Daily Archives: 23 October 2024

Who’s in Charge in Arizona?

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Arizona citizens will be voting this fall on a ballot measure that would

require legislative approval for any regulation that the state Office of Economic Opportunity projects would impose costs of $500,000 or more over a five-year period. Lawmakers or anyone subject to the proposed rule could request a cost estimate. If lawmakers failed to ratify the rule before the end of the legislative session, the promulgating state agency would have to issue a notice of termination.

That seems entirely reasonable, restricting as it does unelected bureaucrats in unelected “independent” State agencies from acting on their own recognizance to limit citizen activities.

However.

Republicans hold a majority in the Arizona House and Senate and this year passed a bill to require legislative approval for costly regulations. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it, claiming such a check “would create an unnecessary burden on state agencies that would inhibit their ability to carry out duties in a timely manner.”

And

Two Arizona Sierra Club chapters betray what opponents fear when they claim Prop. 315 “undermines the autonomy of state agencies.”

The Sierra Club chapters’ managers have said the quiet part out loud.

This is the Progressive-Democrat and her Leftist…supporters…insisting that the citizenry exist to give government agencies something to do; those agencies aren’t at all beholden to the State’s citizens or their elected representatives.

As the WSJ editors put it in the link above, The issue is who decides—elected officials, or unelected regulators? Or perhaps those regulators favored by Progressive-Democrat politicians?
The Know Betters in Arizona’s governor’s office have answered that plainly. The citizens of Arizona need to apply their answer in a couple of weeks, loudly and clearly.

A Question of Border Security

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This question has been rattling around, sub rosa, in my pea brain for some time, and it’s finally percolated to the surface. Texas, in particular, has spent some billions of dollars on its own direct effort to seal its southern border against the flood of illegal aliens allowed in by the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration. Several other States have spent significant dollars sending units of their respective National Guards to Texas and Texas’ southern border to support Texas’ efforts. Florida and South Dakota come particularly to mind, although those are far from the only States to send Guard units. Those units, too, serve to improve the sending States’ own security.

The proximate question is this: should the Federal government reimburse those States for their expenses in guarding our national southern border, expenses necessarily incurred as a result of the present administration’s decision to abrogate its security responsibility?

That raises an overarching question: precisely who is responsible for maintaining the security of our national borders?

Were the Federal government to reimburse, that would be tantamount to asserting a strictly Federal responsibility for border security. Texas’ Governor Greg Abbott (R) has a valid point too, though: Texas has a responsibility to see to the security of its borders, particularly that portion that coincides with the national border with Mexico.

Given the flow of illegal aliens throughout our nation, much of that flow actively and deliberately abetted [sic] by the Biden-Harris administration in transporting illegal aliens from the locations where they’re caught and temporarily detained to a variety of destinations in our interior (along with the flow of gotaways and of an unknown number of undetecteds), by extension of Abbott’s point, all 50 of our States have a responsibility to see to the security of their borders—and their interior—with respect to the illegal aliens in their midst.

The answer, it seems to me, is that border security in our republican federal democracy is a responsibility shared between the central, Federal, government and our several State governments. That leads me to lean toward no Federal reimbursement, per se. However, it may be appropriate for our national defense budget—not any part of a Department of Homeland Security budget—to allocate some border security funds explicitly to the States to defray, not reimburse, some of the States’ costs in securing their own borders.