Category Archives: regulation

Speaking of Proud Records…

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.

Mark Zuckerberg Against our 1st and 2nd Amendments

Posted on by
Reply

Mark Zuckerberg, who owns controlling shares of Meta, has instructed his Facebook and Instagram packages to censor posts of athletes participating in sporting events that involve firearms.

McKenna Geer competes for Team USA at the Paralympic Games in air rifle competitions. She posted an image of the air rifle she uses on her Instagram feed. Conner Prince competes in shotgun events for Team USA. He posts about his competitions and the equipment he uses in them. The US Military Academy has its West Point Rifle Team that competes in various events. The team similarly posts about their competitions and equipment.

Zuckerberg has censored them all, even completely “unpublishing” the West Point Rifle Team’s Facebook page. He did this because each of them violated, he claims, in some nebulous way his “Community Standards.”

Never mind that these athletes and organizations, in addition to competing, share with fellow competitors a variety of tips about how to do better and emphasize to their larger public—until Zuckerberg cut each of them off from their larger public—the necessity for firearm safety and the techniques for achieving firearm safety.

This isn’t Zuckerberg expressing his opinions regarding speech and firearms. This is the Progressive social media pusher moving to dictate to us average Americans what he will permit us to say and do under our unalienable, and constitutionally acknowledged, rights. His unamerican behavior is a prime example of why social media’s Section 230 protection needs major modification so entities that are in the public square—which Zuckerberg said early on was his goal—and engage in such censorship can be haled into court.

Trump’s Education Plan

Posted on by
Reply

Former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has released a 12-point plan (actually, 8 points, the last of which has 4 sub-points) for revamping and improving our nation’s public education system. He deserves large credit for laying out a specific plan. No one in the Progressive-Democratic Party has been willing to do anything of this specificity, especially including Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, other than tightly hewing to the teachers union line and denigrating voucher and charter schools.

For all that, much of Trump’s plan will be difficult to achieve. The dozen points, together with my august comments (in italics), are listed below.

  • Cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. These, especially CRT, will be hard to enforce, beyond getting rid of public verbiage on Web sites. Florida provides a good example of how to do this. That’s at the State level, though. South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which this can be implemented at the Federal level. That ruling held that while Federal funds could be preferentially withheld, they could not be withheld to a coercive extent.
  • Direct the Departments of Justice and Education to open Civil Rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination, including discrimination against Asian Americans. There need to be sanctions identified, also, though.
  • Because the Marxism being taught in schools is aggressively hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. Better would be to enforce teaching Judeo-Christian material alongside.
  • Find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and get Congress to reaffirm the president’s ability to remove recalcitrant employees from the job. The former will be hard to define. The latter needs to be done wholly separately, and Executive Branch-wide, not just in DoEd.
  • Veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. And teach civics far more than in just a single 8th grade semester.
  • Keep men out of women’s sports. In parallel, make a Title IX case, or amend Title IX, to require separate athletic programs for transgender athletes in the same manner that Title IX mandates for men and women sports programs.
  • Create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them. The new credentialing body also needs to emphasize subject matter expertise, not merely “teach how to teach.”
  • Implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts that make the following historic reforms in education: These are local control matters; see my remark above for how South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which “funding preferences” can be implemented. Reward funding, though, will be easier to implement than coercive defunding.
    • Abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12 and adopt Merit Pay.
    • Drastically cut number of school administrators, including the “DEI” bureaucracy.
    • Adopt a Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice.
    • Implement the direct election of school principals by the parents, as the ultimate form of local control.

On the whole, this is a plan worth pursuing with all speed.

Dictating the Terms of Business

Posted on by
Reply

The Progressive-Democratic Party is at it again, trying to dictate how private businesses in our, so far, substantially free market economy will be permitted to operate. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden intends to dictate to landlords:

Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: if you raise rents more than 5%, you should lose valuable tax breaks.

This isn’t just the big landlords, either, bad as that would be by itself. Biden’s proposed cap would apply to half the rental market in the country.

We’ve known this for a while. Here’s then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeting:

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.

He’s talked about fundamentally transforming our economy in his State of the Union addresses, also.

A Couple of Supreme Court Rulings

Posted on by
1

The Supreme Court announced its ruling in a case centered on Chevron Defense, and rescinded that precedent [citations omitted].

The only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” is for the Court to leave Chevron behind.

And

Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency acts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

The Court also announced its ruling, a couple of days prior, in SEC v Jarkesy that the SEC—government regulatory agencies in general—seeking monetary punishments must do so through an Article III court and a jury trial. As summarized in The Wall Street Journal,

The Court’s decision means most complaints by agencies seeking penalties will have to be charged in federal courts, where defendants enjoy more procedural rights including to legal discovery. Agencies also won’t benefit from a home-court advantage. They win nearly every case in their own tribunals, as you might expect.

And, especially decisively, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court wrote

A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator. Rather than recognize that right, the dissent would permit Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch. That is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands. Jarkesy and Patriot28 are entitled to a jury trial in an Article III court.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion that expanded on the CJ’s ruling and strengthened it IMNSHO [citation omitted].

The Seventh Amendments jury-trial right does not work alone. It operates together with Article III and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to limit how the government may go about depriving an individual of life, liberty, or property. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to trial by jury. Article III entitles individuals to an independent judge who will preside over that trial. And due process promises any trial will be held in accord with time-honored principles. Taken together, all three provisions vindicate the Constitution’s promise of a “fair trial in a fair tribunal.”

I put these two rulings together in this article because I see considerable synergy between them. No longer are our courts expected to defer to the judgment of Executive Branch regulators.

That means that even—especially—in both criminal and civil trial courts, after Jarkesy now the courts of first recourse for regulators seeking punishments, the judgment of regulators can be only that—judgment/opinion—and regulators’ judgments can carry no more weight than those of any other expert witness either party to the case might call to the stand—and they are just as vulnerable to showings that the expert isn’t all that.

Especially important, regulators must make their case in front of a jury of their accused’s peers.

That’s good for American liberty.