Tag Archives: freedom

Dictating the Terms of Business

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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

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The Supreme Court announced its ruling in a case centered on Chevron Defense, and rescinded that precedent [citations omitted].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

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.

How Many?

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The FBI says it has identified a characteristic common to sites of active shooter shootings.

…open spaces—which include roads, neighborhoods, parks, and outdoor venues—are the places where victims are most likely to be targeted.

There’s one other characteristic, not fully addressed in the FBI’s report, that’s well worth consideration. How many of those locations were defenseless, whether because laws barred firearms from the areas or because the relevant business owner—mall owner or theater owner, for instance—lawfully posted his locale as barring firearms? The report did address this, but only tangentially, with this single remark, captioning a single chart:

Of the 48 incidents in 2023, four involved civilian intervention where a civilian intervened or attempted to intervene, resulting in two civilian casualties.

Across all 48 of the 2023 active shooter events, there were 105 killed, and 139 injured. Subtract off the two casualties where civilians responded in the time frame before the cops could arrive—naively allocating the two to one death and one injury—and that works out to an average of 2-3 deaths per defenseless event and 3-4 injuries per defenseless event.

Clearly armed patrons already on scene reduced the casualty rate by filling the gap between the onset of the event and the arrival of the second first responders. But the wannabe gun controllers would rather sacrifice the Left’s “if it saves one life” mantra in favor of their obsession with disarming all of us.

 

The FBI’s report can be read here.

The Draft

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A correspondent to The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday’s Letters wrote of the consequences of ending the military draft and of the need for reinstating it.

He’s spot on, including his call for keeping exemptions to a bare minimum.

If we are to reinstate the draft, exemptions must be few and confined to medical reasons. American youth deserve fairness if they are to respond to the call of freedom.

I agree with reinstating the draft, but I would add two opportunities for delay by one drafted.

College/trade school students who are drafted should be allowed an opportunity to finish their degrees/certifications before heading to boot camp. That opportunity, though, should come with its own limit. College degrees take four, or at most five years, and trade school programs take two, or at most three years. A drafted student’s delay clock should start from the first year of his time in school, and the delay should expire at the end of those four/five years or two/three years, whether he’s finished his program or not.

Graduate students would have no such delay; they should be required to report on the specified date.

The other delay—which could convert to an exemption—should apply to those enrolled in ROTC programs. When I went through USAF ROTC some while ago, the program proceeded in two phases. The first was a General Military Course, which lasted for two years, and at the conclusion conferred no obligation to enlist. Any student could enroll in the GMC. The second phase, the Professional Officer Course, was open only to those who had completed the GMC (the requirement could be waived, but that was only rarely done), and enrolling in the POC involved formally enlisting in the Air Force as an NCO. Cadets could resign from the POC at any time, but they were then expected to report for duty at their NCO rank (a requirement that, in the realization, wasn’t always enforced.)

A draft/delay exemption would apply to ROTC enrollees in this way. Their draft delays would date from their enrollment in the GMC. Resigning from the GMC, or declining to subsequently enroll in the POC would require the draft-delayed student to report to boot camp on the next available date. Students who resign from the POC would be required—with no exceptions—to report for duty at their NCO rank. A cadet who completes the ROTC program and is commissioned would see his draft status OBE.