The House is currently considering the supplemental appropriations bill for the troops on the floor.  Aside from the setting of an arbitrary withdrawal deadline, and various other provisions I do not agree with, the supplemental has several domestically directed additions as well as a tax increase to top it all off.

First, this piece of legislation includes language that will expand veteran’s education benefits to the tune of $51.6 billion over ten years.  I don’t think anyone can argue that the modernization of education benefits for veterans is long overdue, but it must be done responsibly.  This expansion of benefits will, according to the Pentagon, and former P.O.W. and Navy Captain, John McCain discourage retention rates among active duty personnel. 

Second, it provides thirteen weeks of unemployment compensation to workers, and for states with unemployment rates that exceed 6%, the benefits would be extended for another thirteen weeks. History shows, that extending unemployment benefits longer actually keeps people unemployed for longer periods of time. Besides, unemployment benefits have nothing to do with this supplemental appropriations bill.

Lastly, Democrats have proposed a job-killing tax increase on individuals making more than $500,000 and couples making more than $1 million. According to the Tax Foundation, nearly 83 percent of filers who will be hit by the Democrat tax increase report some form of income from a small business, sole proprietorship, or partnership. According to ADP, last month, small businesses created 56,000 jobs, while the economy lost 20,000 jobs overall. The last thing we should be doing is raising taxes on the innovators and entrepreneurs who are critical to getting our economy back on track.

Three major domestic aspects of a supplemental appropriations bill that has nothing to do with domestic policy…what’s next?

Caring for China
3300 S. Fairview
Santa Ana, CA 92704

	By Aly Song, Reuters
A relative of an earthquake victim prays for the dead at the site of a collapsed school building in Wenchuan, Sichuan province, Thursday.

The question we must address is whether, under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

That was not in fact the central question.  The central question was whether the representative nature of the California state government, including its initiative provisions, would be upheld.

They were not.  The California Supreme Court asserted its ultimate power today in a way that is shameful and deeply destructive of the ability of a free people to govern themselves. 

UPDATE:  From Justice Baxter' opinion partially concurring and partially dissenting:

Only one other American state recognizes the right the majority announces today. So far, Congress, and virtually every court to consider the issue, has rejected it. Nothing in our Constitution, express or implicit, compels the majority’s startling conclusion that the age-old understanding of marriage —an understanding recently confirmed by an initiative law — is no longer valid. California statutes already recognize same-sex unions and grant them all the substantive legal rights this state can bestow. If there is to be a further sea change in the social and legal understanding of marriage itself, that evolution should occur by similar democratic means. The majority forecloses this ordinary democratic process, and, in doing so, oversteps its authority....

But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves.Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority, the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration. The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will....

I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature’s own weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat the People’s will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative interference. Though the majority insists otherwise, its pronouncement seriously oversteps the judicial power. The majority purports to apply certain fundamentalprovisions of the state Constitution, but it runs afoul of another just as fundamental— article III, section 3, the separation of powers clause. This clause declares that “[t]he powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial,” and that“[p]ersons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others” except as the Constitution itself specifically provides. (Italics added.)

History confirms the importance of the judiciary’s constitutional role as a check against majoritarian abuse. Still, courts must use caution when exercising the potentially transformative authority to articulate constitutional rights. Otherwise, judges with limited accountability risk infringing upon our society’s most basic shared premise — the People’s general right, directly or through their chosen legislators, to decide fundamental issues of public policy for themselves.

Judicial restraint is particularly appropriate where, as here, the claimed constitutional entitlement is of recent conception and challenges the most fundamental assumption about a basic social institution.

The majority has violated these principles. It simply does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice.

"John McCain’s emergence is testimony to the shattering of Bush’s presidency. Without the fracturing of conservatism, McCain would never have become the Republican nominee. It is not an accident, as the Marxists might say, that McCain was Bush’s rival in 2000, a bitterly fought contest that resulted in wounds that are still fresh to McCain. Regardless of McCain’s need to consolidate and conciliate the Republican base–and despite some Democrats’ insistence that McCain is little more than a party line reactionary–he remains an utterly singular figure in the individualistic tradition of Goldwater but lacking Goldwater’s early (at least) extremism. Ironically, at the end of the current Republican era, McCain is the last important Republican whose career stretches back to the Reagan period–and even to the Nixon years as an icon of the Vietnam War. McCain represents continuity and a break with it. His reliance on neoconservatives for foreign policy advice is his most important connection to the Bush legacy.

For McCain to win in the Electoral College, of course, he would have to reassemble the Republican coalition. But he might well have greater appeal and put into play states that dropped out of the G.O.P. alliance under George W. Bush, from New Jersey to California. If McCain did so the result would not be a restoration of Reaganism, but the basis of a post-Bush Republicanism."