Category Archives: rights

“America Has Too Many Rules”

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And too many laws. Jimmy Sexton, CEO of Esquire Group, is right about the rules.

More than 88,000 federal regulations were promulgated between 1995 and 2016, the most recent data I can find. The Federal Register, a compendium of each year’s new federal regulations, proposed rules and notices, totals nearly two million pages dating back to its inception in 1936. And the Code of Federal Regulations ran to 185,000 pages in 2020. In addition, state and local governments have their own laws and rules.

As he noted,

Laws should be easy to comply with and simple to enforce.

The easy compliance and enforcement isn’t only a matter of each one being short and sweet; the ease flows especially from keeping the overall number small and knowable in their aggregate.

And I’m right about too many laws, especially at the Federal level. Just on the criminal side alone, there are almost 5,200 criminal laws and roughly 300,000 regulations that can subject people to possible criminal penalties. among our statutes, even though the only crimes our Constitution actually names are treason and bribery—and the nebulous high Crimes and Misdemeanors, named in the context of impeaching the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States. Even the first enumeration of national-level crimes, the Crimes Act of 1790, passed in the 1st Congress, identified only 21 additional crimes wanting Federal-level enforcement and punishment:

  1. treason
  2. misprision of treason (deliberate concealment)
  3. willful murder occurring on federal property
  4. rescue/attempted rescue of a body following an execution
  5. misprision of felony
  6. “man-slaughter”
  7. piracy
  8. “accessory before the fact”
  9. “accessory after the fact”
  10. confederate to piracy
  11. maiming
  12. forgery/counterfeiting/falsifying federal securities or coin
  13. altering/corruption of federal records
  14. larceny
  15. receiving stolen goods
  16. perjury
  17. subornation of perjury (contracting with another to commit perjury)
  18. bribery
  19. obstruction a federal officer
  20. rescue of an inmate
  21. violation of safe conduct/passport.

The rest of criminal behaviors and their definitions are, by design, left to the police powers of each of the several States.

The only Federal criminal laws we need, then, are few: against treason and bribery, and against each of those additional 21, each of which needs to be particularly describing these crimes’ defining criteria, and especially for those 21, particularly describing the criteria that separate them from State crimes and make them Federal crimes.

And yet we have an enormous and bureaucratic Department of Justice and a broad range of Federal police forces: the FBI, the Marshals Service, the Secret Service, each Federal cabinet has its own police force, even the Congress has the Capital Police.

Misguided

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A Federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction (meaning the matter must still go through the courts before anything becomes final) barring the Federal government from communicating with social-media companies with a view to influencing what those companies post or allow to be posted on their sites.

Some on the Left are objecting.

Some legal scholars have been skeptical that…courts could intervene without chilling legitimate government speech about controversial matters of public interest.

“Some legal scholars” are cynically distorting the situation. There is nothing in the judge’s ruling that bars government speech about controversial matters of public interest. The “government”—i.e., the men and women in government—remains entirely free to speak on any matters it wishes, and in any venue it wishes. The “government,” however, may not seek to tell—or even to try to influence—private enterprises what they might post or not post, or allow or not allow to be posted, on their sites.

The government has a plethora of outlets of its own: the White House, for instance, the Senate, and the House all have their own Web sites, as do each of the several Federal Departments and agencies, and every Congressman in the Congress. And many of those Congressmen hold aperiodic town halls to talk directly with their constituents—all of them should, and those meetings should occur more frequently—but that’s the Congressmen’s choice. Nothing bars any Congressman from doing any of those direct-to-constituents conversations as often as a Congressman might wish.

Furthermore, the judge noted in his injunction that

The Court finds…that a preliminary injunction here would not prohibit government speech.

And

A government entity has the right to speak for itself and is entitled to say what it wishes and express the views it wishes to express. The Free Speech Clause restricts government regulation of private speech; it does not regulate government speech.

At bottom, and especially in light of that last—and the plethora of legitimate government outlets for its own speech—the answer to speech with which government disagrees is not to bar the speech (outside of deliberate and overt incitement to riot), but to answer it with their own speech.

The judge’s preliminary injunction ruling can be read here.

“I Don’t Understand”

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Andy Kessler’s op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal centers on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, Kessler’s putzing around with a variety of firearms at a Nevada firing range, and his assessment of the effect of Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of an individual’s right to keep and bear any of a variety of Arms on the national firearm debate.

The importance of that debate is summarized in Kessler’s statement about having an AR-15, but which he implied was about a much broader matter:

…I still don’t understand why you would want to own one.

It doesn’t matter a whit that Kessler doesn’t understand. He’s only a journalist, though, and his level of understanding also is not all that important.

Far more importantly, is the fact that it’s the individual’s right to keep and bear; us American citizens, individually or as groups, do not require a government permission slip to do so, and that makes a government man’s level of understanding of the matter irrelevant, except to the extent that man attempts to act on his level and therewith move to restrict our individual right.

The 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, along with recent Supreme Court acknowledgments, make all of this crystalline, and they make the government man’s move to act on his level of understanding unconstitutional.

Free Speech Progressive-Democrat Style

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Progressive-Democratic Party members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its subcommittees—Congressmen Frank Pallone (D, NJ), Jan Schakowsky (D, IL), Doris Matsui (D, CA), and Kathy Castor (D, FL)—are unhappy with the new free speech position of Sundar Pichai’s Google-owned YouTube. They categorically reject YouTube‘s statement that

open debate on political ideas, “even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society—especially in the midst of election season.”

They’re perfectly fine, though, with Pichai’s YouTube censoring the speech of President Joe Biden’s (D) presidential primary campaign opponent, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and leaving Biden an unanswered and unanswerable field for his own speech.

The Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it seems, want to be the sole arbiters of what speech is legitimate, and what speech must be banned. These Leftist politicians think we ordinary Americans are just too grindingly stupid to understand what we hear and how to evaluate it, and so we must not be allowed the choice. We must be led by these Leftist politicians.

This is the naked censorship toward which we can look if the Progressive-Democratic Party wins in 2024.

It’s Ours By Right, Dammit!

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No Labels is looking hard at running their own President/Vice President ticket for the 2024 election. The Progressive-Democratic Party is in fury over the possibility, to the extent that its Arizona arm is going to court to try to stop No Labels from registering its candidates in that State.

It [the Arizona chapter of the Progressive-Democratic Party] filed a lawsuit in state court against No Labels alleging that the signatures we collected and the petition approved by Arizona’s secretary of state should be thrown out.

Party’s rationale—and they’re absolutely serious:

No Labels’ presence on the ballot could “make it more difficult to elect Democratic Party candidates,” and “require [the party] to expend and divert additional funds and staff time on voter education to accomplish its mission in Arizona.”

It’s Party’s God-given right to have its members elected; they shouldn’t have to compete for voters.

I won’t be surprised when if Party files a subsequent suit to do away with Arizona elections altogether on the grounds that Party shouldn’t have to expend and divert additional funds and staff time on voter education to get its members elected. Just appoint them, and save all that time and waste.

This is what Progressive-Democratic Party one-party rule looks like.

Side note: it’s only the Progressive-Democratic Party that insists on obstructing competing candidates from even competing. Republicans similarly are concerned about what a third party would do to their own candidates’ chances, but Republicans engage only in jawboning against the third party while preparing to compete against the third party’s candidates as enthusiastically as they are against Progressive-Democratic Party candidates.