Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Rep. Engel (D-NY) that it is unconstitutional for our President to conduct a "limited strike" on a foreign country without a Congressional declaration of war. Seeing the differing responses of Rep. Engel and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) on the matter is rather like reading a Goofus and Gallant strip, except that the guy with the unkempt hair is actually Gallant here. It should be fish-in-a-barrel easy to refute Mr. Engel's suggestions that military strikes without Congressional authorization are OK as long as someone, somewhere, can define them as "limited," but sadly our "liberal" media doesn't seem prepared to do it, as they parrot the lines Mr. Engel himself parrots. And I hate to be a hard-ass (OK, I don't), but "t(ying) the President's hands" isn't a bug in our Constitution, it's a feature. The Founders were fairly disgusted with untrammeled executive power exercised by a wannabe tyrant, as you may recall. You know, like the 46% President we've got now.
Meanwhile, our House slipped $50 million for gun violence research (to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control) into a must-pass budget bill, so CREDO helps you tell your Senators to ensure that this legislative rider makes it into their budget bill, too. I've laid out my boundaries on gun control -- I want semi-automatic weapons treated the same as automatic weapons (which means there'll be almost no semi-automatic weapons on the streets), but I don't want universal background checks or greater limits on gun or rifle ownership. That being said, I, at least, am confident enough in my beliefs that I see no harm in funding more federal research on the matter. Oh, and that absolutely is my way of saying the rabid pro-gun crowd is not secure enough in their beliefs to endure the trauma of research that might (or might not!) tell them what they don't want to hear. And any Congressfolk who are "afraid" the research will "automatically" (semi-automatically?) lead to gun bans can, you know, perform oversight duties.
Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senator to oppose SB 618, which would give corporate welfare handouts to big coal corporations to burn off their coal waste. These handouts would total over $750 million over the next 17 years, and if you're thinking maybe we should give corporations some incentive to deal with their waste, consider, first and foremost, that giving corporations "incentives" to do the right thing is always a bad idea -- almost certainly they'll take the "incentive" and do nothing. Consider, also, that burning off coal waste in this matter doesn't reduce the volume of the waste very much and adds to the pollutants already in our air. Consider, finally, that there are better ways to ameliorate this problem, like revegetating on top of the coal waste, which not only works better but costs less. You thought conservatism was about being fiscally responsible? If so, then the funnel-taxpayer-money-to-cronies-at-all-costs crows is not conservative.
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