Category Archives: regulation

Gun Control, Progressive Style

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Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) has jammed into a gun control bill making its way through the Senate an amendment that adds Draconian Federal government control over our individual right to keep and bear arms.  Schumer first Dragoons the states.  Section 102 of the gun control bill, with his amendment, is aptly titled:

SEC. 102. PENALTIES FOR STATES THAT DO NOT MAKE DATA ELECTRONICALLY AVAILABLE TO THE NATIONAL INSTANT CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECK SYSTEM.

Under this section, the US Attorney General is allowed to withhold up to 4% of Federal funding for state and local law enforcement agencies in any state that respects its citizens’ privacy vis-à-vis the Federal government by refusing to provide its state’s data to the NISC.  After a five-year “grace” period from implementation of the Senate’s legislation, the US Attorney General is required to withhold 5% of that funding.

Charles Cooke, writing for National Review Online, provides a description of other parts of the Schumer Amendment.  On the matter of “transfers” of firearms between household members, Cooke summarizes thusly:

If, for example, a gun owner leaves his home for more than seven days—leaving his firearms with his roommate, or gay partner, or landlord—he’ll be committing a felony that carries a five-year prison term.  And while married couples are exempted from falling afoul of that provision, the family exemptions apply only to recorded “gifts” and not to “temporary transfers.”

Don’t take that business trip of eight days without incurring the hassle  of taking all of your firearms with you (or the jail term in New York, if you do).  If you leave them behind, you and your spouse will become Schumer-felons on the eighth day.  Unless you formally “gifted” those weapons to your spouse, using the attendant paperwork to effect the transfer, before you left.  After which, your spouse better not leave for more than seven days without exercising one of those same options.

Cooke understates the problem of “transfers” of firearms between friends, though.  Cooke summarizes thusly:

[I]t would be illegal to lend a gun to a friend so that he can go shooting.  Want to give your pistol to your neighbor so he can pop down to the range for a few hours but don’t have time to go with him?  Sorry, better make sure you look good in orange.

But Schumer’s amendment says, in SEC. 202. FIREARMS TRANSFERS, paragraph (2)(D), that the transfer must occur at the firing range.  The owner still has to take the time to accompany the friend to the range and effect the “transfer” there.

Moreover, Schumer’s amendment requires that regulations be written to require a paper record be created for every transfer:

(ii) shall include a provision requiring a record of transaction of any transfer that occurred between an unlicensed transferor and unlicensed transferee….

Want to lend your piece to your friend for his use at the firing range?  Go with him to the range to make the weapon loan, and then fill out a ream of Federal paperwork concerning that loan.  Every time.

Welcome to Progressivism.

Schumer’s amendments can be viewed here and here.

Obama’s Other Face

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President Barack Obama is giving the appearance of wanting a bipartisan, compromise deal on our budget, deficit, and debt.  Is this real, this time, or just another version of the idle chit-chat and outright lies he’s passed off for the last five years?

The Wall Street Journal offers some metrics for assessing his behavior this time around.

  • Will he drop his demand for a tax increase outside of tax reform?  This has no chance of passing, and his continued insistence will poison the chance of any budget deal.  On tax reform he has willing GOP partners in Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and Ohio Senator Rob Portman, but the formula has to be lower rates in exchange for fewer loopholes.  Any additional revenue will have to come from the faster economic growth that will follow.
  • Will he agree to a flexible, generous guest-worker program on immigration?  The AFL-CIO wants a restrictive program with a political body determining when there is a labor shortage and how many visas can be granted in specific industries.  Anything close to the AFL-CIO plan won’t stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming to the US for work, but it ought to kill reform in Congress.
  • Will he put more than token entitlement reforms on the table?  As we wrote last week (“Obama’s Not So Grand Offer,” March 8), the President’s Medicare proposals don’t begin to solve the health-care spending problem.  Short of Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan, the only chance for reform worth the name is “comprehensive cost-sharing” that forces individuals to confront at least some of the costs of their own care.

These sound like a pretty good test to me.  It looks, from the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal, like he’s failed the test.

More Regulation Foolishness

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This one isn’t as egregious as the idiocy described at Coyote Blog‘s place, but it’s bad enough.

Think about the expanse of…something…between the sidewalk in front of your house and the curb of the street.  Some towns have the sidewalk and the curb immediately adjacent to each other, but in most urban areas, this is a three- to five-foot wide strip in which most folks plant grass as an extension of their yard.  Ron Finley, though, plants a garden in his strip (parkway, as it’s known in Los Angeles) in LA, and he advises others on how to do the same.

Except that there are LA regulations against just up and doing that.

City code forbids residents without special permits to plant much of anything besides grass in curbside areas, making many of the gardens illegal.

After receiving citations from the city, Mr Finley persuaded officials to waive the $400 permit fee he was supposed to pay to install drought-resistant, aesthetically pleasing plants up to 36 inches tall outside his own home.  But he is still trying to get the city to approve a greater variety of plants for these spaces.

Never mind that such gardens are highly patriotic,

Urban farming isn’t new, dating back at least to World War I, when the government encouraged Americans to become more self-sufficient by planting “liberty gardens[,]”

they’re against the rules.

In fairness to LA, though, there is an effort to get a little bit more sensible here.

A spokesman for the district’s city councilman, Herb Wesson, said city staffers are working on revising current policy to let residents make more use of the parkways [those strips] “where appropriate.”

It remains to be seen, though, what the city’s definitions of “where,” “appropriate,” and “more use” will turn out to be, as well as the rationale for same.

A Cascade

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…that needs to be encouraged.

Since the DC Circuit’s ruling that the Obama “recess” appointments to the NLRB were unconstitutional—the Senate actually being in session at the time—some 87 enterprises, including a few unions, are citing the ruling in their lawsuits to overturn a variety of the NLRB’s actions.  After all, with the board lacking a quorum, it was legally powerless to do anything at all.

The actions these enterprises are seeking include overturning/blocking union elections, undoing penalty payments to fired workers, halting subpoenas, and so on.

Here’s the cascade: 10 or more NLRB regional directors are argued also to be illegally appointed since they were seated by Obama’s unconstitutionally manned NLRB.  Extending from this, those regional boards’ decisions also must be voided, since those rulings were issued by illegally constituted regional boards.

Lafe Solomon, NLRB acting General Counsel, objects.

It’s already having a huge impact.  At every stage…we’re seeing attacks….

Indeed, as the WSJ reports,

The surge of challenges tied to the court ruling is overwhelming the NLRB, a federal agency that referees disputes between companies and employees.  Working through them is delaying resolution of cases alleging unfair labor practices, including whether workers can fairly hold union elections[.]

There’s no doubt the new workload is inconvenient to the Federal government.  That’s just too bad.  The inconvenience of our employee, the government, can never be an excuse for its behaving illegally.  Our employee, through the NLRB, brought the present inconvenience on itself through its patently illegal behavior.

The NLRB—Solomon—is merely blaming the employer for the employee’s own inconvenience.