Category Archives: regulation

There is No Difference

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Nathan Diament, Orthodox Union Advocacy Center Executive Director, wrote eloquently of the importance of St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, Colorado’s effort to force Catholic schools to accept as students those who reject, or whose parents reject, the school’s religious mission. He also asked a couple of questions:

What if the state doesn’t explicitly exclude religious schools? What if it attaches conditions that force religious schools to choose between accessing public benefits and compromising their values?

The answer to these seems crystalline to me.

Applying criteria as a condition of participating in a program with which an institution cannot comply and maintain its character and mission is precisely the same as explicitly excluding that institution.

That’s OK, if not necessarily good, if the conditions are applied to private enterprise. No business has an intrinsic right to any particular business model or practice.

It’s entirely different, though, when the conditions are applied to religious institutions. Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, whathaveyou have precisely that intrinsic right to operate under their specific practice. That inalienable right is clearly acknowledged in our Constitution’s First Amendment bars against government interference with an institution’s and its members’ right freely to exercise their religion (or lack of such) and the equally explicit bar against government establishing a government-devised or -run religion or religious entity, whether to compete with or to supplant other religious or areligious establishments.

An Answer

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Although it would take quite a bit of time to bring to fruition. The problem is getting low cost natural gas to the good citizens of New England. President Donald Trump (R) has proposed the beginnings of a solution.

New Englanders pay some of the highest energy costs in the nation, and the Trump administration says the Constitution Pipeline—a project New York successfully blocked once before—is the answer. New York, however, appears to remain stubbornly committed to stopping it.

The Constitution Pipeline would transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York. A complication in the matter is that all five of the New England States are just as adamantly opposed to pipeline development as is New York. Trump is looking at designating the pipeline a national security matter and forcing is construction, but that’s of sometime utility.

An alternative, or perhaps parallel, solution is to use the Federal government’s authority to appropriate State lands and its 5th Amendment power to seize, with just compensation, private lands as necessary to assemble the rights of way the pipeline would require to pass through New York and into each of the New England States.

Then let the State government men and women justify refusing to let their respective constituents to have access to that cheap energy that now sits on those constituents’ figurative doorsteps, needing only their local utilities’ abilities to hook those pipelines into the distribution’s last miles.

None of the moves won’t solve this winter’s problem, but they would address future winters.

Gun Control

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This one in Bend, OR. A mass-shooter wannabe, after firing into nearby cars, broke into a locked elementary school by shooting out the door locks. The violence began around 1300 last Thursday. More precisely,

The violence started and ended within minutes, with police saying they received an initial call at 12:59 pm local time and then arriving at the scene with the suspect dead at 1:02 pm.

A teacher armed with a cell phone as a throwing object and her own physical courage and a bystander armed with a firearm had responded and stopped the mass shooter and his butchery by the time the police arrived. The teacher had followed her thrown phone by charging and tackling the shooter. She was still struggling with him (I speculate in an ultimately losing effort) when the bystander arrived and shot the shooter, killing him.

The shooter had already killed three children and another teacher and severely wounded another child and teacher; his butchery was cut short at that point by those two civilian first responders, one of whom was armed.

Yet, gun control…persons…insist on disarming and keeping disarmed civilians already on scene—the true first responders—in favor of police, who won’t arrive for some few minutes (three of them in the present case, which is a fast response. For those in the peanut gallery, the police failure in Uvalde, TX, was an extreme exception; most police response times in urban areas are quite good, in the range of 3-7 minutes.). These gun control persons don’t seem to care that the butchery will continue apace until the police do make it to the scene.

Go figure.

Progressive-Democrats’ Letter and a Medical Panel

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Seventeen Progressive-Democrat Senators wrote a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr decrying the medical experts he’d appointed to a creation of the Progressive-Democratic Party, the US Preventive Services Task Force, from back when the Senate joined with the House to unilaterally pass Obamacare.

We are greatly concerned about the potentially outsized impact these members could have in pushing for services within their specialty[.]

Never mind that Kennedy’s appointees are actual medical experts in the variety of fields which the panel was designed to oversee. These specialist doctors replaced a collection of generalists wholly unqualified to oversee the plethora of specialties that need treatment recommendation oversight. After all,

Primary care doctors are less familiar with new research on diseases and screenings than specialists, which is one reason the panel is often behind the medical curve.

One example of the panel’s heretofore failures is this bit regarding PSA testing for prostate cancer in men:

[T]he panel retained its recommendation against PSA tests for men 70 and older. Why? Who knows, but some on the left argue that screening older men could result in unnecessary treatment since they may die of something else before cancer kills them.

That’s just cynical and has no basis in the practice of medicine. The specialists will be much more efficient, much more accurate, and so much more cost effective with their recommendations.

Kennedy hasn’t responded yet, at least publicly, but were I in his shoes, my response would be public, and it would be short and sweet. My responding letter would have this appearing at the top right of the body:

Reference A: [Make up of the US Preventive Services Task Force]
Reference B: [The Progressive-Democrats’ letter]

The body of my response would have consisted of this in its entirety:

Reference B noted. Reference A applies.

Nothing else need be done or said or written.

Government Rules

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James Freeman asked, in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed, how many of these are necessary.

How much government could we all do without? President Donald Trump says that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful. Truer words were never spoken, and last week this column noted his encouraging progress in repealing misguided rules enacted by his predecessors. Now a few recent examples [not repeated here] suggest that half or more of government regulation is completely unnecessary.

I submit that we already have a nearly complete set of government rules in our Bill of Rights, backed up by the Bill’s overarching document, our Constitution.

I would add two rules to flesh the list out to completeness. One would enforce the sanctity of contracts. When two or more parties agree on a thing, that contract should be entirely enforceable as it stands, with severe sanctions applied to those who violate it. There really are only two legitimate ways to deviate from a freely done agreement. One way is if all of the parties involved agree to alter the contract or to dissolve it altogether. The other way is through the bankruptcy of one or more of the parties, making it impossible for them to uphold their parts of the bargain. Current bankruptcy law deals quite nicely with this sort of eventuality.

The other government rule centers on truth in advertising. Advertisements are contracts between the advertiser and the buyer, and so within the sanctity of that contract, not being truthful should be a felony if the distortion can be shown to have been deliberate, or a civil offense if the distortion can be shown to result from either party’s negligence.

Such a cleanup of our rules and regulations regime would result in how many pages of the Federal Register becoming obsolete and without effect. It also would virtually eliminate compliance costs and very greatly simplify our lives and our economy.

Even better it would render the vast majority of the Civil Service unnecessary, with those personnel returned to the private sector, all to the profit of a greatly downsized and so more efficient government, of the civil and now private employees, and to our economy writ large, through no longer having to compete so much for the same resources that the government had heretofore competed for.

Yes, I’m ignoring environmental and climate regulation in this. Those milieus are well enough covered by our Bill of Rights and the proposed contract sanctity rule.