It’s time for our Statist of the Week. Who is most deserving of this week’s honor? Why it’s U.S. Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch. Did you have any doubt that it would be them? Crapo and Risch voted for that monstrosity of an infrastructure bill that generations of Americans will be paying for. You’re already paying for it, as the$1.2 trillion price tag is added onto the trillions of dollars in new national debt.
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If you were upset by President Barack Obama’s runaway spending, you should be upset that Crapo and Risch are carrying on in his tradition. Keep in mind also that while the Washington, D.C. insiders call this an infrastructure bill, just like the Farm Bill is not about farms, this legislation is not about infrastructure.
It’s about a lot of other things. For example: it’s about government surveillance, because it includes a pilot program to charge drivers based on how many miles they drive.
It includes onerous reporting requirements on cryptocurrency transactions that will probably drive some crypto innovators out of the country.
It includes a prohibition on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
But it’s not just those things that are annoying as all get out. It’s the fact that, like a lot of statists, they tried to explain away their votes with lies, cover ups and distractions. Risch called it “reasonable and conservative.”
Crapo called the bill “counter-inflationary.” That’s his way of saying it won’t add to inflation. That’s just not just true. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent write up about why Crapo’s argument flies in the face of reality.
But I’ll save that for another day. For now, I’ll just mention that IFF’s Vice Chairman, Bryan Smith, did a really nice job looking over the John Birch Society’s ratings of congressmen based on adherence to constitutional principles, very similar to how the Freedom Foundation looks at legislation. Smith noticed that in 2012 Crapo and Risch both scored 95 percent on the JBS scorecard.
In each of the years since then, their ratings have fallen, and in 2020, Crapo and Risch scored 30% and 35% respectively. Today, these senators rank lower than Bernie Sanders, who scored a 38% most recently.
Not long after the vote on the so-called infrastructure bill, our senators sent out news releases, criticizing Democrats and complaining about how they’re sending us down the road to socialism. Who do they think they’re fooling? Not us. And that’s why Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch are our statists of the week!
Who should be next week’s winner? Drop me a note … [email protected]. And also don’t forget to let me know who should be the statist of the quarter for Q2, 2021. As always be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, leave a comment down below, share this content with your friends and enemies, and I’ll talk to you again soon!
