Was Brexit a Failure?

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The Tories, who took the United Kingdom out of the European Union (saving the nation’s sovereignty, I say), now are going to get tossed out of the UK government, likely to be limited to a few ignominiously back bench seats in Parliament. And they’ll deserve it.

Some excuse their failure, attributing it to the onset of the Wuhan Virus Situation shortly after the Brits had gone out from the EU. That’s a coward’s excuse-making copout, though.

The Tories didn’t only make missteps, they were determinedly incompetent, and many government officials (vis., Mark Carney, the then-Governor of the Bank of England, the British Central Bank) acted solely out of their own hubris and/or for their personal political gain.

Energy lies at the heart of any nation’s economy, and cheap energy directly facilitates a healthy, burgeoning economy. As soon as the UK had (re)gained its sovereignty, the Tories abjectly surrendered to the British Climate Funding Industry and heavily increased restrictions on regulation of British fossil fuel production in favor of expensive (not only to the government, but to the British subjects, also) and unreliable “green” energy.

The Tories, having just regained the nation’s sovereignty, “negotiated” with the EU over where the UK’s internal boundaries should be drawn. This is the Northern Ireland customs border fiasco.

The then-Prime Minister Theresa May moved to institute a broad-scale tax rate reduction program which would have left millions more pounds in the hands of the UK’s private citizens and their businesses, which would have fostered a more active private economy—and more revenues on net flowing into government back pockets. But in her own display of incompetence, May chose simply to try to ram the cuts through Parliament with no serious effort to explain the benefits to anyone—not her Party members in Parliament, not to the public at large. And she chose not to put forward a serious spending plan that would live within the new tax rates.

The plan also was deliberately sabotaged by the self-important, personal gain-seeking Carney who used his office as BoE Governor to manipulate the Bank’s interest rates so as to counter and destroy the beneficial effects of those tax rate cuts.

The Tories have failed (a failure so complete I almost have to conclude it was a conscious decision by otherwise highly talented politicians (or so they claim about themselves)) to decisively address the influx of illegal aliens into their nation. Illegal aliens still flood in, absorbing national resources and jobs that otherwise would have gone to British subjects and legal residents.

Brexit was no failure; it was an excellent chance for the UK to revive itself as a serious player on the world stage. The failure was entirely that of the Tory Party and of some officious officials. Brexit still can work to the benefit of the nation. The people just need to elect responsible and competent representatives.

The coming (snap) elections will tell the tale.

A Couple of Supreme Court Rulings

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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.

A Woke…or Something…State Judge

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A Montana State district judge, Shane Vannatta, is having trouble with reality. He has ruled a law, AN ACT GENERALLY REVISING THE LAWS TO PROVIDE A COMMON DEFINITION FOR THE WORD “SEX” WHEN REFERRING TO A HUMAN unconstitutional because

the bill’s title did not adequately explain whether the word “sex” referred to gender or sexual intercourse and that it did not indicate the words “male” and “female” would be defined in the body of the bill.

Never mind that bill titles typically do not themselves include glossaries or references to glossaries. His plaint that “sex” was unclear in its intended subject in the present title is simply disingenuous since the title explicitly states “when referring to a human”—and does not suggest, even by tenuous innuendo, “when referring to human sex practices.”

Never mind, either that the law’s first paragraph and that paragraph’s first two subparagraphs provide precisely the definitions of interest:

Section 1. Section 1-1-201, MCA, is amended to read:
“1-1-201. Terms of wide applicability. (1) Unless the context requires otherwise, the following definitions apply in the Montana Code Annotated:
(a) “Female” means a member of the human species who, under normal development, has XX chromosomes and produces or would produce relatively large, relatively immobile gametes, or eggs, during her life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of those gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this definition, but for a biological or genetic condition, is female.
(b) “Male” means a member of the human species who, under normal development, has XY chromosomes and produces or would produce small, mobile gametes, or sperm, during his life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of those gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this definition, but for a biological or genetic condition, is male.

Apparently, Vannatta’s law school training didn’t include a literacy test, nor did it train him in extending his attention span. For the good of the State, especially for the good of Montana’s citizens, he needs to be removed from the bench until he corrects those deficiencies.

Those Dumb Average Americans

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A poll run by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government indicates that former President Donald Trump (R) is preferred over Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden to handle “threats to democracy” by a 44% to 33% margin in poll respondents. Two things make that an important preference. One is that the poll also asked how important “threats to democracy” was to poll respondents, and a little more than half said it was “extremely important” to their vote.

The other was that the poll was conducted throughout six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Left has their usual answer to that poll, articulated this time by GMU’s Justin Gest, Professor of Policy and Government:

Many Americans don’t recognize Biden’s custodianship of our democracy, which is a bad sign for his campaign[.]

Those dumb, ignorant average Americans—you just can’t take ’em to raise.

Economic Travails

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This time those of the People’s Republic of China’s economy. In a Wall Street Journal editorial in which the editors, correctly, deprecate the idea that the continuing slow devaluing of the yuan is necessarily something about which to worry. Neither the falling yuan relative to the US dollar, nor the parallel weakening vs the dollar of Japan’s yen, the Republic of Korea’s won, Malaysia’s ringgit, and a number of others across Asia reflect anything other than the strength—more accurately, the lesser weakness—of our economy compared to those nations’.

Then the editors dropped this mistake:

No one can say whether an economic crisis is imminent in China, but no one should want one.

The first part is true; the mistake is in the second. Absolutely we, the rest of Asia—particularly the Republic of China and the nations rimming the South China Sea—should want one, as well as Europe and the United States. The PRC’s increasing aggressiveness and threats against those Asian nations, and its support for Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine and the threat that represents for the rest of Europe, and its economic support for a nuclear Iran and the threat that represents to the existence of Israel and the threat of Iran-nuclear armed terrorist attacks on Europe and the US—these are possible only with a strong economy with which to fund the PRC’s militarism, its supplies of military materiel to Russia, and its purchases, even at slight discount, of Russian and Iranian oil, thereby funding those nations’ misbehaviors.

An economic crisis in the PRC or, especially hopefully, a prolonged economic meltdown would be economically disruptive for the world at large in the short run, but it would be a very good event in the medium- and long term for the security, and economies, of non-PRC Asia, Europe, and the US.