Well-Established Constitutional Rights

In a Wednesday Letter, University of Maryland School of Law Professor Robert Percival wrote in defense of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s move to politicize the Supreme Court—a move which he denies.

But what drew my attention was this statement regarding Roe v Wade and his concept of constitutional rights:

Justice White opposed creating new constitutional rights, but he didn’t think the court should take back rights once they were well-established.

What Percival has chosen to ignore here is the distinction between “well-established” and “long extant.”

The decision of Roe lasted a long time, but the equally long fight against abortion at various stages of pregnancy, in parallel with the equally long fight to reverse Roe, demonstrates that the “constitutional right” was not at all well established.

Right Idea, but…

…details in the implementation will matter, also. Competition always drives costs to a level approaching the cost of production, and that’s to the good, not only of consumers but for competitors and others looking to enter the market, as well.

However.

On Monday, [Congresswoman and MD Mariannette (R, IA)] Miller-Meeks along with three of her colleagues introduced a bill titled the “Biologics Competition Act,” which seeks “to evaluate the process by which interchangeable biological products are approved to be used in pharmaceuticals.”
“So in essence, what we’re trying to get is biosimilar drugs that are the same chemically—that they have an equivalency to let those be prescribed as generic drugs, which would bring down the cost of medication[.]”

There’s a reason generics, in general, are delayed in getting authorization to be marketed: to allow the drug’s initial developer(s) time to recoup the costs of development and to begin realizing profit, and thereby encourage further drug development.

Such permission delays would need to apply to the biosimilar drugs, too. With a fillip: defining how much change is necessary while remaining biosimilar without leaving the required change so trivial that the new drug is an outright plagiary with only a token item grafted on.

That may well be the eye of a needle—passable, but with difficulty, especially when trying to write down a specific law. Worth going for, though, absolutely.

The Press Censors

And it tries to whitewash history, pretending what it’s censoring never happened.

The latest example is provided by NBC. That press outlet tweeted this, saying that Hispanic illegal aliens were just trash:

Now, as Molly Hemingway, Federalist Editor-in-Chief, has noted, NBC has cravenly deleted their tweet.

NBC didn’t—doesn’t—have the integrity or moral courage to leave the tweet in the public’s history with a note acknowledging its error. No, the press outlet has chosen instead to cower away, hide its tweet, and try to gaslight us average Americans into believing that the bigoted tweet never occurred at all.

Hemingway is being generous, too. NBC and its allies don’t just look horrific. They are horrific in the depths of their racist bigotry.

Manchin’s Permit Reform Legislation

It’s in serious jeopardy from House Progressive-Democratic Party members—70 of them—and Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) hasn’t even released the language of his permit reform proposal (but West Virginia’s other Senator, Republican Senator Shelly Moore Capito, has released hers). Despite this, Manchin blames Republicans for the jeopardy.

On top of that, Manchin says he’ll release his proposal in the coming days.

This, of course, is nonsense. Manchin, responsible Senator that he is, has had his proposal written since early in the days when he was negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) the price for which Manchin would sell his vote on the Progressive-Democratic Party’s then-latest spendthrift bill.

Manchin has no reason at all for withholding his proposal from public scrutiny for so long, much less from the other party’s scrutiny before demanding their vote on it.

But not Protection of the Community

It appears that Minneapolis’ Progressive-Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis’ post-Floyd murder rioting and his own disdain for letting the city’s police department deal with the rioters infamy, is ready to announce a new police chief—nine months after the Floyd era chief retired.

The new chief’s job description includes this Critical Item:

[A] visionary leader, able to communicate the need for and create long-lasting and systemic change within MPD.

Change within the police department, but no change in hizzoner‘s (non)enforcement policy or the department’s capacity for enforcement.

That’s not very reassuring for the damaged, even destroyed, neighborhoods and businesses, which were almost exclusively minority-populated and -owned.