the rings with their
long-lost children.” A former prosecutor says she made such cases a “personal priority”.

It’s also ironic that during her confirmation hearings last January, Republican Senators spent
significant time expressing impatience to see Eric Holder go. Gun groups were outraged
that Lynch would continue enforcing gun laws. There was indignation she wouldn’t call
illegal the executive actions on immigration taken by the president who nominated her for
the job. She explained that while not being familiar with the details, establishing priorities
for enforcement is not uncommon.

She supports the death penalty, takes a harder line on marijuana than does the president
and stated unequivocally that waterboarding is “torture . . . and thus illegal”. She said a
priority of hers would be strengthening “the vital relationships between our courageous law
enforcement personnel and all the communities we serve.”

Loretta Lynch cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last February on a 12-8 bipartisan
vote, and has majority support in the Senate to ensure confirmation. So what’s been the
hang-up?

Part of it’s payback for the Senate rules change in 2013, when Democrats put a stop to
Republicans’ routinely blocking nominees with 60-vote cloture demands. Lynch is (or was)
one of 18 nominees currently awaiting a Senate vote, with 130 stuck in committees. Last
week, a judge in Texas became the first confirmed by the Senate in three months under
Republican control, with 23 vacancies identified as “judicial emergencies” in the federal
courts.

Also, as Eugene Robinson put it in the Washington Post, “most Republican senators feel
obliged to oppose anything Obama proposes, especially this close to an election year.”

The latest hang-up involved a bill to combat human trafficking. Its passage was assured as
it came out of the House, but Senate Republicans added language threatening to expand
the Hyde Amendment – a provision tacked onto appropriations bills prohibiting taxpayer
funding for abortions. A vote on Loretta Lynch would have to wait until this bill with its new
anti-abortion language was passed.

A Senate Democratic aide put it this way to The Guardian: “Whether it’s chipping away at
women’s reproductive options in an anti-trafficking bill, or trying to repeal the Affordable
Care Act that did so much to expand access to healthcare for women, the bottom line is
Republicans are still laser-focused on putting politicians in between a woman and her
doctor.”

That observation was confirmed in the House last week as well, where Republicans
sought to overturn a local D.C. ordinance barring employment discrimination based on
a woman’s reproductive health choices. Republicans argued that prohibiting the firing of
someone based on birth control, in vitro fertilization, an abortion or unwed motherhood
would violate the employer’s “religious freedom”. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) countered
that they are “activities which are none of an employer’s business.”

For this current bill, Republicans figured they’d hold Loretta Lynch’s confirmation
hostage in order to force agreement on expanding the Hyde Amendment to cover private
as well as taxpayer funds, while in the meantime blaming Democrats for stalling action on
human trafficking. President Obama called it “political gamesmanship in the Senate on an
issue that’s completely unrelated to her.”

It didn’t work. As passed, taxpayer funds in the bill remain covered by the Hyde
Amendment, as they would anyway, while other funds (fees from traffickers) simply won’t
be used for health services.

Despite Republicans’ best efforts, we now have legislation passed to address human
trafficking, the Hyde Amendment has not been expanded, and Loretta Lynch will soon be
sworn in as our nation’s 83rd attorney general.

If her confirmation process is referred to at all during next year’s congressional
campaigns, it will be to recall President Obama’s observation that “There are times where
the dysfunction of the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it.” As he said, it’s
“embarrassing”.

THE DROUGHT OF WISDOM

California is suffering from a record drought – perhaps one for
the history books. But the drought to which I refer is not the
water drought, but the wisdom drought. Rain comes and goes in
California – always has, always will - but the stupidity among the
Liberals who run this state seems unending.

A harsh statement, you might be inclined to argue back. How can I
possibly blame politicians for the fact that it hasn’t rained much in
the last 4 to 5 years? But I’m not holding them accountable for how much it rains; I’m
holding them accountable for what they did with the water when it rained a lot and was
plentiful, and now for what they’re doing with the water when it’s in relatively short
supply.

California is an arid state. It is on the low end of rainfall volume in the United
States. We get more than the truly desert states, but certainly less than the east coast
and Midwest. But that’s a given. We’ve always been at the low end, on top of which
we’re subject to the occasional drought. Even severe droughts are not unheard of in
California. Again, though, all this is normal; all this has been known to the state’s
leaders since the state was founded. That’s why previous generations put so much effort
into building what once was one of the greatest reservoir and aquifer systems of its time
in the nation.

Our present problems are the result of short-sighted and callous politicians who
allowed that system to fall into disrepair, who refused to build any new storage facilities
over the last 30+ plus years when our population grew to 40 million people, and who
gave into the ruinous policy prescriptions of the crazy wing of the environmentalist
movement.

The numbers tell the story pretty clearly. In an average year, California receives
enough snow and rain to accumulate 200 million acre feet of water (an acre foot is an
acre of land covered 1 foot deep). During that same average year, California consumes
approximately 60 million acre feet. The consumption estimates I found actually ranged
from 40 million to 60 million acre feet. I’m giving the politicians the benefit of the
doubt, going with the higher estimate. Even still, in an average year, there’s more than
enough water to use and – if we had intelligent leadership – to store for the dry years. In
fact, in normal years – let alone “wet” years – we are relative to our consumption needs
flooded with water.

On the opposite end of the spectrum in droughts, the water received can decrease
substantially while the usage stays fairly constant. That just emphasizes the need to
store the water we do receive. Here’s where the bunglers in Sacramento did the bungling.
Environmental laws intended to protect various fish species and wetland habitats have
us dump half the normal water we receive out to the ocean. That’s 100 million acre feet
flushed out to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific to save a couple of fish. Carly Fiorina,
former CEO of Hewlett Packard and thus a pretty sharp cookie, quoted one estimate
that 70% of our rainfall is flushed out to sea.

The magnitude of the water we throw away is staggering in its own right, but it might
be attributable to some sliver of logic if this actually helped the fish. Unfortunately,
the “endangered” fish populations have decreased over the last 40 years, which is also
roughly the time period during which no new reservoirs were built. The best laid plans
of mice and Dems have truly gone awry.

The failure to build those reservoirs and damns is the other component of our present
problem. Even if we decided to keep the water we get in average and good years, we
would need to store it some place. Environmental groups have passed laws and used
the courts to effectively block the construction of any new significant storage facility
since 1980. In a weird way, we have to grant the logic of this last one. If you’ve passed
laws mandating that you not keep the water you get, why would you spend any money to
build damns or reservoirs to store the water you aren’t keeping?

Liberals are always surprised when their policy prescriptions make things worse, and
California’s water policies are no exception. One of the unintended consequences of
refusing to store more water in order to “help” the environment is that farmers in the
great valley are being forced to dig their wells deeper, thus reducing the water table
lower than is probably good for us. The law of unintended consequences has not been
suspended.

The sad reality is that even under the most dire of circumstances this year (official
measurement of rain and snow fall for the year won’t end until June 30th), we will have
received enough water to meet our needs if we had captured and kept everything that
fell from the sky. The lack of water can’t be blamed on Mother Nature. All she did was
expose the drought of common sense and wisdom that passes for political leadership in
Sacramento.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a freelance writer and has spoken to several
civic and religious organizations on cultural and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles
area with his wife and 3 children and is active in the community. He can be reached at
gregwelborn2@gma/5l.com

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