Category Archives: regulation

Another Example of Federal Government Run Amok

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This time it’s by President Joe Biden’s (D) infamous medical wonder, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, in his attack on those evil Catholics. This attack is on Oklahoma’s Saint Francis Health System. The hospital system maintains, in the chapel of its Saint Francis Hospital South, a candle representing the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

That’s no good, insists Becerra, who had—or has tacitly allowed—his Department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use the Joint Commission (nominally an independent accrediting organization which CMS uses for Medicaid and Medicare certification) to manufacture a fire hazard (!) from the candle.

Lose the symbol of Christ or lose Federal certification and funding for Medicaid and Medicare is the threat from the Feds.

Fire hazard: this is the candle and its danger, located as it is in the hospital’s chapel:Here is Becerra’s statement, carefully done through a spokesperson, instead of being made by Doctor of Ersatz Becerra himself:

[T]he department “is aware of a safety finding involving a fire risk, made by an independent accrediting organization, issued to a hospital in Oklahoma.”

Apparently, all those flammables are too close to the glass and brass-enclosed flame. Apparently, too, the flame of Christ burns so brightly in Catholics that the candle’s flame might burn through all that glass and brass, leap that distance, and ignite the furniture. Or something.

This is yet another campaign in the Biden administration’s war on religion.

Update: The Biden administration has–for now–decided not to pursue the Saint Francis Health System over the candle in the System’s Saint Francis Hospital South.

After the hospital threatened legal action through The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the government reversed course on what seemed to be the latest development in a pattern of aggressive regulatory and criminal enforcement actions by the Biden administration against the Catholic Church.

Child Abuse

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The Oregon House of Representatives, dominated as it is by the Progressive-Democratic Party, has moved to legalize child mutilation and sex abuse. Oregon House Bill 2002 B, passed strictly partisanly (the vote was 36-23),

would allow minors younger than 15 to obtain an abortion without parental consent. Doctors would not be compelled to disclose this information to parents unless receiving express written permission from the child.
The legislation would expand taxpayer money to fund gender reassignment surgery—including sterilization for children as young as 15—without their parent’s consent.

This governmental abuse of parents’ children is another path along the Progressive-Democratic Party’s plan to fundamentally transform America,

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
—Barack Obama, October 30, 2008
We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.
—Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

and to fundamentally change things—our economy, certainly, as President Joe Biden (D) only recently asserted but also the relationship between children and their parents and between children and the State.

A Better Solution

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) is reintroducing his energy project permitting reform bill in the Senate. He also re-cited the need for reform in his remarks introducing the bill.

In the United States, it often takes between five and ten years—sometimes longer—to get critical energy infrastructure projects approved, putting us years behind allies like Canada, Australia, and more recently the EU, who each have policies designed to complete permitting in three years or less[.]

Even though fixing this would help allegedly green energy projects, also, Manchin’s cronies in the Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate have been happy to sacrifice that in favor of letting those interminable delays kill so many domestic cheap hydrocarbon-based energy projects. It’ll be an up-the-cliff battle to get anything like this passed in the Party-dominated Senate.

Among the useful things in Manchin’s bill, though, is this:

The Building American Energy Security Act would establish maximum timelines for permitting reviews including a two-year process for major projects and a one-year process for smaller projects. It would provide legal avenues for project developers to take against the federal government if a permitting review is delayed beyond set timelines and would mandate a single inter-agency environmental review.

That’s good as far as it goes, but here’s a better enforcement mechanism, IMNSHO: the permits should be will-issue, and if no decision is reached by those deadlines, the project should be deemed fully permitted, with no further review and no appeal of the permit. Rejections must be public, specific, and detailed, and they can be appealed directly to Federal courts: the Energy and Interior Departments, EPA, any other government entity can appear only as defendants in an appeal; no appeal of a permit grant should be allowed.

A further criterion and an additional deadline: if any of the rejection criteria are not met, the project should be deemed fully permitted, with no further appeal. The rejecting authority should have gotten it right the first time.

If the initial court does not reach a final decision within six months, the project must be deemed fully permitted. Appeals must be finally resolved within three months of the appeal filing (which itself must occur, fully developed, within one week of the lower court’s ruling, or the opportunity to appeal must be forfeit), or the project must be deemed fully permitted. And: only one appeal of a permit grant must be allowed at each court level; naysayers cannot be allowed to drag things out with serial appeals.

Those last put a premium on the Federal courts moving cases apace, but it puts a bigger premium on the lawyers to prepare and move their cases without delays—and eliminates the deliberate stalls represented by cynical serial appeals.

A Step in the Right Direction

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But it’s a small step, and much more needs to be done. A bill has moved through the Texas legislature—it’s now on Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) desk—that would create a $200 annual registration fee for battery vehicles.

State Senator Robert Nichols (R), who sponsored the bill in the Senate:

As more of these vehicles drive on Texas roads, there are concerns about how they contribute to the funding of the roads which they use. Currently, Texas uses the gasoline/diesel fuel tax to fund transportation projects; however, with the growing use of EVs, the revenue from the fuel tax is decreasing, which diminishes our ability to fund road improvements for all drivers.

That’s a necessary step in maintaining funding for Texas’ roads and bridges, but it’s insufficient because wear and tear of our roads and bridges isn’t the only cost imposed on us by battery vehicles.

Battery vehicle owners also should be the only ones to pay for the environmental damage their vehicles inflict on Texas’ land. Battery vehicle batteries, at their end of life, cannot be recycled; they can only be “disposed of.” Major components of those batteries, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel are enormously toxic, requiring the dead batteries to be carefully disposed of, lest that environmental damage get widespread.

Serious environmental damage also occurs at the beginning of the battery production cycle, even if much of that start damage doesn’t occur in Texas: mining lithium, cobalt, and nickel, along with copper, is even more environmentally damaging than battery disposal, from the destruction caused by the mining itself to the highly toxic mining waste byproducts—tailings—that are thrown off by the mining.

Much, if not most, of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel mining, along with a significant fraction of the increase in copper mining, is done for the sake of these batteries. The only ones who should be paying these environmental costs are the battery car owners. No one else.

Battery car owners are getting off light under this fee.

Permit to Buy

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The Delaware legislature is trying again to infringe on American citizens’ right to keep and bear Arms; the Know Betters of the legislature are renewing their drive to require the State’s citizens—who, for those Progressive-Democrats not keeping up at home, also are American citizens—to get the State’s permission just to buy a firearm.

A proposal filed Wednesday in the state Senate would require prospective handgun owners to complete a state-authorized firearms training course and submit an application that would include fingerprinting and an extensive background check. If approved, Delaware’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security would issue a free 180-day permit.

A permit just to buy. The duration of this…requirement…is laid out in the proposed bill:

A handgun qualified purchaser permit is valid for a period of 180 days from the date of issuance….

I have no conceptual objection to requiring training on the firearm, so long as neither the training itself nor the cost of it, are constructed as barriers to the getting and subsequent keeping and bearing, and so long as any license (not permit to buy) is issued on a will-issue basis.

I do object to fingerprinting the prospective firearm keeper and bearer of his weapon. No government has any business keeping track of which of its citizens have weapons and which of them do not. That’s a need only with regard to criminals, and acquiring a firearm is not, by definition, a criminal act.

But beyond that, these worthies are carefully ignoring the key phrase in our Constitution’s 2nd Amendment [emphasis added]:

…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Plainly, getting Arms, including the purchase of one or more of them, is a necessary precondition to the keeping and bearing of them. Restrictions on buying a firearm—which is what a State-granted permission slip, of any duration, is—is just that infringement. No permit to buy, no matter its construction, is legitimate; such permission slips start out unconstitutional and they are incurably so throughout their existence.

 

The bill on offer can be read here.