Monthly Archives: July 2024

One More Thought

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Or maybe two….

My first concerns Corner Post, Inc v Board Of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that newly created businesses really are allowed to argue against decades-old regulations, here the Fed’s long-standing cap on credit card fees that card issuers are allowed to charge.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent,

The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the Court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright [which removed Chevron defense] have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.

In an era of burgeoning regulatory, vice Congressional, governance of our economy, and in an era where Federal government officials routinely ignore Federal law (immigration) and Court rulings (student debt “forgiveness”) to go about doing whatever an official feels like doing whenever one of them feels like doing it, it’s hard to see the downside of limiting the functioning of the Federal Government, much less to see any “devastation.” The tsunami of lower court lawsuits is simply the dam holding back private citizens’ and our businesses’ objections to such overreach finally bursting. The flood has every chance of flushing away a large part of that overreach detritus before it abates. And abate it will, just as even tsunamis do.

My second thought concerns the worry of Kevin King, a partner with Covington & Burling, regarding the Federal government’s reduced legal ability to blow off the objections of us private citizens and our businesses to government behaviors and the resulting potential for significant differences in interpretation of statutes by courts to develop:

The risk is that you’re going to get variation over geography, a patchwork of decisions[.]

Again, I say, “Yeah, and?” King’s worry seems centered on the possibility that the federated republican democracy nature of our constitutional governance, where the several States are, in their aggregate and individually, the equal of the central government regarding domestic matters might be starting to reassert itself. Furthermore, those geographic disparities are simply the noisy nature of democracy and a reflection of the plain fact that the citizens of one State might not have the same imperatives as the citizens of other States.

There’s also that Commerce Clause in our Constitution, a clause too long dormant, that can be put to the use for which it was devised and included—to smooth over (not paper over) the larger differences among the States where those differences too much impact the separate doings of other States.

Both of these are outcomes to be welcomed, not feared. Especially are they not to be obstructed.

Finland Soft-pedals on Ukraine

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President Alexander Stubb is partially correct, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

China holds the key to ending the war in Ukraine, urging Beijing to use its sway over Moscow while also calling on the US to lower growing tensions with China.

Stubb is correct to the extent that the People’s Republic of China is a key player in Russia’s war of destruction against Ukraine, but it’s not the key player. On the other hand, US-PRC tensions are irrelevant to the barbarian’s war except to the extent PRC President Xi Jinping chooses to use the war to poke a PRC stick in our eye.

Stubb’s soft-pedaling also comes from a basic misunderstanding of the situation vis-à-vis the barbarian’s invasion, which is done with a view to erasing Ukraine as a sovereign entity and absorbing it into the fabric of Russia. Here he is, exposing the depth of that misunderstanding:

President Xi Jinping holds the keys to a peaceful solution to this conflict because he’s in such a position of power. We in the West, not even the United States, cannot do that. All we can do is to provide arms to Ukraine to make sure it doesn’t lose its war.

There can be no peaceful solution with a barbarian that deliberately butchers women and children, bombs hospitals and schools, destroys power distribution nodes with a view to freezing Ukrainians in winter, and rapes women and children in barbarian occupied cities.

It’s utterly immoral to the point of outright evil, too, for the US and Europe to limit themselves to provid[ing] arms to Ukraine to make sure it doesn’t lose its war. That just keeps Ukrainian soldiers dying or being maimed while fighting to not lose. That just keeps Ukrainian women and children exposed to and dying from continued Russian atrocities. That just keeps the dwindling populations in barbarian occupied cities exposed to privation and continued atrocities. Fighting to not lose only increases Ukrainian losses.

It’s necessary that Ukraine win its war for survival outright, and that requires—demands—that the US and Europe stop supplying only enough arms for Ukraine to “not lose.” It requires—demands—that the US and Europe supply Ukraine, promptly and in numbers, with the weapons it needs to win its war for survival.

Another Stubb misunderstanding: Ukraine has been crystalline in its terms for ending the war: the barbarian’s withdrawal from all of occupied Ukraine. The PRC’s true key role is this: stop supplying Russia with arms, ammunition, technology, and money. Buy its oil and natural gas from sources other than Russia. Anything less is a dilution of its role to the point of meaningless virtue signaling. And poking with a stick.

Presidential Immunity

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor waxed hysterical in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Presidential immunity from prosecution for alleged crimes committed while in office.

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Maybe some broader context is in order.

Consider, for instance, our individual right to commit piracy on the high seas, so long as that, too, is done with the express permission of our Federal government (the immunity parallel is that the sovereign, We the People, have granted a considerable measure of permission to a President by electing him to that office).

The Federal government’s authority to authorize piracy by us private citizens exists in so many words in Article I, Section 8, of our Constitution:

To…grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal….

It’s instructive that that clause comes immediately on the heels of this clause:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas….

It’s hard to get any clearer than that: our Constitution authorizes our Congress to define what piracy is and then to authorize us private citizens to commit what otherwise would be that piracy by sailing as privateers under Congress-issued Letters of Marque.

Immune, immune, immune, indeed.

 

H/t AJ Jacobs, writing in The Free Press

There’s Another Reason

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Eric Felten had an op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (I seem to be on a theme here) noting the weakness of the 25th Amendment in temporarily displacing an incapacitated President. He correctly noted that a majority of Cabinet Secretaries must vote to displace the President, and that those politicians [sic] owe their position to the man they’d be moving to displace. That debt likely would prevent a sufficient number of them from making the move.

There’s another reason, though, why the Amendment might not have the teeth it was intended to have. The Amendment also requires the Vice President to vote for removal. If that politician does not, even were the Cabinet unanimous in its vote to remove, the move would fail: the Vice President has that veto power.

What Vice President is going to put his/her own political future in jeopardy with such a move? That politician, by voting to overthrow the President, even temporarily, is too likely to be viewed as betraying his/her erstwhile ally and the one who put him in the role of Vice President. That politician, too, will be viewed as making a grab for personal power, since the Vice President voting to remove the President would himself ascend to the Presidency.

A Third Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined at length on the need for Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection. Among other things, they described one of Party’s rationalizations for Biden’s staying the course:

Ignoring the ballots that voters have already cast for Mr Biden in primaries across the US would undermine democratic decision-making and anger the party’s core supporters.

The editors offered two reasons for why that rationalization is erroneous.

[T]he estimated 4,672 delegates to the Democratic national convention—most of whom were selected in primaries, caucuses, or local party conventions—are a microcosm of the party, not a self-appointed cabal of insiders.

And

[Delegates] aren’t robots. Although delegates pledged to a particular presidential candidate are expected to vote for that candidate, the official party selection rules leave room for judgment, saying that pledged delegates “shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” Delegates pledged to Mr Biden could conscientiously claim that new information has induced them to change their minds[.]

There’s a third reason, too, and this does directly address Party’s claimed concern for “democratic decision-making.”

Party went to great pains to limit primary voters’ choices to just one: Biden himself. Party pressured potential competitors against competing at all, and took active steps even to deprecate serious consideration for folks like Cornel West and Jill Stein, folks that most “democratic decision-makers” would have had no trouble assessing on their own. One potential candidate who was gaining traction, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, was interfered with and subverted so much that he felt driven to leave the Progressive-Democratic Party altogether and mount a separate, third-party campaign—where he’s getting anywhere from 8%-15% support in the polls. The one alternative candidate who was allowed into the primary campaign, Congressman Dean Phillips (D, MN), was sufficiently timid that he chose not to enter until it obviously was too late for him to have any sort of impact.