Category Archives: regulation

Opening Schools—Two Schools of Thought

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has ordered all schools—private and public—not to open until his Omnipotent State declares it safe to do so. This seems at the behest of California’s teachers unions, which fear competition from private schools—and which are losing that competition, as they’ve been doing for some years.

Catholic school tuition, for instance, costs $1,000-$4,000 per student less than the union public schools, and they provide better education—academic, discipline, moral values. And they’re ready, willing, and anxious to open on schedule.

In contrast, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (D) has sprung some of his discretionary education funds to cover school costs for families whose kids went to private schools last year, but for whom the Wuhan Virus situation has hammered their finances this year.

What’s really at stake? The virus risk to the kids in K-12 is vanishingly small: they’re simply unlikely to get infected, and among those who do, the severity of their infection very usually is slight.

The science is uncertain on how infectious the kids are when they are infected but asymptomatic. They appear not to be mutually infectious; the uncertainty is how infectious they are to the adults around them, the teachers, teacher aides (a relatively recent, and seeming featherbedding, addition to staff), administrators and staff, janitors. The data, though, are leaning increasingly in the direction of not very infectious.

There are occasional moves to stagger in-person schooling with half the students present some days, the other half the other days, at socially distanced desks, and with virtual schooling (a disastrous failure last spring, but maybe practice teaches) for the kids at home on those alternate days.

This is unnecessary. The kids are as safe from each other with the Wuhan Virus as they are with colds and flu. Bring them back.  All of them.

While the risks remain uncertain, it would be cumbersome but easily and straightforwardly doable to socially distance the teachers from the students in their classrooms. They spend a fair amount of their class time on the chalkboards at the front of the rooms, anyway. Or could easily go back to that.

Teachers unions holding out for deus ex cashina (I wish I’d thought of the term, but it’s the WSJ editors’) State and Federal interventions are acting in their petty interests rather than the interests of our children. Easier said than done, but these unions need to be decertified. Their selfish greed borders on child abuse.

Foolishness

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The United Teachers Los Angeles union put out a paper earlier this month, and among the union’s claims is this one”

Police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.

Wow.

There are thousands of blacks killed or traumatized and families traumatized by other blacks every year. Police violence causes more black deaths and trauma than that?

Thousands of black babies murdered in the womb every year. Police violence causes more black deaths and trauma than that?

The UTLA is insulting the intelligence of all of us with this…foolishness. The UTLA is especially demonstrating its soft bigotry of low expectations with this insult to the intelligence of blacks.

The UTLA doesn’t care a fig about the welfare of blacks or of black children or of any of our children or of any of us. The union just wants money.

Full stop.

More Disingenuosity

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The Supreme Court has ruled—7-2—in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other organizations. The Court upheld the Trump administration’s rule exempting these employers from an Obamacare requirement to provide insurance coverage that includes contraception.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court:

We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

…this Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets.

Ginsburg is being disingenuous in this. Contraceptives are dirt cheap in Walmart and drug stores. It’s no great burden for “women workers” to pay for contraception “out of their own pockets.” If it’s a burden to seek “contraceptive coverage” from other sources, that’s the direct result of Obamacare driving up the cost of all coverage.

Ginsburg is being sexist in this. Condoms are nearly as cheap and even more widely available. But Ginsburg is blithely assuming that contraception is solely the responsibility of the woman.

Revolution

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On the eve of the 2008 Presidential election, then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama (D) bragged

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

In 2015, then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D) insisted

[D]eep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.

Current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is declaring via tweet

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.

Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI) all are calling for the elimination of police departments. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) are demanding nakedly wealth redistributive tax codes.

Progressive-Democrat supporters are busily assaulting, attempting to tear down (and too often succeeding) statues to our Founders and to heroes who supported and fought for equality under law for all Americans—statues to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln (including a statue celebrating the emancipation and Lincoln’s welcome of a rising, newly freed black to his new life), Ulysses Grant, Frederick Douglass, Mathias Baldwin, the Shaw Memorial.

Now we have this, from Jamal Chapel:

We need a revolution in order to overthrow this system, bring a whole new communist world into being that can actually ensure the rights of black and brown people.

This is the fundamental change we’re in for if we elect a Progressive-Democrat government. And not just this fall. Ever.

A Judicial Error

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The Supreme Court has ordered a restructuring of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: its single director, removable only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, among other things, was an unconstitutional abridgment of Executive Branch authority.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, said that the

setup meant the CFPB’s director was unaccountable to the executive branch, creating an unconstitutional diminishment of presidential power.
“The CFPB’s single-director structure contravenes this carefully calibrated system by vesting significant governmental power in the hands of a single individual accountable to no one[.]”

And then,

To address the problem, the court changed the CFPB removal provision to make the director subject to presidential removal for any reason.

That’s the error. The Court’s position of the unconstitutionality of the CFPB’s structure is entirely correct. The Court’s remedy is entirely wrong.

With this ruling, the Court has unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, a thing it does far too often for far too long.

The correct remedy would have been to strike the CFPB entirely as unconstitutional and return this inherently political matter to where it belongs: the political branches of the Federal government, Congress and the Executive Branch for new legislation. And to We the People, the owner-boss of our Government, both the two political and the judicial branches.