Category Archives: regulation

Some Lipstick for the Pig

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Here’s some of what’s in the Build Back Reduced bill—formally styled Inflation Reduction Act—that Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) agreed, which Manchin euphemizes as an all-in energy policy:

[T]he Interior Department would be required to offer up at least two million acres of federal land and 60 million acres of offshore acreage to oil and gas producers every year for the next decade. If Interior officials fall short, they wouldn’t be able to advance some permitting aspects of the wind and solar projects on federal land.

Offer up. But at what price? And for what duration before the leases expire? Look for the Biden administration to use lease pricing to actively discourage producers from buying leases, to slow walk the subsequent permit applications that would enable the leases to be acted on, and to use the failure to get the permits on time as excuses to terminate the leases/allow them to expire.

Hostage Taking

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Recall that the President Joe Biden (D) administration, some months ago, said it would

withhold food assistance funding from schools unless they comply with the administration’s guidance on a range of LGBT issues.

After these months of trying to get the administration to retract that threat—after all, in Dole v South Dakota, the Supreme Court said the Federal government could use funding to influence, but not to coerce, State compliance—22 Republican AGs have filed suit to try to force the administration to retract its threat. Notice, too, that no Progressive-Democratic Party AGs are party to the suit.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has the right of it:

[T]hey’ve [the Biden administration] reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.

It truly is disgusting that this Progressive-Democrat Biden administration would use children as hostages in its attempt to coerce K-12 schools into accepting Party’s extremist position.

More Gun Control Distortion

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Delaware, President Joe Biden’s (D) adopted home State, has a new gun law [emphasis added].

Under the bill, known as the Delaware Lethal Firearms Safety Act of 2022, the manufacturing, sales, offer to sell, transfer, purchase, receipt, possession, and transport of assault weapons, aside from those lawfully possessed or purchased before the bill became law, is prohibited.
The law classifies weapons that feature a high rate of fire and capacity for firepower used in a sports, or recreational, form is outweighed by “the danger that is can be used to kill and injure human beings” and are restricted on the possession and use of those weapons. However, the bill states that it is not the intent of the Legislature to place restrictions on those weapons designed for hunting, target practice, or other legitimate sports or recreational activity.

This is Progressive-Democrats presuming to dictate to the good citizens of Delaware those Government-approved purposes for which they will be permitted to keep and bear Arms, even though no such authority exists in the 2nd Amendment or anywhere else in our Constitution.

There’s this, too, in that bill:

The law also provides that anyone currently owning, or possessing, those weapons are encouraged to receive a certificate of ownership from the state’s Department of Homeland Security[.]

Encouraged. Sure. There’s no reason for this, either, given the unconstitutionality of the law (which obviates any need to prove grandfathered ownership) other than so that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, who continue to decline to identify their limiting principle, can know who has weapons for future confiscation.

This is yet another example of the lawlessness of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Lawlessness

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Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is busily mandating prevailing-wage requirements for contracts let by the State’s government. Never mind that she’s defying the will of the legislature—and in the present case, the will of the citizens of Michigan—in doing so.

…a citizen initiative under the Michigan Constitution. We collected tens of thousands of signatures, sending the issue straight to the Legislature. Lawmakers overwhelmingly stood with taxpayers, bypassing the governor [then-Governor Rick Snyder (R)] and ending prevailing wage for the whole state.

It hardly matters, though, since Progressive-Democratic Party politicians like Whitmer think petty laws don’t apply to their august selves.

Jimmy Greene, Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan President, who spearheaded that citizen initiative, isn’t done, though, and neither are the good citizens of Michigan.

So with the help of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, we’ve filed a lawsuit asking state courts to throw out the prevailing wage.

The fight still won’t be done, though. The suit is a necessary step, but even with a victory in the courts, there’s no reason to believe Whitmer’s bureaucrats won’t tacitly enforce the union wage business simply by which companies they select for contract award and the weasel-worded pseudo-rationales those bureaucrats provide.

It’s necessary to take the next couple of steps, also: vote the Progressive-Democrats out of office en masse in Michigan, and then the newly installed Executive Branch politicians will need to follow through and fire the bureaucrats, also en masse.

Another CFPB Overreach

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Now it’s preparing to force banks to make whole those their customers who are conned by money-transfer service scams, regardless of whether the bank had anything to do with the scam.

Bank customers no longer should be responsible for their own decisions, even their foolish ones. We average Americans, holds the CFPB and its MFWIC, Rohit Chopra, are just too grindingly stupid to be responsible for ourselves.

Currently, banks must repay customers for charges they did not authorize. Chopra and his CFPB want banks, in addition, to have to refund these third-party transfers, done on the banks’ systems, if the customer authorizes the transaction and later changes his mind and cries foul. Customers are no longer expected to do their own due diligence regarding their money. That’s too much responsibility, you see.

This is one more reason this creature of Elizabeth Warren, this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, needs to be disbanded, the law creating it wholly rescinded, and metaphorical salt poured on the pages of the Code of Laws of the United States of America, our USC, and the child pages in our Code of Federal Regulations, our CFR, that contained it.