Category Archives: regulation

Another Reason for Smaller Government

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Even with lives at stake—lives in the middle of a budding pandemic—Big Government bureaucracies are more interested in protecting turf and responsibility ducking than they are in their fundamental task of protecting American citizens’ safety from foreign problems.

Worse, one of the bureaucracies involved in this cynical ego-based Federal road block has nothing to do with the medical questions involved. First, the experts, at least by training and experience, if not by smooth performance:

The hazardous waste protocols in place for hospitals require staff to place any potentially infected substances—whether it is medical equipment or protective gear—into special hazardous waste containers. That waste then is supposed to be turned over to licensed hazardous waste companies, where it is incinerated or chemically sterilized, according to the CDC.

However, because that other Big Government agency thinks it must have something to say about handling hazardous medical waste, we get this [emphasis added]:

Due to specific Ebola-related regulations issued by the US Department of Transportation (DOT), which governs what medical waste companies can and cannot transport, the usual waste haulers or medical waste disposal companies are prohibited from accepting Ebola-contaminated waste until it has been properly packaged in accordance with DOT guidelines.

And so we get this problem, delineated by [Dr Jeffrey, National Global and Public Health Committee Chairman for Infectious Diseases Society of America] Duchin:

The medical waste companies are refusing to come and pick up the waste because of the DOT regulations, which the CDC does not agree with.

Never mind that the sole experts in the matter, the CDC, has said the Ebola waste ready for safe handling by medical waste companies.

Just to add to this ego-ridden fiasco, we also have this, demonstrating that it’s not only the Federal government that’s gotten too big, too turf-ridden, with too many egos embedded:

[A] Louisiana waste disposal facility, Chemical Waste Management Inc-Lake Charles, says it will not accept the ashes generated when Duncan’s belongings were incinerated, at least not until state officials agree that it would pose no threat to the public.

And this nonsense: The Louisiana Attorney General, Buddy Caldwell, has sued in state court to block the transportation of the waste to the Calcasieu Parish facility (the waste disposal facility in question), and a Louisiana state judge has agreed and blocked the shipment. Because these guys—a state government lawyer and the state government’s judge—know better.

These are yet others reason for shrinking government.

The Left and “Free” Speech

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On the matter of Common Core,

Employees of at least one school have been directed not to express opinions in public or by texts, email, social media or traditional media, according to notes taken at a faculty meeting last week that were obtained by The Town Talk.

[Rapides Superintendent Nason “Tony”] Authement said there is not a district policy about social media.

“We are not communicating any procedures, policies or expectations about posting on social networks,” he said.

Of course. Instead,

Local teachers who agreed to speak to The Town Talk anonymously said these directives normally are given orally rather than in writing. The notes came from a faculty meeting after teacher Cher Wilson spoke to a TV news outlet about what she called a “dishonest” grading system.

One teacher said she was “written up” by school administration for writing a comment from her personal Facebook account on a negative post about the Common Core State Standards. The comment was against the standards.

She said she was shocked when asked to remove her comment, which she did, and then was written up.

“We are not to voice our opinions in any public forum,” she said. “We are to be neutral or in favor of…. This is a hot national debate. Why can’t I comment?

And

She said teachers have been told not to talk to the press without going through the chain of command, which begins with the principal and ends with the superintendent.

Plainly, the plebes are free to speak only what has been approved by their Betters for them to speak.

A Thought on Disparate Impact

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Disparate impact is the theory that a policy, or standard, or… is inherently racist if it has an outcome that impacts one group of Americans more than it does other groups of Americans, regardless of any racist intent. If the standard simply affects one group more than another, it must be racist (sexist). Let’s take as an example for this article student discipline in our grade schools. Disparate impact says that discipline standards that result in more black students being disciplined than white students must be racist, even if the discipline is meted out to members of both groups for the same misbehavior, with either no exceptions or identical exceptions allowed.

Let’s unroll that a ways.

Why are more black students disciplined than white? Because they misbehave more often.

Well, why do they misbehave more often? One major reason is lack of discipline at home—lack of home bringin’ up in the parlance of my youth. Either these kids don’t know how to behave at school, or they’re used to getting away with misbehavior.

Why is there that lack? A major reason for this is the higher incidence of broken homes—single parents (usually, single mothers)—in black homes than in white homes. Another reason, closely related, is the greater poverty in black homes than in white, which drives and is driven by that single parent status: the (mother) is occupied with trying to bring in enough money to support her family and lacks both time and energy at the end of her day to deal with her children.

Why is there that difference in poverty? Certainly, racism plays a part at this origin of the students’ behavior problems: the black mother is less likely to be able to get a job at all than is the white mother otherwise similarly situated solely because the one is black and the other is white.

But there’s another major source for this origin. Government welfare policies, with their attendant welfare cliffs, both encourage dependency on government (even to the point of eliminating welfare work requirements that had been in place since the early Clinton years) and make it extremely expensive to move up an income ladder that’s based on earned income. This traps welfare recipients in their poverty, which traps those single-parent families in their poverty, which traps those single parents in their time and fatigue cycle, which severely harms those parents’ capacity for teaching their children behavior standards—giving them that home bringin’ up—which leaves those children more likely to misbehave in school, which exposes those children to disciplinary action by the school.

But the Left doesn’t want to address the disparate impact of that origin—their welfare programs. Or acknowledge that what’s being illuminated by disparate impact is not racism or sexism, but an underlying failure of existing policy. Not at all.

And so, not only do we have the disparate impact of government policy, the remaining true racism that interferes with a black mother’s ability to get a job is obscured and made more difficult to address directly.

Born in Jerusalem Means Born in Israel?

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There is a case on the Supreme Court’s docket this session (which began Monday) that can be summarized thusly:

Born in Jerusalem: The case of an American born in Jerusalem who wants his passport to list his birthplace as Israel underlies a major dispute between Congress and the president, with Middle Eastern politics as the backdrop. The United States has never recognized any nation’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, believing the city’s status should be resolved in peace negotiations. The administration says a 2002 law passed by Congress allowing Israel to be listed as the birthplace of Jerusalem-born Americans would in essence be seen as a US endorsement of Israeli control of the city.

This should be a no-brainer, and it never should have reached this point.

“The Administration” signed the bill into law; it wasn’t merely “passed by Congress.” If the President didn’t like the way it would be perceived by foreign nations, he should have vetoed it, instead.

The courts cannot rule on American domestic law on the basis of how foreign nations might perceive the thing. The courts can only rule on what the law says, in its context—which is domestic. Even at that, what the law says must be primary.

Perceptions of the law by foreign nations are matters of politics not of law, as the separate existences of Articles I and III in our Constitution make clear. The courts have nothing to say on matters of politics.

Finally, if the present administration—or the present Congress, come to that—no longer believe this law to be appropriate in any way, including because of foreign nations’ perceptions, those two should work together on this purely political matter to alter or rescind it. Resorting to the courts is inappropriate and a waste of judicial (and Congressional and administration) resources.

(Aside: that neither Congress nor the President should worry overmuch about foreign opinion when considering American laws is a separate matter.)

Another summary of the case, which gives an outline of its legal history, is here. In my view, the district court, as summarized by this link, erred in both of its rulings. Having held originally, the matter was a non-justiciable political question, the judge should have required State to follow the law. The court was not equipped to rule otherwise, since it had not found the law “illegitimate,” which is to say unconstitutional.

The judge’s second error, when told (correctly) by the Supremes to quit waffling and make a decision, was to rule the relevant section of the law to be an unconstitutional interference with the President’s sole authority to recognize foreign states. Of course, the section does no such thing; it merely accepts that Jerusalem is a part of Israel. The President’s recognition power is unaffected.