There’s Another Way, Also

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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has submitted to Congress a number of California “climate” waivers for repeal under the Clean Air Act. This is a necessary step, and the Republicans in the House and Senate need to find the personal courage to take them up without delay and rescind them, an action that’s straightforwardly doable with simple majority votes in both houses and the President’s signature.

There’s another way, a parallel path, though, and it’s the responsibility of We the People and our businesses and enterprises.

One EPA waiver lets California mandate “zero emission” commercial vessels, including ferries and whale-watching boats. Another allows California to require that container ships and oil tankers docked at California ports plug into the state’s electrical grid or install technology to capture their emissions.

And

Another EPA permit lets California mandate that new lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chain saws, and other “small off-road engines” sold in the state must be electric.

And

[An EPA] waiver approved by the Obama team…allowed California to impose EV quotas through 2025.

It’s straightforward, also, for our private enterprises to adjust their supply chains and sales paradigms to avoid doing business in California altogether. These businesses need to do so promptly and broadly.

“Parliamentary Heresy”

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In his Tuesday FoxNews article on two Progressive-Democrats voting in favor of a Republican procedure to advance a bill against the express wishes of Party leadership, Chad Pergram had this comment:

The duo [Congressmen Jared Golden (D, M) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, WA)] committed something close to a parliamentary heresy, handing the GOP the necessary votes on a procedural matter to unlock the floor for the majority.
Republicans lacked the votes to do it on their own—had Golden and Gluesenkamp not intervened.

Couple things on this. One is that our Congress is not a Parliament where party discipline is a requirement and MPs voting against their leadership is both rare and serious enough to lead directly to the fall of the government. No member of the American Congress is bound to vote the way any party leadership demands. Indeed, Congressmen voting against their party’s leadership has occurred ever since there were political parties in the US—what Washington referred to as factions. Such contrary votes only recently include two Progressive-Democrat Senators voting against a Party budget bill and moving against an effort to get rid of the filibuster.

That these two Progressive-Democrats also didn’t advise Party leadership in advance of their intention was certainly rude, but that’s hardly heresy, Parliamentary or otherwise. I suggest on this, that they gave no heads up because their Party boss, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), because he is so deeply in the pocket of Party’s Left and its DSA members that he couldn’t be expected to listen to their reasons.

The other thing is that second paragraph in the cite. Republicans lacked the vote because some Republican Congressmen were voting against Republican party leadership by voting against that same procedural matter. This, though, seems no parliamentary heresy in Pergram’s eyes, he made no mention of the dastardly nature of those contrary votes.

Go figure.

Revisionist History and Political CYA

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress from Michigan’s 7th Congressional District William Lawrence has been busily deleting politically inconvenient social media posts he’s made in the past. The smaller problem is that his deletions are nothing other than a coward’s attempt to revise his history. It’s the smaller problem because such revisionism is widely spread and all too common, even though that in no way legitimizes the misbehavior.

The larger problem here concerns those deletions and his rationalization of them. The deletions include posts pushing for such things as

police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats, and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
…
“f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

That’s about as un-American as it gets. His rationalization, though….

Lawrence said that he currently does not support defunding the police or open borders despite what his earlier posts suggested.
“Like many millennials, I’ve done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet[.]”

That’s an illustration of Lawrence’s dishonesty. He spoke from his heart in those since-deleted posts. His deletions and his rationalizations are nothing more than him covering his political behind. What concrete actions has he taken, after all, to illustrate, if not demonstrate, his alleged evolution of his thinking?

Foreign Donations to American Colleges and Universities

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A letter writer in the WSJ‘s Monday Letters section answered the section’s subheadline—Should colleges and universities be required to disclose the names of foreign donors?

Transparency measures aren’t running universities dry of foreign funds.

I go much beyond that passive affirmative. There should be no debate over foreign money in our education systems. The schools should be required to reveal more than just names. They should give up, also, any restrictions, caveats, codicils, etc. that the foreign donor has attached to his donation. There should be no such money at all from donors who are citizens of or entities domiciled in enemy nations, like Russia, Iran, northern Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.

This is as much a national security matter as it is an education one.

Nor is there any free speech problem here. Foreign entities and individuals are not subject to American free speech constitutional clauses or free speech statutes.

That’s Nice

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has issued an ultimatum to Iran in the wake of the terrorists’ firing on one of our aircraft carriers and a guided-missile destroyer.

It’s simple: if Iran shoots at US ships, we will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers. All they have to do is not shoot at [the] US Navy[.]

That’s nice. Here’s a much better alternative, though. How about instead of, within Hegseth’s (and his boss, President Donald Trump’s (R)) preferred parameters of tit-for-tat, the Navy administered an extensive series of love taps on the sites from which attacks on our Navy might come, while simultaneously seizing the Iranian tankers, rather than destroying and sinking them?

The seized oil could be sold on at market prices, and the money used to help defray the cost of the Navy’s deployment into the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The tankers themselves could be sold on (perhaps to US shippers to facilitate Jones Act shipping) or sent to American breakers to be sold for scrap, and the money from this used as prize money for the sailors involved.