Monthly Archives: December 2021

A Progressive-Democrat Threatens

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has issued a threat to try to destroy one of our most fundamental rights as Americans: our right to keep and bear Arms. He’s doing it, too, while drawing a disingenuous parallel between Arms possession and abortion—and in the process, threatening an even more fundamental right, one imbued in all humans not just in Americans.

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.
We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA[.]

In the process, Newsom ignored a critical distinction here. Gun rights are in our Constitution.

The right to abortion exists only in a Supreme Court ruling and has only the force of statutory law—which is explicitly subordinate to our Constitution.

Regarding Newsom’s disingenuous claim about using legal authority to protect people’s lives, he’s also ignoring that our gun rights exist in critical (but not exclusive) part to defend lives and to defend against overreaching government. That the tools occasionally are misused to illegally kill only emphasizes the need to better catch and punish the killers, not to punish the vast majority of us for the crimes of those few. And to not keep letting the accused killers back out on the street with little to no bail.

Abortion laws, on the other hand, kill babies and tend toward blocking legal voices from speaking for them in court. That’s not very protective of our very youngest people’s lives.

Invading Ukraine is a Trap for Putin?

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That’s the thesis Christopher Hartwell has in his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed. And he made a good case: Russia failed in a similar situation in Afghanistan; the “brother Slav” argument that Putin makes for Ukrainians coming into the Russian fold isn’t all that; the Ukrainians would mount a strong guerrilla war after losing the invasion war, making the total cost too high for a fragile Russian economy to survive. He concludes with this:

Russia can’t be an empire without Ukraine. But Russia will cease to be a great power if it tries to acquire the rest of Ukraine.

Hartwell, however, ignored a couple of key points, along with made a false comparison.

The false comparison is that of Ukraine and Afghanistan. There was far more enmity, especially fueled by culture and fundamentalist religion, between Afghans and Russians than exists between Ukrainians and Russians, for all the current “brother Slav” split.

Afghan geography lent itself far more effectively to guerrilla resistance than does Ukrainian territory.

The matter of experience: the Red Army, now Russian Ground Forces, gained quite a lot of experience at fighting against a guerrilla foe in Afghanistan, and those forces now are real-time combat experienced at prosecuting a guerrilla war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They’re conversant with both sides of the guerrilla question. They’re also gaining currency as an occupation force in Crimea.

The key points are these: regardless of how easy or hard it might be for Putin to conquer Ukraine (which conquering will be the easier for Biden-Harris’ refusal to arm Ukraine even with defensive weapons, much less offensive ones), Putin in the end will have Ukraine under his at least more-or-less control, and in the process, he will have completely denied Ukraine to the rest of Europe.

The other key point will be his success at humiliating Biden-Harris, adding to the Biden-Harris administration’s own destructive effects on American credibility. That alone is worth a pretty kopek in Putin’s geopolitical calculation.

Maybe an invasion wouldn’t be such a trap.

A PRC Anschluss

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Here is one Critical Item in Xi Jinping’s rationale for conquering the Republic of China and occupying the island of Taiwan. At the 19th Party Congress, in October 2017, Xi was quite blunt:

People on both sides of the strait are one family, with shared blood…. No one can ever cut the veins that connect us.

It doesn’t matter that the citizens of the RoC are proud to be of the RoC and not of the PRC.

No one can ever cut the veins that connect us. Sound familiar?

Where else are there significant Chinese-heritage populations? Here are the 15 sovereign nations with the largest such:

  • Thailand
  • Malaysia
  • Indonesia
  • Singapore
  • Canada
  • Myanmar
  • Philippines
  • Australia
  • South Korea
  • Japan
  • Vietnam
  • France
  • United Kingdom
  • Venezuela

All of these nations are under pressure of one form or another to, at the least, not interfere with PRC interests, and in many cases to accede to them. Will that be sufficient for Xi? It matters not a single minim that these populations are proud, loyal citizens of those nations: their blood is mainland Chinese, and no one can ever cut the veins that connect [them].

And the United States, with the third largest Chinese-heritage population—entirely loyal to and proud, successful citizens of the US, but also with, according to Xi, those inseverable blood ties to mainland China. The PRC is working hard to develop and deploy a world-spanning first strike capability for its PLA.

Dangerous Misunderstanding

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JCS Chairman General Mark Milley has a very serious and dangerous misunderstanding. He said, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal,

China’s investment in its navy, hypersonic missiles, cyber, and other technologies are designed to ensure that it, along with Russia and the US, are world-leading nations.

This is a man who isn’t paying attention to what’s going on around him. The People’s Republic of China’s investments, along with its foreign policy initiatives, are not at all concerned with enabling the PRC to operate on an equal footing with us and with Russia.

The PRC’s moves are centered solely on that nation being the sole world power, with Russia as its sidekick and our nation subordinated to its bidding.

See, for instance, the PRC-Russia agreement allowing the PRC to exploit Siberian mineral, timber, and other resources. In executing this agreement, the PRC is allowed to colonize move hundreds of thousands of PRC workers into south central and eastern Siberia to carry out the exploitation, and then it will share some of the produce with Russia.

The PRC’s navy, hypersonic missiles, cyber, and other investments, many of which are coming to fruition, are intended to give the PRC a first-strike military capability so overwhelming that no second-strike response would even be possible.

Two Mistakes

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The Chevron Deference “rule,” which the Supreme Court coalesced out of the æther in its 37-year-old Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council ruling, comes up again in this year’s American Hospital Association v Becerra case, which centers on Medicare’s drug reimbursement schedule for hospitals.

The Supremes invented a two-step evaluation of Executive Branch agency rules in that Chevron case:

First, courts are to give effect to the “unambiguously expressed intent of Congress.” Second, if a court finds that the statute is ambiguous…then it is bound to respect any plausible agency interpretation.

The second step contains the two mistakes, a remarkable achievement even for the activist Court that dreamed up the process.

First, if a court finds that the statute is ambiguous, then the court has no other option, under each of our Constitution and the judge’s/Justices’ oaths of office, to strike the statute as unconstitutionally ambiguous. It has no need, it cannot, then reach that second bit.

Second, a court is not at all bound to respect any plausible agency interpretation. Far from it. In evaluating an agency rule or regulation—having found the statute constitutionally clear—any court must, by the Supreme Court’s rule, treat the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress as their limit. From that, a court must evaluate, de novo, the rule or regulation for whether it fits within the clear confines of the statute.

There can be no deference to another branch of government, much less to a subordinate agency of another branch, if judges of the judicial branch are to be faithful to our Constitution’s construction of three coequal branches of government, rather than to, say, the British construction of the judiciary being subordinate to another branch (Parliament in the British construction).

If the Supreme Court is to satisfy its function in AHA, it must rescind, reverse, root out to every jot and tittle Chevron Deference (and all other deferences, vis., Skidmore, City of Arlington v FCC‘s Arlington, etc) and evaluate the Becerra rule on the basis of whether the governing statute truly is unambiguous and if so, then on the fit of Becerra’s rule within that statute.