Category Archives: regulation

Call Them on Their Obstructionism

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Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, says go big or go home regarding Obamacare.  Republicans in Congress should quit dithering, should not play reconciliation games, and should simply put an Obamacare repeal and replace package up for vote.  This would force the Democrat obstructionists—especially those #NeverTrumpNoHow and #NeverRepublicanNotEver Progressive-Democrats in the Senate on the record as by-name blocking reform of the Obama program that is in its death spiral, the endpoint of which will leave millions of Americans without health coverage and without even coverage providers to which to appeal.  Especially put those 10 Progressive-Democrats pretending to moderacy in order to protect their precarious reelection chances in 2018 on the spot.

Now that insurers are acknowledging the death spiral, there’s an opportunity for bolder action. The House could use regular order, not reconciliation, to pass a bill that not only fully repeals ObamaCare—returning control of the private market to the states—but simultaneously puts into effect at least the core components of reform while including grandfathering and other provisions to smooth the transition to lower-priced options on the free market.

Such a bill could easily pass the House, putting pressure on the Senate. Would Minority Leader Chuck Schumer allow proper consideration of much-needed health-care reform? And with all the evidence that ObamaCare has been a disaster and—untouched by Republicans—is quickly unraveling, would Democrats, 25 of whom are up for re-election next year, vote to defend the status quo?

And

There would be two Senate filibuster points—the first, to allow consideration; the second, to allow a vote. Thinking through what would happen, the American public and Trump administration would be well served by this exercise of transparent democracy.
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If Democrats blocked consideration of the bill, they would do President Trump a favor by showing the public the parliamentary shenanigans of the anti-deliberation filibuster—call it the “Senatorial Full Employment Through Avoiding Tough Votes” maneuver.

And

If Democrats refuse to allow debate, Republicans should kill the filibuster against deliberation (as distinct from the filibuster to end debate and hold a vote). They can do so by simple majority vote, as Harry Reid showed when he ended the filibuster against most nominations in 2013. Either way, the Senate can actually have a vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act and reforming health care.

Republicans should heed this advice, and go for it.  If it fails, Republicans can always go the reconciliation route.

Constitutional Carry

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That’s the term currently in vogue for the permitless carrying of handguns, whether openly or concealed; it’s the concept that the 2nd Amendment is all the permit an American citizen needs to carry his handgun.

New Hampshire has become the 12th State eliminate the need for a State-issued permit for concealed carry; it already had permitless open carry.  With the bill signed into law by Governor Chris Sununu, a New Hampshire citizen is allowed

the unlicensed transport or carry of a firearm in a vehicle, or on or about one’s person, whether openly or concealed, loaded or unloaded…if that individual is not otherwise prohibited by statute from possessing a firearm in the state of New Hampshire.

[Aside: it’s too bad Federal laws can’t be this brief and to the point.]

Of course, the Progressive-Democrat gun control persons are up in arms about this.  Raymond Buckley, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman, for instance:

New Hampshire has imminent issues that need the Governor’s attention, but further relaxing the state’s notoriously lax gun laws is not one of them[.]

Never mind that there have been zero school shootings in New Hampshire since 1990.  California has had 19 school shooting deaths just since 2010.

DC had at least 32 incidents of gunfire within 500ft of a school, during school hours, in 2011-2012; the District still has one of the tightest gun control régimes, even after Heller.  Chicago, also with one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation, averaged 82 shootings per week in 2016 through August of that year.  And on and on.

“Notoriously lax”—read: Progressive-Democrats can’t impose their rule asserting government control over the matter.

Of Course He Does

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California has an infrastructure failure problem that involves everything from its roads to its dams and other water control facilities.  Governor Jerry Brown (D) says it will cost $187 billion to fix its infrastructure, and he wants $12 billion per year of Federal funding to help with that.  In actuality, Brown doesn’t want Federal funding, he wants what Federal funding consists of: money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of financial straitened New York to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of nearly bankrupt Illinois to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of fiscally responsible and so flush Texas and Utah to help pay for his needs.

He doesn’t care that his State’s infrastructure is in such poor shape because he and prior administrations of both parties deferred maintenance they knew at the time was promptly needed.

When asked why California hadn’t spent more on infrastructure before, Mr Brown said it wasn’t seen as a priority before. “This is the way the world works,” he said. “The immediate takes precedence over the more fundamental.”

Leadership wouldn’t acquiesce so meekly to the immediate, though.  Leadership would push the matter and get his bosses, the citizens of California in the present case, behind the more fundamental.

Oh, and there is the “green” lobby, too.  Amid all the current plenty of water, all that’s happening is flooding (those badly maintained dams are part of this problem, to be sure), denial of that plentiful water to farmers, and routing of plentiful water that isn’t flooding straight to the sea.  For instance,

the Central Valley Project Improvement Act[] diverted 1.5 million acre-feet of water—roughly a fifth of the total water delivery—annually to wildlife and green hobbyhorses. That ultimately means flushing it out into the ocean. “Basically, they’ve now legislated a permanent drought in the San Joaquin Valley,” Mark Borba, a cotton farmer….

That’s still going on.  And this:

The San Joaquin River Restoration Program, the result of a 2006 settlement in a lawsuit over fish habitat, took away another some 225,000 acre-feet of water annually.

Progressive-Democrats are willing only to spend OPM; fiscal responsibility, discipline in spending their own money is an alien concept.

It’s certainly true that in a republican democracy all of the States are in the nation together, and all of the States need to, are bound to, support each other, as Brown and others have also claimed.  But a major part of that mutual support is each State not creating itself a burden on any of the other 49 through its own wanton profligacy.

The Left Gives the Game Away

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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.

Federal Funds and Sanctuary Cities

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Within days of President Trump’s executive order to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, San Francisco had filed a lawsuit opposing the order [to block federal funding for them]….

We also have this regarding…coercion…by the Federal government.

Last year, a federal judge in Illinois ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Department of Homeland Security to force local jails to detain suspected undocumented immigrants without a warrant. And in a 1997 Supreme Court decision, Printz v US, a 5-4 majority held that the federal government “may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

OK.  And with our republican form of democracy, articulated most clearly in our 9th and 10th Amendments, those probably aren’t bad court rulings.

However, if things like Printz v US or South Dakota v Dole [another Supreme Court coercion case] really are going to be players in this, it’s a game easily settled: stop sending Federal dollars—taxpayer dollars—to all cities altogether.  The cities have no inherent right to Federal money, and the cessation of that particular spending would be good for the Federal budget in its own right.