Daily Archives: 5 October 2026

One Additional Aspect

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The Supreme Court is taking up the case of Suncor Energy v Boulder County, which as the WSJ editors put it, asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws to impose liability on American companies for the effects of global climate change.

The editors pointed out a number of reasons why the Boulder County effort to punish fossil fuel companies nationwide for global outcomes from a global range of putative sources should fail, including this one:

From the beginning, the Constitution was designed to ensure that the US would speak with one voice in its dealings abroad. States may not conduct their own foreign relations or establish competing national policies toward other countries. The Supreme Court has repeatedly enforced that principle, recognizing that federal authority in matters affecting foreign relations must be free from local interference.

There’s an additional aspect to this argument. One of the reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to correct the several ills and weaknesses in our Articles of Confederation, weaknesses that were verging on being fatal to our nascent nation. Under the Articles, the nominally central government could not speak for the nation on matters of international import; each of the 13 States of the Confederation could speak for itself on the global stage. Those 14 voices, usually in as much conflict with each other as with foreign nations, were tearing the Confederation apart if not exposing it to outright conquering by a still hostile Great Britain, a newly (overtly) hostile France, and an antipathetic Dutch Republic.

Our Constitution fixed that failure by seating foreign policy firmly in the hands of the Federal government, to be executed by the government’s chief executive, the President. States no longer had any say on foreign policy, other than via Representatives and Senators in Congress.

Costs and Aggregated Statistics

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A Just the News news writer wrote that [p]ositive US economic indicators have been left out of much of the mainstream media’s reporting on the state of the economy.

He’s right—the mainstream media really is that mendaciously biased. His claim, though, also is wholly irrelevant in the present election season.

All those economically favorable data that the news media studiously ignores are aggregated data; they refer to the nation and not to any particular individual, not even to any small groups of people in local communities.

Folks don’t care that, as a nation, inflation is down sharply from the Biden years or the nation’s median household income has risen to nearly $87,500. Who is this Mr/Ms Median Household person, anyway? Has anyone actually met him or her? Nor do folks care that the nation‘s jobs data are favorable.

What an individual—a voter—cares about is that he’s personally paying gas prices that are up 30-40 percent over the pre-Biden years; he, the trucker, is personally paying diesel prices that are up nearly double; her grocery bills at the local grocery store are up 40-50 percent; his/her income—what he or she gets in an actual take home paycheck—doesn’t stretch to pay those higher costs. It’s not that he notices that his take home pay isn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation—generally he doesn’t. Nor does he need to, what he sees is that his paycheck no longer covers his gas, groceries, utility bills, and on and on. That’s if the individual has a job at all, which personal datum is invisible in those aggregated statistics. He’s just a depersoned number in the collection of labor statistics.

What are politicians, especially Republican politicians, going to do about that? This is what, so far.

Republicans are going to be swept into oblivion next month if they don’t stop hiding under their desks avoiding these simple facts and get out among their constituents—diners, rec centers, town halls, letters to local editors, interviews on local television and radio stations—and say, in so many words, what their particular policies are that will address their constituents’ particular cost of living concerns.

Being specific is the bane of politicians, exposing them as specifics do, to broad criticism and sharp opprobrium. It’s time now, though, for Republicans to find some backbone and be specific, which, as a happy side effect, would let them point out the failure of their opponents to have any sort of plan for these ills other than that they’re not Trump and they’re not Republicans.