Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/297066
Greg Stevens, Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor Editorial Board How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151 ext. 112 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FaCEbook.CoM/ rbdailynEwS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @rEdbluFFnEwS The length to which the federal government can go to make itself look heartless and fool- ish is, at times, breathtaking. This is one of those times. The latest case study came last week when the Washing- ton Post revealed that the gov- ernment has been confiscating taxpayers' refunds to pay de- cades-old debts that may have been incurred by their parents. Often those debts are not ne- farious, but instead were over- payments made by the govern- ment itself. No, really. We aren't kidding. For the last three years the Social Security Administration has been intercepting federal and state income tax refund checks from about 400,000 families to pay debts that the agency acknowledges are usu - ally more than 10 years old and likely incurred by the parents of the current taxpayers. This unpleasant circum - stance was apparently made possible by a single sentence buried deep in, of all places, the 2008 farm bill. No one should spend much in - tellectual capital pondering the connection between a farm bill and collection of old Social Se- curity debts. It is unlikely there is one. It is just how things get done in Washington. Sometimes the results are benign, but some - times things get messy. For example, consider the case of J. Marc Dion, a former police officer who is now a law - yer in Westlake Village. He had his $2,000 tax refund inter- cepted this year because So- cial Security says he received too much in disability benefits while he was in law school more than a decade ago. Dion won a judgment against Social Security in 2010, but the debt collection continues. "None of it makes sense, and I'm an attorney," Dion told the Post. "You can't get a straight answer from anybody." But apparently a couple of senators are going to try. The Post's stories caught the eyes of Sens. Barbara Boxer, D- Calif., and Barbara A Mikulski, D-Md. The two senators fired off a joint letter to the head of the Social Security Administration asking that the agency halt the practice. The senators pointed out that families, " … are unfairly being held responsible for de - cades-old errors at the So- cial Security Administration — even though many of these taxpayers were children at the time the error was made. "Garnishing taxpayers' re - funds to pay for debts that are more than a decade old — and in- curred through no fault of their own — is a policy that cannot be continued in good conscience." No, it can't. The Social Security Admin - istration responded to the news story and letter by stopping the policy. But that isn't enough. The two outraged senators have the power to introduce legislation that would make sure this process can't be res - urrected somewhere down the road. They should exercise that power as soon as possible. This editorial was originally pub - lished in the San Jose Mercury News. Editorial Put an end to decades-old debt collection Dislike changes in Daily News Editor: The Daily News did away with Monday publishing; the size of the paper has gotten much smaller with regard to news re - porting and finally the last straw, I am forced to go back to my op- tometrist and get a new pre- scription for reading. The font is so small anymore. Even the crossword puzzle is dif- ficult to squeeze the letters in the small squares. What's the next step? I refuse to buy a magnifying glass just to read your paper. — Mac McCollum, Red Bluff A nation of laws? Editor: I'm watching the Bundy pro- test on TV. The news people keep saying "we're a nation of laws." I have to laugh after see- ing what goes on in this admin- istration. Nation of laws, my foot. De- pends on whose side you are on. Obama has his pets and laws, the rest of us have ours, which they change to fit what they want that day. Look at Obamacare. Now you can't buy a policy until Jan. 1. Every day a new set of rules from the king. Well, I almost hope this con - tinues. They're voting them- selves out, good riddance. Maybe next time we'll get a grown up in the White House. This morning also on TV, ev - ery working person in Amer- ica owes $106,000 to the gov- ernment because of the debt. I hope they hold their breath on that one. Half of that is probably Obama's travels, the other half fraud, corruption, graft, steal - ing like the congressman in Lou- isiana, money in his freezer, and he got re-elected, continues to serve his country. I hope he got his bills paid off. I don't believe what goes on these days. We're going to have riots, you can count on that. Peo - ple are fed up with being perse- cuted, bullied, spied on, etc. — Bernice Cressy, Cottonwood Crying wolf Editor: Mr. Mazzucchi dedicated his March 24 column entirely about me. Maybe I should be flattered. I ruminated his accusing me of distortions and false incrim - inations to undermine his char- acter and question his sincerity. After all, by his definition he is a man with an impeccable past and of unimpeachable charac - ter. His character and sincerity speaks for itself. I'll let the read- ers decide for themselves, we both have our detractors. By using Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," Maz - zucchi was assured the read- ers would naturally identify me as his target. However, there are many readers who believe his constant haranguing about global warming, climate change, greenhouse gases and green en - ergy — how many billions of tax dollars have been wasted on green energy projects by the Obama Administration — is crying wolf. Rural Olympic Peninsula of Washington or urban clutter, you all sound the same, do as I say not as I do. Was he raised there or just a transient? The on-line explanation he gave for the Caddy regis - tered in Texas was quite differ- ent with no mention of his wid- owed mother. Now, it belongs to his widowed mother. Which way is it? Forgive me if I ques- tion the validity of his claim that the Texas Caddy is legal in Cal- ifornia. The few people I have talked to that owned a Prius claimed 40 mpg and there are other non-electric vehicles that claim 40+ mpg. For business purposes he could ship bulky smokers and barbecue equipment by truck - ing companies that travel up and down I-5 and all over. The super-sized suburban and trailer are not really needed and the inconvenience would be re - warded with fewer emissions. Whether its charcoal, wood or pellets it produces greenhouse gases, then you add mesquite, apple, hickory or some other wood shavings for flavor and it all adds up. I prefer the old fashion light bulb and isn't the fluorescent bulb hazardous waste? He rides his bicycle in Los Molinos, I walk in Red Bluff. Does he have a free pass to ride TRAX? I quote: "Finally as a vet - eran, retired engineer, busi- ness owner, consumer and care- giver." Being a veteran is very commendable but it's not a free pass. In California one can re- ceive monetary compensation as caregivers to relatives such as grandchildren or elderly par- ents. I think Mazzucchi protests too much, or should I say cry- ing wolf. —Les Wolfe, Red Bluff Your opinions Cartoonist's take bless their hearts...we need more people like these two to get involved. High five.... renee Fowler: Comment on story about firefighters who rescued a puppy from an abandoned well our local red bluff city police and Tehama County sheriff officers are exempt from obeying this law. Jay nelson: Comment on article about crackdown on cell phone usage while driving WaSHiNGtoN » In a 2006 inter- view, Supreme Court Justice Ste- phen Breyer said the Constitu- tion is "basically about" one word — "democracy" — that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. De - mocracy is America's way of allo- cating political power. The Con- stitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to "secure the blessings of" that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic govern - ment — natural liberty. The fundamental division in American politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual's right to a ca - pacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fun- damental value is the right of the majority to have its way in mak- ing rules about which specified liberties shall be respected. Now, the nation no longer lacks what it has long needed, a slender book that lucidly explains the in - tensity of conservatism's disagree- ments with progressivism. For the many Americans who are puzzled and dismayed by the heatedness of political argument today, the message of Timothy Sandefur's "The Conscience of the Constitu- tion: The Declaration of Indepen- dence and the Right to Liberty" is this: The temperature of today's politics is commensurate to the stakes of today's argument. The argument is between con - servatives who say American pol- itics is basically about a condi- tion, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, de- mocracy. Progressives, who con- sider democracy the source of lib- erty, reverse the Founders' prem- ise, which was: Liberty pre-exists governments, which, the Decla- ration says, are legitimate when "instituted" to "secure" natural rights. Progressives consider, for ex - ample, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefur's for- mulation, "spaces of privacy" that government chooses "to carve out and protect" to the extent that these rights serve democ - racy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and indi- vidual rights, which cannot be ex- haustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient jus- tification. With the Declaration, Ameri- cans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and be- gan asserting rights that are uni- versal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flour- ishing of human nature. "In Eu- rope," wrote James Madison, "charters of liberty have been granted by power," but America has "charters of power granted by liberty." Sandefur, principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, notes that since the 1864 admis - sion of Nevada to statehood, ev- ery state's admission has been conditioned on adoption of a con- stitution consistent with the U.S. Constitutionand the Declaration. The Constitution is the nation's fundamental law but is not the first law. The Declaration is, ap - pearing on Page 1 of Volume 1 of the U.S. Statutes at Large and at the beginning of the U.S. Code. Hence the Declaration "sets the framework" for reading the Con - stitution not as "basically about" democratic government -- major- ities -- granting rights but about natural rights defining the limits of even democratic government. The perennial conflict in American politics, Sandefur says, concerns "which takes prece - dence: the individual's right to freedom, or the power of the ma- jority to govern." The purpose of the post-Civil War's 14th Amend- ment protection of Americans' "privileges or immunities" — pro- tections vitiated by an absurdly narrow Supreme Court reading of that clause in 1873 -- was to as- sert, on behalf of emancipated blacks, national rights of citizens. National citizenship grounded on natural rights would thwart Southern states then asserting their power to acknowledge only such rights as they chose to dis - pense. Government, the Framers said, is instituted to improve upon the state of nature, in which the in - dividual is at the mercy of the strong. But when democracy, meaning the process of major- ity rule, is the supreme value — when it is elevated to the status of what the Constitution is "basi- cally about" — the individual is again at the mercy of the strong, the strength of mere numbers. Sandefur says progressivism "inverts America's constitutional foundations" by holding that the Constitution is "about" democ - racy, which rejects the Framers' premise that majority rule is le- gitimate "only within the bound- aries" of the individual's natural rights. These include — indeed, are mostly — unenumerated rights whose existence and im - portance are affirmed by the Ninth Amendment. Many conservatives should be discomfited by Sandefur's anal - ysis, which entails this conclu- sion: Their indiscriminate denun- ciations of "judicial activism" in- advertently serve progressivism. The protection of rights, those constitutionally enumerated and others, requires a judiciary ac - tively engaged in enforcing what the Constitution is "basically about," which is making majority power respect individuals' rights. George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com. George Will Understanding our divisions a matter of perspective Sounding off A look at what readers are saying in comments on our website and on social media. OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com thursday, april 17, 2014 » MORE AT FaCEbook.CoM/rbdailynEwS AND TwiTTEr.CoM/rEdbluFFnEwS a6