Daily Archives: 23 February 2017

The Left Gives the Game Away

Posted on by
Reply

Again.  Buried at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal piece on the auto industry’s effort to get the Obama administration’s last-minute (almost literally) attempt to make permanent fuel standards (also last minute because the underlying research wasn’t even going to be complete until 2018) is this rationale from Roland Hwang, at the National Resources Defense Council’s Director, Energy & Transportation Program, as paraphrased by the WSJ.

relaxing standards could hurt Americans depending on clean-car technology jobs.

Because EPA regulations are all about creating jobs and not about mitigating pollution.

Does a foreigner on foreign soil have Fourth Amendment rights?

Posted on by
1

That’s the subtitle of a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  The answer should be obvious, too: it would be the height of jingo-ism to assert US government jurisdiction over non-citizens outside our borders—outside, for instance, the 14th Amendment’s subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Firing into another country at a foreign national, especially one that’s a citizen of the country being fired into, could well be a violation, but that potential would be a violation of a different set of circumstances than the question before the Supremes in the present case, Hernandez v Mesa.  That other set of circumstance has to do with international relations, foreign policy, the nature of casus belli, and on and on—and all purely political matters, not legal ones, and so not only a different set of circumstances, but a matter that’s outside the reach of court jurisdiction.