Tag Archives: government

Not the Government’s Job

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DHS wants the Supreme Court to let its agents cut the razor wire barrier Texas has erected along sections of Texas’ border with Mexico, a barrier raised in order to slow the flow of illegal aliens into Texas, and a barrier necessitated by the Biden’s decision to not defend our southern border and to not enforce existing immigration laws. A core part of DHS’ rationalization for eliminating that barrier is this:

Homeland Security says the wire can leave migrants stranded in the river, risking injury.

The razor wire does no such thing. What leaves the illegal aliens stranded in the river is their decision to try to come into our nation illegally, to break our laws as their first act on entry.

It’s not our government’s job—at any level—to protect illegal aliens from the consequences of their own decisions. It is our government’s job—at any level—to protect our nation from illegal aliens’ entry.

Full stop.

NACs and the Takings Clause

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The SEC is looking at allowing a new class of enterprises, Natural Asset Companies, to be listed on the NYSE. NACs are companies that would raise capital via the Exchange and ultimately purchase land to prevent its use for natural resource extraction. That is, their sole purpose would be not to make money for their owners, vis., by developing that land or any minerals or other wealth in/below that land, but rather by simply sequestering the land and sitting on it, preventing any wealth creation from it.

In response to a broad-based hue and cry, the SEC has reopened and extended the comment period for this proposed action, but the fact remains, the agency is seriously considering such an action. Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks is one of a number of State officials from 21 different States who protested the rule and forced the reopening of the comment period, and who object generally to the rule and its underlying concept altogether. His take on this SEC foolishness:

The proposed creation of Natural Asset Companies is one of the greatest threats to rural communities in the history of our country. Under the proposal, private interests, including foreign-controlled sovereign wealth funds, could use their capital to purchase or manage farmland, national and state parks, and other mineral-rich areas and stop essential economic activities like farming, grazing, and energy extraction. Recreating on Utah’s incredible natural lands could also face significant curtailment.

Marlo could speak only for Utah in the particular examples, but the situation is the same in all 21 States, and in the other 29 States and the several territories of our nation.

However, this might be a venue in which the Left’s views of private property, given concreteness in the Supreme Court’s badly misguided decisions in Berman v Parker, Hawaii Housing Authority v Midkiff, and Kelo v City of New London could come back to bite them. In Kelo, especially, the Court ruled that it was perfectly jake for private property, a widow’s home, to be seized by the city of New London, CT, and turned over to a private enterprise, a mall developer, for his benefit, and further that such seizures need not be limited to public use: the developer wanted to build another mall, a private use, on land that included the widow’s home.

Were the SEC to follow through, and its rule to stand, then it could be that suitably situated State governments could then seize the NACs’ land holdings and turn them over to State agencies for public use, per the original text and meaning of our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause, or, per Kelo, to private enterprises for private exploitations of the lands.

Here’s that Takings Clause:

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

 

Berman, Midkiff, and Kelo can be read here, here, and here, respectively.

Eric Adams Has Given Away the Left’s Game

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New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams says he’s down with raising New Yorker’s already sky high taxes along with firing city employees, including cops—[Asked “where the layoffs would begin,” Adams only repeated, “Everything’s on the table”]—and he’s blaming the Federal government for his budget failures. His statement on that last is the tell-all:

Our insurance policy was the federal government. They’re not paying us[.]

It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Impeaching Mayorkas

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House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R, TN) is bent on impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his palpable, and dangerous, failure to perform. This is, at best, a fool’s errand since the votes don’t exist in the Senate to get even a serious trial, much less a conviction.

I have a better idea, because of course I do.

Instead of wasting time on impeaching Mayorkas, Green, and the House at large, should exercise the House’s Constitutional control over government spending and move to cancel all funding for much of the Department of Homeland Security until Mayorkas and his Deputy and Assistant Secretaries are gone and the Department has materially improved its performance related to keeping illegal aliens from entering our nation.

Specific DHS agencies that should receive full, if not increased, funding include these:

  • United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • United States Coast Guard
  • US Customs and Border Protection
  • Federal Emergency Management Agency
  • US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
  • United States Secret Service
  • Transportation Security Administration
  • Office of the Inspector General

All the other agencies—and there are 16 more of them, including such strongly overlapping agencies as the Management Directorate, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Partnership and Engagement, and the Office of Public Affairs (there’s a hint there regarding how bloated the Department has become)—should have their funding zeroed out.

Further, the House should refuse to pass any DHS-related bill that does not include these funding reductions.

Talking a Good Game

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Javier Milei, the newly elected Argentine President, is, indeed, talking a good game. It’ll be well worth watching to see if he can deliver—and he has many large obstacles in his way, including (this is far from an exhaustive list) opposition to his wish to get rid of the nation’s central bank (and the economic pitfalls associated with it, both near term as Argentina’s economy adjusts, and longer term with currency controls devolved to the provincial banks or to individual banks (some of which may already be too big to control without stern measures aimed at them in particular)), opposition parties bent on restoring/maintaining their own political power, general resistance—both political and popular—to any change of such magnitude, and his own political inexperience and naivete.

With that rambling lede, here’s an excerpt, via RealClear Politics, from an interview that that Milei had with Argentine TV host Alejandro Fantino just before Thanksgiving:

We aren’t above the ones we represent. In financial terms, “The derivative is never worth more than the underlying asset.” The derivative exists because the underlying asset exists. We exist as representatives of the people because the people exist. It is madness, it is delusional, to think that a representative of the people is above the people he represents themselves. It is a delusion in which the political caste exists.

The full hour-and-a-quarter interview, in Spanish, can be seen at the link at the bottom of the linked-to article. That YouTube link also is this.