Tag Archives: regulation

A Parallel Solution

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DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona (D) wants to enact a rule that would expand Title IX (illegally, but that’s a separate problem) to require State education systems to include transgender athletes in all heretofore women’s sports programs and all on heretofore women’s sports teams. Half of the governors of our States object.

If it comes down to it, Cardona’s move is very likely to fail in the courts. That will be an expensive and time consuming enterprise.

I propose another solution to be pushed in parallel with the lawsuit effort. It also would be expensive and time consuming to put into effect, but I think it would have a more permanent, and more beneficial, outcome.

States should stop taking Federal dollars altogether into their education systems. That would put the States beyond the reach of Title IX, which applies only to those State systems that take Federal dollars.

Not taking the government’s lucre would be expensive, certainly, but only until the States’ budgets adjusted. However, the move would do more than place those States’ education systems beyond the reach of Title IX’s strings, it would free the States from a potful of Federal education strings—and demonstrate that States can get along just fine without those dollars and those strings and so encourage them to decline ever more Federal dollars and reap the increasing value of being free of those strings.

A Red Flag Law

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This one waiting to be signed by Michigan’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

A judge would have 24 hours to decide on a temporary extreme risk protection order after a request is filed. If granted, the judge would then have 14 days to set a hearing during which the flagged person would have to prove they do not pose a significant risk. A standard order would last one year.
Lying to a court when petitioning for a protection order would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine.

The law starts out being unconstitutional: the flagged person would have to prove they do not pose a significant risk. No. As with all other moves to limit an individual liberty or to circumscribe an individual right, it must be on Government to prove the “flagged person” is a risk.

Then, since the matter is claimed to be urgent, the court should be required to complete its adjudication within an additional 24 hours after having granted the temporary order.

Beyond that, the sanction for dishonestly petitioning for a red flag order must not be left to the wrist slap of a misdemeanor punishment. Falsely petitioning for a red flag order should carry a jail sentence—not reducible—of one year, the same duration of the red flag sanction if a petition is upheld.

And one item not addressed in this red flag law proposal, or in any of the others: the police department that took possession of the weapons on execution of the temporary extreme risk protection order must produce them in court, and in the event Government fails to make its case of significant risk, release them to the now no longer flagged person on the spot.

There also are no protections for the rights of other members of the “flagged person’s” household regarding their lawfully possessed weapons. Those weapons also are subject to seizure under the Michigan red flag law and other such laws. That seizure is an unconstitutional infringement of the non-flagged persons’ right to keep and bear Arms.

As with all the red flag laws on the books or currently proposed, this one is fatally flawed and a deliberate attack on our Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Another Example of Federal Government Run Amok

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This time it’s by President Joe Biden’s (D) infamous medical wonder, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, in his attack on those evil Catholics. This attack is on Oklahoma’s Saint Francis Health System. The hospital system maintains, in the chapel of its Saint Francis Hospital South, a candle representing the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

That’s no good, insists Becerra, who had—or has tacitly allowed—his Department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use the Joint Commission (nominally an independent accrediting organization which CMS uses for Medicaid and Medicare certification) to manufacture a fire hazard (!) from the candle.

Lose the symbol of Christ or lose Federal certification and funding for Medicaid and Medicare is the threat from the Feds.

Fire hazard: this is the candle and its danger, located as it is in the hospital’s chapel:Here is Becerra’s statement, carefully done through a spokesperson, instead of being made by Doctor of Ersatz Becerra himself:

[T]he department “is aware of a safety finding involving a fire risk, made by an independent accrediting organization, issued to a hospital in Oklahoma.”

Apparently, all those flammables are too close to the glass and brass-enclosed flame. Apparently, too, the flame of Christ burns so brightly in Catholics that the candle’s flame might burn through all that glass and brass, leap that distance, and ignite the furniture. Or something.

This is yet another campaign in the Biden administration’s war on religion.

Update: The Biden administration has–for now–decided not to pursue the Saint Francis Health System over the candle in the System’s Saint Francis Hospital South.

After the hospital threatened legal action through The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the government reversed course on what seemed to be the latest development in a pattern of aggressive regulatory and criminal enforcement actions by the Biden administration against the Catholic Church.

Child Abuse

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The Oregon House of Representatives, dominated as it is by the Progressive-Democratic Party, has moved to legalize child mutilation and sex abuse. Oregon House Bill 2002 B, passed strictly partisanly (the vote was 36-23),

would allow minors younger than 15 to obtain an abortion without parental consent. Doctors would not be compelled to disclose this information to parents unless receiving express written permission from the child.
The legislation would expand taxpayer money to fund gender reassignment surgery—including sterilization for children as young as 15—without their parent’s consent.

This governmental abuse of parents’ children is another path along the Progressive-Democratic Party’s plan to fundamentally transform America,

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
—Barack Obama, October 30, 2008
We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.
—Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

and to fundamentally change things—our economy, certainly, as President Joe Biden (D) only recently asserted but also the relationship between children and their parents and between children and the State.

A Better Solution

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) is reintroducing his energy project permitting reform bill in the Senate. He also re-cited the need for reform in his remarks introducing the bill.

In the United States, it often takes between five and ten years—sometimes longer—to get critical energy infrastructure projects approved, putting us years behind allies like Canada, Australia, and more recently the EU, who each have policies designed to complete permitting in three years or less[.]

Even though fixing this would help allegedly green energy projects, also, Manchin’s cronies in the Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate have been happy to sacrifice that in favor of letting those interminable delays kill so many domestic cheap hydrocarbon-based energy projects. It’ll be an up-the-cliff battle to get anything like this passed in the Party-dominated Senate.

Among the useful things in Manchin’s bill, though, is this:

The Building American Energy Security Act would establish maximum timelines for permitting reviews including a two-year process for major projects and a one-year process for smaller projects. It would provide legal avenues for project developers to take against the federal government if a permitting review is delayed beyond set timelines and would mandate a single inter-agency environmental review.

That’s good as far as it goes, but here’s a better enforcement mechanism, IMNSHO: the permits should be will-issue, and if no decision is reached by those deadlines, the project should be deemed fully permitted, with no further review and no appeal of the permit. Rejections must be public, specific, and detailed, and they can be appealed directly to Federal courts: the Energy and Interior Departments, EPA, any other government entity can appear only as defendants in an appeal; no appeal of a permit grant should be allowed.

A further criterion and an additional deadline: if any of the rejection criteria are not met, the project should be deemed fully permitted, with no further appeal. The rejecting authority should have gotten it right the first time.

If the initial court does not reach a final decision within six months, the project must be deemed fully permitted. Appeals must be finally resolved within three months of the appeal filing (which itself must occur, fully developed, within one week of the lower court’s ruling, or the opportunity to appeal must be forfeit), or the project must be deemed fully permitted. And: only one appeal of a permit grant must be allowed at each court level; naysayers cannot be allowed to drag things out with serial appeals.

Those last put a premium on the Federal courts moving cases apace, but it puts a bigger premium on the lawyers to prepare and move their cases without delays—and eliminates the deliberate stalls represented by cynical serial appeals.