Scalise: Pelosi's Outrageous Power Grab Upends 200 Years of Precedent

WASHINGTON, D.C.—House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Fox News Channel's Hannity to discuss Speaker Pelosi's proxy voting scheme that upends over 200 years of precedent with serious constitutional and institutional repercussions. Whip Scalise blasted Speaker Pelosi for exploiting the Coronavirus crisis to ram through a partisan rule change for her own political gain, when the House should be returning to work to lead by example and show the American people how to adapt to our new normal.

Click here or on the image above to watch the interview.

On Democrats using the Coronavirus crisis as a cover for a power grab that upends over 200 years of precedent:

“You know, the thing is it gives Nancy Pelosi power, but imagine being a Democrat who goes back home in a swing district. You just voted to give your voting card in Congress to Nancy Pelosi, and she doesn't represent the values of a lot of those districts. You know, you now signed on for San Francisco values, and by the way, what are you doing now? Why are you collecting a paycheck if you want Nancy Pelosi to be the one to vote for you and represent your district, and you're representing a swing state somewhere else? And so, this could be a tough vote for those people to explain, it's unconstitutional first of all, because a quorum under this resolution they just passed – 20 people on the Floor – 20 Democrats can constitute a quorum of the House of Representatives, 435 people. That goes against Article One of the Constitution. They don't seem to care about any of that, they just want to consolidate power and spend money. I mean, a drunken sailor would be offended to be compared to them and what they did with this bill. Money to illegals, taxpayer funding of abortion, this is crazy.”

[…]

“If [Democrats] pass any bill using these new rules, they haven't done it yet, but they are now creating this opportunity to have 20 people on the Floor to constitute a quorum, and Nancy Pelosi [will] literally be able to hold the voting cards of so many of these people. It will be challenged.”

On Speaker Pelosi’s decision to shut down the people’s House during the time when it’s most important for us to lead by example:

“Can you imagine, even the United States Senate is going to work. And there is no reason [not to come back into session], we were here today voting. You know, there were about 24 Members who couldn't make it out of 435. And so, to suggest that it's complicated to get here is just fallacy. So, why she did this, it's about a power grab. It surely has nothing to do with health and safety, because as you mentioned, you know, we've got our frontline workers back at home in our hospitals, our grocery stores, now in Louisiana today we just started opening up, so you can go into a restaurant today at 25% capacity. We could finally go back into places of worship, and yet she's going to say that she doesn't want Congress to be meeting in Washington debating bills. She just would rather just take your proxy vote and hold on to it so that she can vote for you. I'll tell you this, and of course Jason, you would have never done this either. Nancy Pelosi is not going to get my vote, she surely would not have gotten yours. But for any of those folks that voted for this bill today, how do they go back home and explain today they voted to allow Nancy Pelosi to vote for them so that they don't have to go to work anymore? Well then why don't they just resign their seat and send somebody up here who wants to come and fight for restoring the American dream up here in Washington.”

meanwhile...Telegraph behind paywalls:

16 May: UK Telegraph: Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time
The boss of a top software firm asks why the Government failed to get a second opinion before accepting Imperial College’s Covid modelling
by David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik
In the history of expensive software mistakes, Mariner 1 was probably the most notorious. The unmanned spacecraft was destroyed seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral in 1962 when it veered dangerously off-course due to a line of dodgy code.

But nobody died and the only hits were to Nasa’s budget and pride. Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns will supersede the failed Venus space probe and could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.

Since publication of Imperial’s microsimulation model, those of us with a professional and personal interest in software development have studied the code on which policymakers based their fateful decision to mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship. And we were profoundly disturbed at what we discovered. The model appears to be totally unreliable and you wouldn’t stake your life on it.
First though, a few words on our credentials...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/neil-fergusons-imperial-model-could-devastating-software-mistake/

16 May: UK Telegraph: Coding that led to lockdown was ‘totally unreliable’ and a ‘buggy mess’, say experts
The code, written by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, was impossible to read, scientists claim
By Hannah Boland and Ellie Zolfagharifard
The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.
“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led-lockdown-totally-unreliable-buggy-mess-say-experts/

more details:

16 May: Fox News: Imperial College model Britain used to justify lockdown a ‘buggy mess’, ‘total unreliable’, experts claim
By Peter Aitken
The criticisms follow a series of policy turnabouts, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to extend the national lockdown. The United States also used the model, which predicted upwards of 2.2 million deaths in the US without proper action. The prediction helped influence the White House to adopt a more serious approach to the pandemic.
Experts have derided the coding from Professor Neil Ferguson, warning that it is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.”

“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust,” David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco, told the Daily Telegraph...
The Imperial model works by using code to simulate transport links, population size, social networks and healthcare provisions to predict how coronavirus would spread. Researchers released the code behind it, which developers have criticized as being unreadable...

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh have further claimed that it is impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data using the model. The team got different results when they used different machines, and even different results from the same machines...

“There appears to be a bug in either the creation or re-use of the network file. If we attempt two completely identical runs, only varying in that the second should use the network file produced by the first, the results are quite different,” the Edinburgh researchers wrote on the Github file.
A fix was provided, but it was the first of many bugs found within the program.
“Models must be capable of passing the basic scientific test of producing the same results given the same initial set of parameters…otherwise, there is simply no way of knowing whether they will be reliable,” said Michael Bonsall, Professor of Mathematical Biology at Oxford University...

A spokesperson for the Imperial College COVID19 Response Team said: “The U.K. Government has never relied on a single disease model to inform decision-making. As has been repeatedly stated, decision-making around lockdown was based on a consensus view of the scientific evidence, including several modelling studies by different academic groups.”
“Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus that COVID-19 is a highly transmissible virus with an infection fatality ratio exceeding 0.5pc in the UK.”...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/imperial-college-britain-coronavirus-lockdown-buggy-mess-unreliable

That’s a bad thing for any code. Can you say they never really tested it? Back when I coded, I ALWAYS did multiple runs with identical data to make sure I got identical results. . . sometimes when there was a bug in the code we’d get a wildly out of whack result on a fifth or ninth or some other run because some register wasn’t properly completely emptied or something wasn’t properly constrained. You had to find the offending error and fix it. You learned that with computers, assumptions can get you in a heap of trouble. . . such as assuming that the state of a computer’s registers at fresh startup we’re the same as the registers that had just had the application run on it. Uh, nope. Don’t assume. Clear everything for each run unless there’s a reason to keep it. Or, better, store it, clear, and replace it if you need to be certain. This was especially true if the application would be run on an unknown environment computer where unknown other applications could have been run before or simultaneously with yours, changing things you’d least expect.

It’s a lot better now than it was then.

Different results from different machines. . . Sounds as if their code attempted to introduce an entropy generation component from a faux-random number seed gathered from something read from the machine that was different in each machine. . . Not a good idea if reproducible results are required.

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