Tag Archives: regulation

Blocking CRT in Schools and Teachers’ Feigned Fears

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The Trump administration is moving to deny Federal funding to K-12 schools that have Critical Race Theory in their curricula. Teachers are claiming to be in a panic about that. For instance,

[s]ome New England teachers are worried the new restrictions on teaching CRT could cause teachers to self-censor out of fear that any discussion on race would make them a target of the new administration….

No, those are supposedly grown adults sulking and threatening to throw toddler-level temper tantrums, planning to hold their breaths until they turn blue in the face, if the don’t get their way.

There’s nothing at all in banning CRT indoctrination—which in its overt bigotry insists on racially intrinsic oppressor/oppressee status depending on the skin color of the individual, which further insists that victimhood is inherent in one race or one gender and not at all a frame of mind with an inherent ability to overcome being a victim (including taking coherent effective action in those instances where a person really has been victimized)—that prevents teachers from discussing race, or teaching its effects, with such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or any of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing.

These pseudo-teachers would be no loss at all, were they to carry on their tantrums by quitting teaching altogether.

It Could be made to Work

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President Donald Trump (R) wants a sovereign wealth fund for “promot[ing] fiscal sustainability,” “establish[ing] economic security for future generations, and promot[ing] United States economic and strategic leadership internationally.” This is a slush fund with a gussied up label.

It could work, nonetheless, under a very narrow Critical Item-level set of circumstances.

• slush fund dollars can be loaned only, not committed as grants or investments
• slush fund purposes and scope clearly defined and limited
• scope and types of enterprises to which slush fund dollars may be loaned clearly defined and limited
• slush fund loans to be made at annually adjusting rates equal to the prime rate plus 12.75%, which is roughly comparable to today’s credit card interest rate markup
• slush fund loans to be repaid in full within two years
• principle to be returned to the slush fund; interest payments to be sent to Treasury for the explicit purpose of paying down the national debt
• bankruptcy can be used to discharge slush fund loans, but only via liquidation bankruptcy

Those are stiffly limiting criteria for a Federal government slush fund, but the WSJ editors are correct in every respect in their concerns about the dangers of such a fund. Setting up such a device under these criteria is likely a pipe dream chasing a chimera, but the idea is worth serious consideration: under these criteria, the idea could work; alternatively, the idea could be put to rest for a useful period of years.

No They Haven’t

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the press-alleged difficulty of putting into action President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order specifying that the number of human sexes are two—male and female—the authors wrote this opinion masqueraded as received fact:

As social norms around gender have grown more fluid in recent years….

No, they haven’t.

Their subheadline pushes matter:

Executive order requires changes to passports, prisons and other areas of American life

The implication is that enforcing the outcomes of only two sexes will be very difficult. Never mind the simple fact that difficult means doable.

It won’t be that hard to undo what the Biden administration inflicted over its short term. Passport changes can be reversed as easily as they were inflicted on us, prisons can easily undo the assaults on its female prisoners simply by no longer putting male prisoners in the same prisons as female prisoners and (re)transferring existing male prisoners (back) to male prisons, “other areas of American life” won’t require much change beyond the existing—and vastly incomplete—moves to eliminate DEI bigotry from our institutions.

Not much change will be required because it’s eminently legal for men and women to live their lives as though they were the opposite sex, except where mingling would be inappropriate: males in females’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and the like.

The vast majority of Americans know biology better. We understand full well that in human (for instance) biology, beginning with genetics, there are only two sexes, and which one defines a particular individual is immutably specified at conception—that’s when the chromosomes come together as XX or XY.

It’s true enough that biological mistakes do, rarely, occur and a child gets an XXY or an XYY combination, but those are extremely rare. It’s also true that gender identity disorder (which the authors of the politically written DSM-5 were pleased to relabel gender dysphoria), which is generated primarily by hormonal developments that mistakenly contradict biology and by cultural aspects, occurs, but GID also is an extremely rare occurrence. It’s instructive that GID didn’t become a political matter until the last few years, when identity politics pushers, taking advantage of adolescent hormonal confusion, began pursuing their demand for ever more identities to push and for which to collect government monies and “protections.”

Social norms around gender have not at all grown more fluid except as the Leftist press pushes the narrative created by those activist identity politics pushers. We remain a nation that knows biology better than that.

Changes to the Administrative Procedure Act?

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The incoming Trump administration and the newly installed Republican-led Congress (even if only more-or-less so in the Chaos Caucus-infested House) want to make deep changes to that Act. The law requires, among other things, advance public notice before regulations are adopted or rescinded. The Act more broadly

  • requires agencies to keep the public informed of their organization, procedures and rules
  • provides for public participation in the rulemaking process, for instance through public commenting
  • establishes uniform standards for the conduct of formal rulemaking and adjudication
  • defines the scope of judicial review

That public participation is the advance notice and public comment part, with the mandated notice being several months. The Act, though, was done in 1946, when information moved at the speed of newspapers and radio. We have computers today and the Internet with their vastly sped-up—not quite instantaneous—information dissemination capabilities. The advance notice requirement could easily and beneficially be shortened to 30 days for notice and public comment.

The transparency requirement could be sharply improved. One path for that is strictly enforcing responsiveness to FOIA requests by all agencies: require agency response within those same 30 days, with any failure to respond being deemed approved and the requested information required to be delivered in toto on the 31st day. Redactions also would be profitably limited much further, with reasons for allowed redactions being much more limited. Any document still containing redactions would be delivered promptly to the requester with the same document, wholly unredacted, delivered to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the relevant House and Senate committees for their information.

The judicial review requirement needs also to be tightened. This can be done by subjecting all rules that come before a court to substantial evidence review, which encompasses the agency’s assessment of the evidence in the record and its application of that evidence in reaching a decision. That standard requires courts to decide for themselves whether the agency’s factual and policy determinations were warranted in light of all the information before the agency at the time of decision. This is especially important in light of the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference: courts no longer are subordinate to agency technocrat “expertise,” no longer expected to take an agency’s bureaucrats’ blandishments seriously.

A Foolish Question

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors note that California’s Progressive-Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has waived some permitting requirements for some folks to facilitate their rebuilding efforts in the wake of the fires burning to ashes some suburbs of Los Angeles. Then they ask

Why not ease regulations for all projects if the rules are such a barrier to development?

It’s clear enough why not. Newsom hasn’t had the epiphany the editors’ headline at the link claims; he’s pandering to the uber-rich and to the upper middle class folks in what is really a narrow slice of the whole of California. Those rich who’ve lost their homes to the fires are major donors to him and to Party. The waiver is limited to these panderees because throughout that whole of the rest of California, Green groups and unions operate, and they’re major donors, also, to Newsom and to Party.