Monthly Archives: August 2023

A Start

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But it’s a move that could—and should—be made irrelevant by a larger move.

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL) and Kevin Cramer (R, ND) have reintroduced their Protect Equality and Civics Education (PEACE) Act, which is intended to eliminate the ability of the Department of Education to commit tax dollars to any plan or program to push Critical Race Theory into our schools.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a larger solution that more broadly addresses this mess.

The US Department of Education needs to be eliminated altogether—not merely defunded, but erased from the Federal government. This is a Cabinet entity that our nation did without just fine for nearly 200 years. It was created out of whole cloth just 43 years ago in 1979, and over the last several years, all it’s done has been to interfere with our children’s education by moving teaching away from serious subjects and into inherently racist and sexist ideological indoctrination. Additionally, DoEd has become a facility that seeks to deny due process to students accused of sexual misbehaviors. DoEd’s usefulness has disappeared.

Moreover, DoEd’s FY2024 budget request of $90 billion is money much better allocated to other purposes: items like plussing up our defense establishment with equipment, logistics, and combat training, as well as our defensive and offensive cyberwar capabilities; strengthening our government and private cyber security capabilities outside of our defense establishment; strengthening our energy and water distribution networks; supporting relocation of our economic supply chain sources and intermediate stops away from enemy nations. The personnel of the department should be transferred completely out of Federal government employ into the private sector, where their existing experience will easily facilitate their finding gainful employment.

Inadequate Electricity Infrastructure

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There is a move afoot, spearheaded by a number of car companies, to expand the number of battery car charging stations in the US. iSeeCars.com says that planned expansion is inadequate. The company’s Executive Analyst Karl Brauer:

[E]ach of these fast chargers can cost $50,000 or more to install, and this joint effort claims it will utilize 100 percent renewable energy to power the new chargers, which can only mean higher costs for each unit[.]

And that’s just for a few midwestern States.

Bauer is right about the infrastructure’s inadequacy, but the shortfall is much deeper than just battery cars’ electricity demands.

Our electrical infrastructure is inadequate because it’s built on antiquated wiring/cabling, too few and too restricted fossil fuel-powered generating stations; too few generating stations of any sort; lack of spares, particularly transformers and transformer parts and fluids; poor-to-nonexistent (still!) cybersecurity; and on and on.

Those shortfalls need to be filled regardless of the number of battery cars and trucks are on the road.

Misplaced Push

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Too many Republican Senators are joining their Senate Progressive-Democrat colleagues in pushing Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) to drop his blocking of President Joe Biden’s (D) military appointments and flag officer promotions.

Tuberville is holding up—not blocking—final confirmation votes on those appointments and promotion lists over SecDef’s insistence on using taxpayer funds to pay for abortion and abortion-related services used by military members and/or families.

Tuberville isn’t holding up anything; he’s merely blocking blanket moves to use unanimous consent for approval. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) readily enough could bring each of those appointments and promotion lists to the Senate floor for votes, but they refuse. Apparently, they want, instead, the spectacle of the holdup.

That’s a minor point, though. The larger point is SecDef Lloyd Austin’s stubbornness in demanding that those tax dollars be used for abortion services, Hyde Amendment be damned, on the legal front, and he just doesn’t care about those babies’ lives on the moral front.

If Austin wants his promotion lists, and if Biden wants his appointments, all they need do is remove their demand to spend our money on abortion services and on abortion.

It’s that straightforward.

Occupying Floodwaters

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It seems a Wisconsin man owns some property near Ixonia, and that property has been flooded, gets flooded fairly frequently, by the Rock River against which the man’s property lies. He’s gotten fed up with the airboats that go running across his land, taking advantage of its temporarily flooded condition, and he’s filed suit in Wisconsin’s Jefferson County Circuit Court to put an end to the practice.

At the heart of the issue is the so-called public trust doctrine, which are provisions in the Wisconsin Constitution that guarantee public access to navigable waters generally defined as any waterway with a bank upon which someone can float a canoe or other small watercraft on a regular basis.
State Department of Natural Resources policies state that the doctrine grants access rights to any part of a navigable waterway as long as the person remains in the water.

At the heart of the man’s suit is this:

public access [the suit holds] ends at the ordinary high water mark, a point on the bank or shoreline where the water regularly stops, and that the DNR’s position has left law enforcement confused.
“DNR’s authority to implement and enforce the public trust doctrine is limited to navigable lakes, streams, sloughs, bayous and marsh outlets,” the lawsuit says. “Flooded yards do not fit into these categories and are not subject to DNR’s public trust jurisdiction.”

The man has the right of it, and a key phrase is that “regular basis” bit. There’s nothing regular at all about floods—that’s why they’re called floods and not rivers, or bayous, or swamps, or ponds or lakes. Another key phrase is that waterway with a bank bit. Floods don’t have banks; they’re floods because the water has overflowed the waterway’s banks.

Beyond that, there are basic private property rights. A man owns his private property, whether it’s in its normal state or flooded by a temporary overflow. There are no “navigable waters” in a flood sitting on private property, however easily someone else’s boat might float on the flood.

Wisconsin’s constitution is fairly explicit on the matter of private property. Art I, Sect 13:

Private property for public use. SECTION 13. The property of no person shall be taken for public use without just compensation therefor.

There is no clause or collection of clauses that authorizes the DNR’s navigable water policy. The DNR’s…policy…looks an awful lot like a taking without just compensation. Just a “shut up and deal with it” misinterpretation of the State’s constitution.

The cynicism of the DNR’s position regarding floods and navigability is demonstrated by this definition of navigable waterway in the DNR’s own policy regarding waterway jurisdiction:

A navigable waterway is defined through case law as any waterway that has a defined bed and bank, and upon which it is possible to float a canoe or small watercraft on a recurring basis.

This directly contradicts the DNR’s Public Trust Doctrine definition of navigable waterway on which it’s hanging its hat in defense in the law suit:

The Public Trust Doctrine applies to all navigable waters, which are defined as any waterway on which it is possible to float a canoe or small watercraft at some time during the year.

That internal-to-DNR contradiction by itself ought to be enough for summary judgment in the man’s favor and the striking of DNR’s navigable water policies. With that internal contradiction, DNR has demonstrated that it has no concept of navigable waters.