Category Archives: law

A Misunderstanding

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This one, a Wall Street Journal editorial centered on a coerced unionization of ride share companies Uber and Lyft. The editors got their misunderstanding in early, via their lede:

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday announced a “deal” with ride-share companies Uber and Lyft that they couldn’t refuse. Democrats in Sacramento will reduce auto insurance coverage mandates that are driving runaway litigation in return for the companies letting drivers collectively bargain.

Yes, they could have refused the deal. The California government foisted onto them a supremely ugly choice, but it was no less a freely taken choice for all its ugliness. The companies’ managers were just too timid to resist, too timid to leave the State altogether, as their own powerful alternative to Sacramento’s demand.

There’s no reason for any business, not just Uber and Lyft, to suffer the politically imposed costs of operating in California. Nothing is stopping businesses from leaving other than the timidity of their managers.

I alluded to it just above: the cost of doing business in California isn’t just fiscal. It’s political, too, reducing as that cost does, a company’s ability to manage its own business affairs in accordance with its own free market imperatives.

A Random Question

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I have one, triggered by a settlement between the Federal DoJ and Kentucky regarding the latter’s granting of in-state college/university tuition rates to illegal aliens living in the State. The settlement has Kentucky rescinding that grant.

Thus:

The first clause of the first article of the 14th Amendment says this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The second sentence of that clause says this in pertinent part:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

What does this suggest about a State’s colleges’ and universities’ use of resident—citizen of the State and of these United States—vs non-resident—but still citizen of these United States—tuition?

Nationalizing Companies

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The Wall Street Journal editors are badly mistaken here.

Mr Trump accused Kamala Harris of being a socialist, but the Biden Administration never nationalized companies.

Routine political polemics on the first part of that; functionally, and obviously, wrong on the second part.

Nationalizing individual companies is piffle. The Obama reign nationalized a whole industry—our health care “insurance” coverage industry via Obamacare, which required all of us to buy an Obamacare policy whether we wanted to or not, whether we needed one or not.

It’s true that the Biden administration didn’t formally nationalize any companies, but it functionally nationalized far more industries than that piker Obama with the Biden administration’s excessive regulation: ICE-powered vehicles and our energy production industries, our banking industry with its pressure to lend to these types and refuse to lend to those types, and even our press with its pressure to spike these news reports and to push those news reports, all the while pushing for editorials that favored administration ideologies while panning or ignoring policies of which Biden and his minions disapproved.

None of this is to suggest that the Federal government taking an ownership stake in Intel or any company is a good idea or even an acceptable one. It isn’t. But it’s telling that these opinion writers can make such an obviously wrong claim at the outset of their piece.

Add some Teeth to It

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Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ) is proposing legislation that would modify the DC Home Rule Act. The piece of interest to me is his Make DC Safe Again Act. Biggs’ proposal would lengthen from 30 days to 180 days the emergency period in which the president can take control of DC police.

I’d like some teeth added to that. Specifically, require DC to pay the costs of the Feds assuming control of the local police unless the DC governing body requests Federal intervention. I’d also like to see legislation that would apply that principle nationwide. Portland of 2020 (especially, but also extending into today) and Los Angeles of the current summer stand as firm examples of that necessity.

A Justice…Misunderstands

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Justice Ketanji Br own Jackson dissented strenuously with a Supreme Court ruling that, in part, upheld the Trump Administration’s request for an emergency stay of a lower court’s blocking of NIH from canceling $783 million worth of grants.

The money part of the woman’s (dare I use that term on a person who doesn’t know what a woman is?) dissent:

the high court’s way of preserving the “mirage of judicial review while eliminating its purpose: to remedy harms.”

No. Not at all. The purpose of judicial review is critically—and solely—to ensure that the action before it, along with the statute(s) involved, follow the text of our Constitution and the text of those statutes. Nothing more and nothing less.

But the woman wasn’t done with shredding (to use the in-vogue term) “judicial review” [emphasis added]:

It would have been much simpler for the Court to just announce that, regardless of the plain text of the APA or what Congress intended to authorize, we no longer accept that the Government’s grant-termination decisions are subject to arbitrary-and-capricious review or that vacatur of an arbitrary grant-termination decision is an available remedy.

The greatest harm that is in play here is ruling on the basis of a particular judge’s or Justice’s personal definition of “harm.” Yet, this is exactly what Jackson presumes to attempt with her setting aside the petty text of a statute from which her august self demurs.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, including Jackson’s dissent can be read here.