Three news-aggregation articles by Quin Hillyer at Liberty Headlines. Follow the links in the titles below for the full stories.
Democrats may weaken “superdelegates”:
Stung by charges that its system was rigged in favor of insiders, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is moving ever closer to downgrading the power of so-called “superdelegates” to future Democratic National Conventions.
Superdelegates are Democratic elected officials – including congressmen, governors, and DNC members – who become delegates to the convention by virtue of their office, without needing to be elected specifically as delegates at presidential primaries.
Comprising about 15 percent of all delegates, these superdelegates are entirely free agents in terms of voting for the party’s nominee, regardless of how home-state residents vote in the primaries….
GOP establishment refused to cut spending: (Written before the vote; indeed, the Senate did kill the rescissions bill — outrageously so.)
With a Friday deadline looming, conservative groups this week are pushing hard for the Senate to take up a $15 billion package of spending cancellations proposed by President Trump.
Known as “rescissions,” the spending maneuver withdraws the prior authority for the federal government to appropriate funds already approved by Congress, but not yet actually spent.
In this particular method of rescissions, a president can formally propose specific cuts to Congress to which Congress can agree by a simple majority of both houses, within a 45-day window, without being forced to overcome ordinary parliamentary hurdles such as a Senate filibuster. (Overcoming a filibuster requires 60 votes, rather than the usual simple majority of 51.)….
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Trump’s proposed cuts come almost exclusively from funds left over from previous years that wouldn’t be spent anyway for the purposes originally intended.
Still, the cuts are important.
Congress typically uses these phantom accounts to “shift” money to other accounts later in the year while claiming they aren’t making deficits bigger…..
Supreme Court smacks down power-grabbing bureaucrats:
Here in the United States, bureaucrats can’t just appoint judges in some willy-nilly fashion, without proper lines of authority.
That’s what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in one of its lesser-noticed decisions last week, in what the Wall Street Journal editorial page called a “smackdown” against power-grasping bureaucrats…..
