Author Archives: eehines

State Problem, not Federal

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Amid the moves related to canceling, or not, $160 million in Federal funding if California misses its 5 January deadline for canceling some 17,000 Commercial Driver Licenses illegally issued to illegal aliens, comes this Federal lawsuit objection by the Asian Law Caucus and the Sikh Coalition, along with the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP:

the cancellations would “result in mass work stoppages” immediately upon the deadline.

Say that’s true, and it likely is. Their beef is with California’s State government for its decision to act illegally and so broadly so, not with the Federal government for enforcing the law. Suing the Feds to stop their enforcement of law should be a nonstarter.

A Thought on “Firsts”

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Too many pundits, too many others, insist on commenting loudly (or quietly) on the first black man to do this, the first woman to do that, the first homosexual person to do the other. The loud current example is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He is, according to these Wonders, the first Muslim, the first Asian American, the youngest to become the city’s mayor.

So what? What he is is an American citizen. All the rest is decidedly irrelevant to the point of meaninglessness.

Unfortunately, as long as pundits, and too many others, insist on pointing that someone is the first this to achieve something or the first that to achieve something else, as long as those pundits, et al., insist on these manufactured firsts, they continue to keep us divided from each other by claiming special accolades for their approved groups.

That divisive decision very closely approaches bigotry. At the very least, it’s insulting to those groups as the pundits insist that the groups cannot succeed on their own; they must be singled out for their immutable characteristics rather than applauded or decried for the material things they’ve done or not done.

It Isn’t Just That

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Roger Severino, writing for the Heritage Foundation in a letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s New Year Day Letters section, demurred from the WSJ house editorial regarding the putative blowup at/of Heritage. He claimed a mistake[ of] a change in tactics for a change in principles.

The disagreement between the two centers on a Tucker Carlson podcast interview of Nick Fuentes and the Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ defense of Carlson and of the interview in the ensuing hooraw over the interview and Fuentes.

Kevin Roberts, the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, defended Carlson after the episode, saying Carlson “remains and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

It’s entirely appropriate—consistent, even, with Conservative thought on free speech—to defend the interview in its existence and to defend Carlson for doing the interview. However, for an allegedly conservative organization to defend the existence of an interview between a conspiracy theory mongerer and a racist bigot without comment is badly wrong.

Such an interview should be accompanied, with or in its immediate aftermath, commentary on the immorality of the bigotry and on the foolishness of conspiracy mongering. That the Heritage Foundation chose to defend the interview and interviewer without comment belies Severino’s pious claims of continued Conservatism.

An Activist Judge Gets It Wrong

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DC District Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ruled that

the Trump administration is legally required to secure funding for the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and that failing to do so would violate a prior court order barring the government from dismantling or shutting down the agency[.]

However.

Leave aside the fact that the question of the Trump administration funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the question of the Trump administration dismantling or shutting down the agency are distinctly separate questions.

The fact of interest here is Jackson’s mistaken ruling that Trump must fund the CFPB. He cannot. By the statute that created the CFPB, that agency is funded solely by the penalties it exacts via its enforcement actions (pay no attention to the conflict of interest behind the curtain) and from the Federal Reserve Bank, the latter which the CFPB draws from according to CFPB-determined needs (pay no attention to the doings behind this curtain, either).

The Trump administration has no control over and no capacity to produce CFPB funding. This is the sort of shenanigan in which activist judges engage, causing increased cost and delay in cleaning up prior messes.

A Useful Test

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In their Wall Street Journal Tuesday op-ed, Michael O’Hanlon and Marta Wosinska, Brookings Institution Senior Fellows, pointed out that shotgunning moves (vis., universal tariffs on everything a target nation or group of nations exports to us and broadly barring exports to those same targets) as a means of altering the several links to the supply chains our economy needs to make the goods we need along with altering those links our economy wants to make the things we want. They then offered a three part test to better target those supply chain links that are most important and most time critical to us and our security.

  • First, a supply chain warrants special focus when its disruption would quickly threaten lives, core defense missions, or essential economic functions.
  • Second, when substitutes or workarounds can’t be instituted in time to mitigate the disruption.
  • Third, when surge capacity can’t be built on a reasonable timeline.

This approach, as they emphasize, acknowledges that developing resilience is costly and helps ensure that scarce capital goes to the most vital choke points. In fine, it targets links for better allocation of our non-tree-sprouting spending money

This is a good test, and it’s applicable in another way than purely domestically. It needs to be applied in reverse, also. What are the analogous critical choke points in our enemies’ supply chains? Applying the test to those would let us better target our enemies’ ability to wage and sustain war against us, our friends, and our allies.