RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tennessee-justin-jones-justin-pearson-bullhorn-biden-white-house-chuck-schumer-gun-control-b9a4d4f5?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Democrats are free to argue that the Tennessee House went too far this month when it expelled Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson for disrupting the chamber’s business. Yet it’s astounding to see prominent Democrats now justifying and outright endorsing the pair’s tactic of derailing legislative proceedings with a bullhorn to demand gun control.

Next week President Biden will roll out the White House red carpet for Messrs. Jones and Pearson, along with Rep. Gloria Johnson, who participated in the disruption to a lesser extent, and who was narrowly spared expulsion.

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed at a Wednesday briefing that the three state lawmakers were punished “for peacefully protesting in support of stronger gun-safety laws.” She added that Mr. Biden phoned them and “thanked them for their leadership,” as well as for defending “democratic values.”

The response from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is even more unbelievable. Last week Mr. Schumer and four other Democratic Senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking him to investigate whether the Tennessee House violated the U.S. Constitution or federal law. These Democrats also go far beyond protesting the expulsions. They argue that the ruckus caused by Messrs. Jones and Pearson was following in the tradition of the civil-rights movement.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/20/sorry-bernie-minimum-wage-hike-would-still-hurt-poor-workers-most/

Vermont’s self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is a nonstop cheerleader for a minimum-wage hike. Recently, in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, he once again called for a huge increase in the minimum wage. Sounds generous, until you realize it would in fact hurt most the working poor, those who supposedly would reap the greatest benefits of a boosted minimum wage.

“Whether they are greeting us at Walmart, serving us hamburgers at McDonald’s, providing childcare for our kids or waiting on our table at a diner in rural America, there are too many Americans trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour,” Sanders wrote. “It cannot be done. This injustice must end. Low-income workers need a pay raise and the American people want them to get that raise.”

The idea that there are “too many” people “trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour” isn’t exactly true, at least not for the vast majority of workers.

Among the 76.1 million hourly wage workers, the average earner took home $33.18 an hour in March, or roughly $1,141.39 a week. That’s $59,352 a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own data (for 2021, the latest full year for data) show that just 1.4% of all hourly workers made at or below the current minimum wage.

There’s a reason for this. Businesses pay people what they’re worth to them. If they can’t afford to pay you the going rate, they don’t hire you and you can try elsewhere. But, as the data show, businesses for the most part pay their workers well.

OK, but, as Sanders would have it, why not just have the government force businesses to pay the higher minimum wage for those at the bottom? Such as $17 an hour, his current proposal?

With ever-greater advances in labor-saving technology, machinery and, most notably, artificial intelligence, America will soon see large numbers of formerly employed people become unemployed.

https://www.newsweek.com/nashville-controversy-reveals-liberals-anti-democracy-double-standard-opinion-1795087

In the last two years, the defense of democracy has been central to the Democratic Party’s attempt to portray itself as the last line of defense against Republicans’ alleged authoritarianism. But as recent events in Nashville showed, Democrats’ alleged fealty to democracy and abhorrence for agitators and mobs seeking to disrupt the legislative branch of government is more a matter of situational ethics than actual principle. As the career of a new Democratic idol, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones, demonstrates, they’re only against anti-democratic rioters when they’re seeking to silence Republicans.

Jones became a national celebrity when, along with two other Democrats—Reps. Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson—he disrupted a March 30 session of the Tennessee legislature to demand that it consider anti-gun rights laws that he supported. Acting in conjunction with a mob of demonstrators that had flooded the state capitol in Nashville, the trio, armed with bullhorns, seized the podium and shut down the assembly, ranting about Republicans being complicit in mass shootings. The demonstrators were kept outside the chamber but harassed both legislators and cops who were present. Eventually, order was restored and days later the legislature voted to expel Jones and Pearson. Johnson escaped the same fate by only a narrow margin.

At that point, the national media and leading Democrats like former president Barack Obama treated the state legislators’ expulsion as the only salient part of the story, ignoring the events of March 30. In that way, they turned Jones into a martyr and used the episode as more proof of the GOP’s supposed authoritarianism.

The hypocrisy and dishonesty of this narrative is staggering.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/04/19/ramaswamy_diversity_is_meaningless_unless_something_else_binds_us_together.html

Ramaswamy: Diversity Is Meaningless Unless Something Greater Binds Us Together