Monthly Archives: July 2023

Security Guarantees

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In an editorial regarding this week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, The Wall Street Journal‘s editors dropped this line:

A debate is underway over whether Ukraine should benefit from a formal Western security guarantee, or perhaps join NATO.

A Western security guarantee for Ukraine is utterly worthless, as the Budapest Memoranda demonstrate. Marginally better would be NATO membership. Ukraine has some security and government integrity criteria to meet, but it’s working to meet them and would benefit from assistance in that direction.

Better for Ukraine, and the West generally, would be a separate mutual security treaty that would include Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland, and the rest of the Three Seas Initiative nations, along with the US and Great Britain (and, perhaps, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway to strengthen Western control over Russia’s ability to leave the Baltic Sea). For all of the editors’ claimed NATO “improvement,” it still lags heavily in satisfying its own mutual defense obligations, much less doing anything to defend Europe at large.

Along with that, it’s necessary to make clear to Russia that, so long as it insists on playing the barbarian, it will continue to be isolated and contained and that the containment will be rapidly tightened.

Russian paranoia needs also to be corrected. No one in the civilized world has any desire to run over Russia or conquer it. Its vast resources are much more cheaply obtained—to mutual benefit—through free trade than through conquering and occupation. The history of Russian-world relations make such convincing deucedly difficult, but they do not make the convincing impossible.

“Undemocratic”

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Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) used his “line-item” veto power to veto part of a legislatively-passed law regarding public school funding. His veto authority actually is less a line-item veto authority than it is a words and phrases veto authority.

Evers, a Democrat, used his veto pen Wednesday to strike out text intended to increase funding for the 2024-25 school years, crossing out the “20” and the hyphen. The updated language allows K-12 schools to raise their revenue per student by $325 a year until 2425.

Lucas Vebber, Deputy Counsel for the Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, says his organization is considering suing the State over the governor’s inherently undemocratic move.

Evers’ move was assuredly undemocratic, but existing law allows the move. Vebber expanded on his beef, and with that expansion, he has a case—and with that case, he may be able to get the law struck down as unconstitutionally (under Wisconsin’s constitution) vague.

Here you have the people who elected the legislature and are represented here in Wisconsin, in the Senate Assembly to write laws, have written a law they intended. The governor’s veto makes it something completely different.

In Wisconsin, as in each of our States and at the Federal level, it’s the legislature that writes the law(s). A governor’s authority, in this context, begins and ends with signing the legislature’s bill into law or vetoing it. Or, as is the case in a few States, a governor’s authority can include vetoing specific parts of the bill and signing the rest into law. Wisconsin allows a governor to veto words and phrases. However, in no State is a governor allowed to rewrite the bill before signing it.

That’s what Evers has done with his carefully chosen words and phrases veto: he’s rewritten a one-year funding law into a 400 year funding law, and that is plainly unconstitutional. Evers’ move also illustrates how flexible is a Wisconsin governor’s words and phrases veto authority: it’s so flexible as to be too vague to pass muster.

The matter likely will end up in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that court has an activist liberal Justice majority.

More Progressive-Democratic Party Racism

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This example is breathtaking in its explicitness. California Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D, 59th District) has proposed a piece of openly racist legislation:

Whenever the court has discretion to determine the appropriate sentence according to relevant statutes and the sentencing rules of the Judicial Council, the court presiding over a criminal matter shall consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.

Because the way to eliminate racial discrimination in sentencing is to engage in racial discrimination in sentencing.

This is how steeped in victimhood Party has become. Its members no longer can…discriminate…right from wrong, can no longer discriminate being racist from not being racist.

These Special Ones cannot even perceive the “disparate impact” on crime victims or discriminate the criminal from his crime’s victim.

“America Has Too Many Rules”

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And too many laws. Jimmy Sexton, CEO of Esquire Group, is right about the rules.

More than 88,000 federal regulations were promulgated between 1995 and 2016, the most recent data I can find. The Federal Register, a compendium of each year’s new federal regulations, proposed rules and notices, totals nearly two million pages dating back to its inception in 1936. And the Code of Federal Regulations ran to 185,000 pages in 2020. In addition, state and local governments have their own laws and rules.

As he noted,

Laws should be easy to comply with and simple to enforce.

The easy compliance and enforcement isn’t only a matter of each one being short and sweet; the ease flows especially from keeping the overall number small and knowable in their aggregate.

And I’m right about too many laws, especially at the Federal level. Just on the criminal side alone, there are almost 5,200 criminal laws and roughly 300,000 regulations that can subject people to possible criminal penalties. among our statutes, even though the only crimes our Constitution actually names are treason and bribery—and the nebulous high Crimes and Misdemeanors, named in the context of impeaching the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States. Even the first enumeration of national-level crimes, the Crimes Act of 1790, passed in the 1st Congress, identified only 21 additional crimes wanting Federal-level enforcement and punishment:

  1. treason
  2. misprision of treason (deliberate concealment)
  3. willful murder occurring on federal property
  4. rescue/attempted rescue of a body following an execution
  5. misprision of felony
  6. “man-slaughter”
  7. piracy
  8. “accessory before the fact”
  9. “accessory after the fact”
  10. confederate to piracy
  11. maiming
  12. forgery/counterfeiting/falsifying federal securities or coin
  13. altering/corruption of federal records
  14. larceny
  15. receiving stolen goods
  16. perjury
  17. subornation of perjury (contracting with another to commit perjury)
  18. bribery
  19. obstruction a federal officer
  20. rescue of an inmate
  21. violation of safe conduct/passport.

The rest of criminal behaviors and their definitions are, by design, left to the police powers of each of the several States.

The only Federal criminal laws we need, then, are few: against treason and bribery, and against each of those additional 21, each of which needs to be particularly describing these crimes’ defining criteria, and especially for those 21, particularly describing the criteria that separate them from State crimes and make them Federal crimes.

And yet we have an enormous and bureaucratic Department of Justice and a broad range of Federal police forces: the FBI, the Marshals Service, the Secret Service, each Federal cabinet has its own police force, even the Congress has the Capital Police.

A Step in the Right Direction

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The 6th Circuit overruled a Tennessee federal district court’s injunction, lifting it, and allowing a Tennessee law barring gender-related child abuse “gender-affirming” “care” for minors to go into effect. Per the AP, the appellate court ruled

[i]n a 2-1 ruling, the majority opinion stated that decisions on issues such as transgender care, which is considered an emerging policy issue, is better left to legislatures rather than judges[.]

This is a good start, and a strong step in the right direction. It’s also important to keep in mind the fact that the matter is still in the courts: the appellate court lifted an injunction; it did not uphold the law itself.

Decisions on issues such as transgender care, though, are even better left—are best left—in the hands of the parents. Government—at any level of governmental hierarchy—has no legitimate business inserting itself into a family’s internal affairs beyond protecting family members from abuse. Which “treatments” to alter a child’s gender away from his or her biological gender most assuredly is.