Category Archives: regulation

Backwards

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The headline and lede demonstrate the utter misunderstanding (to the point of cynically offered distortion?) of the press in the ongoing fight between the Left and the Trump administration’s efforts to streamline our bloated Federal government, bring its spending into line with necessarily lowered income tax rates, and revamp our failed immigration behaviors.

Trump Floods Supreme Court With Appeals to Push Through Agenda
A cascade of Trump administration cases is flooding the Supreme Court, putting the justices on the spot over the administration’s aggressive moves to eliminate federal programs, abolish independent agencies, and recast immigration law without congressional approval.

No. Without the Left weaponizing all of our courts with their lawsuits over every step the Trump administration takes, there would be nothing to appeal to the Supreme Court, emergency or otherwise. This Leftist obstructionism is borne solely of their disdain for, if not hatred of, all things Trump, Republican, or Conservative.

Nor is President Donald Trump (R) seeking to bypass Congress with any of his moves. He and his Cabinet Secretaries understand full well that his moves alone cannot be expected to last past the next election of a Progressive-Democrat President. He and his know full well that Congress needs to statutorily codify his moves in order for them to have any durability.

Trump also knows full well that continuing to wait through Congress’ stately political pace will mean nothing continues to get done in any of those milieus and that waiting through the court system’s drawn out judicial deliberation, suit, countersuit ad nauseum will mean not very much will get done.

The businessman simply is moving at the pace of business rather than at the dither pace of politics and judges. That’s to the good of our nation, no matter the gnashing of the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party obstructors.

Yet Another Thought

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President Donald Trump’s (R) moves against regulations regarding our showerheads, dishwashers, stoves and ranges, and other household appliances has triggered a thought in me regarding regulation and Congressional delegation.

As we all know, Congress has delegated rule-making to the Executive Branch agencies and Departments, and many of us think Congress has over-delegated. Congressmen have shown themselves loath to wholesale claw back that delegation and write their own regulations to give concrete effect to Congress’ statutes. Here’s an easier move Congress could make regarding that delegation and rule-making.

Let the agencies and Departments conduct their rule-making in the current way, with the requirement for a comment period, the regulators required to take seriously the public’s comments during that period, and the writing of the “final” rule. The added steps are these, and they are few:

1. The agency/Department is barred from implementing the rule at any time in draft form, including via “guidance” letter, before it takes formal, legal effect
2. When the agency/Department has finalized its rule, it must submit the rule to Congress for approval
3. Each house of Congress must approve the rule via floor debate and majority vote—this is the step that gives the rule legal effect, not agency/Department finalization
4. Each house of Congress must approve the rule within 10 calendar days of its submittal to Congress
5. If both houses do not approve the rule within 10 calendar days, the rule is deemed disapproved, and it cannot take effect
6. If the rule is disapproved, whether by overt disapproval or by failure to approve within 10 days, the rule and no rule similar to it can be brought up again for six years

That last rule is especially important: it allows for the possibility of a complete turnover of the House of Representatives three times, it allows for the possibility of a complete turnover of the Senate, and it allows for the possibility of a complete turnover of the White House and, by extension, of the leadership of those agencies and Departments.

NB: I posted the gist of this to DOGE’s Regulations.gov, which is DOGE’s call for, and Web site for receiving, suggestions for rule changes and rescission by us ordinary Americans.

Because when I got to the head of the line, they were all out of humility, so I made up for it with an extra helping of hubris.

A Simple Enough Solution

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Even if it isn’t necessarily politically easy to implement. But the political impediment is merely a lack of political courage in the same politicians who natter on about how expensive and abused is the system in question. I’m writing here about our nation’s Medicaid system.

Medicaid is broken, and Republicans in Washington and in state capitals have an opportunity to fix it. President Trump has pledged to protect the program, in part by cutting waste, fraud and abuse. The House budget target would reduce the growth of federal Medicaid payments over the next decade from $2 trillion to $1.2 trillion. That is a good start. Medicaid wastes enormous amounts of taxpayer money as states use it to reward politically powerful healthcare providers.

Instead of making this sort of namby-pamby tweaks around the edges, and masquerading putative reductions in growth as cuts, the simple enough solution is this.

Take the Medicaid-centered Federal transfers to each State in the current year as the baseline, and convert that amount to a block grant with no strings attached, other than the State must spend the block money on its Medicaid program. Then, each subsequent year transfer the Medicaid block grant, similarly without strings, reduced further each year by 10% of that baseline amount. In a short few years (I’ll leave the third grade arithmetic to the reader, rather than insult his intelligence), the block grants will reach $0.00, and the Federal government will, quite properly, be out of this aspect of the State’s business.

Notice that this solution also does not touch the heart of our nation’s Medicaid system, which is each State’s responsibility. On the contrary, it moves the system entirely into the States’ individual purviews, giving each State complete control over its own Medicaid program, free of Federal touching.

Not an Excuse

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FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has his lawyers in court asking the judge to delay an ongoing and longstanding suit against Amazon. The excuse is this:

Our resource constraints are severe[.]

Oh, wah. The convenience of the government is no excuse for this—or any—delay. Our Constitution requires a speedy and public trial, and that extends to civil trials, also, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, as this one surely does. There is nothing in either of those two Amendments, or anywhere else in our Constitution, that caveats any of our rights on what any Government personage decides is convenient to himself.

The FTC’s attempt is just another cynical attempt to drag out an intrinsically lousy suit in the hope that Amazon eventually will roll over and “settle.”

No. Amazon should refuse any sort of settlement other than a court declaratory ruling in Amazon’s favor, with legal and reputational damages awarded Amazon. In an ideal world, the judge either would so rule, or he would dismiss the case with prejudice (with costs awarded) and heavily fiscally sanction the FTC’s lawyers for seeking to extend so blatantly obvious a frivolous suit.

Another Target for Reduction

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DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is, as ex-AG Eric Holder (D) once bragged, Justice’s “Crown Jewel.”

But that’s only because it’s populated with far-Left lawyers who grew up in the ACLU’s extremist creche. Indeed, as Hans von Spakovsky noted from his time in the division,

Nearly all the career lawyers come from liberal advocacy groups, and all carry in the mindset: “I can do exactly what I was doing for the ACLU, only now with the power of government behind me.”

The division is infamous for its resistance to authority other than its own, which it coalesced out of the æther:

…resistance to direction, even direct orders. Career attorneys refuse to work on cases with which they disagree. Others mulishly take part with the goal of misleading superiors on legal questions or sabotaging cases. Lawyers send letters, make threats or initiate proceedings without sign-off from leadership.

These are bureaucrats who’ve self-selected for RIF as part of the initial round of reduction in personnel. Following that initial culling, the division would benefit, and so would DoJ and more broadly us average American citizens, from a much broader and deeper RIF of personnel and concomitant elimination of all of those job slots.

Here’s hoping Harmeet Dhillon is confirmed and she gets the backing she needs. That reduction in personnel job slots is the first step in quelling the naked revolt in the division and bringing it back under control.