Another Progressive-Democrat Foolish Lawsuit

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Blue State AGs don’t like President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order imposing a $100,000 fee on H1B visa applicants.

A group of Democratic state attorneys general on Friday filed a challenge to President Donald Trump’s imposition of a $100,000 fee to apply for an H-1B visa.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, lead AG on the case, based it on this:

Oregon’s colleges, universities and research institutions rely on skilled international workers to keep labs running, courses on track and innovation moving forward. This enormous fee would make it nearly impossible for these institutions to hire the experts they need, and it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended. This threatens Oregon’s ability to compete, educate, and grow.

It may make colleges, universities, and research institutions efforts to hire certain skilled workers more difficult. That, though, is a business model question, not a legal one. No enterprise has an inherent right to pursue the business model of its choice, and government has no obligation whatsoever, to comport laws or regulations to the requirements of any business model. Those entities must alter their business models to accommodate changing legal environments, just as they must with changing market environments.

The only thing threatening [Oregon’s] ability to compete, educate, and grow is those institutions’ insistence on their entrenched models as they are, rather than adapting them. The question of whether the EO goes beyond Congressional intent is a separate matter, and the AGs’ claim of that is wholly conclusory.

This frivolous and foolish lawsuit is just another instantiation of Party’s dislike of all things Trump, independent of merit or lack regarding a Trump move.

Dueling Mischaracterizations

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David Kennedy, Stanford University Emeritus Professor, responded to The Wall Street Journal‘s Holman Jenkins in Kennedy’s Letters letter in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Kennedy said Jenkins mischaracterized his book regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s handling of government during the Great Depression.

Mr Jenkins has me arguing that “Franklin D Roosevelt didn’t end the Depression, he used it to enlarge the federal government.” True enough but too reductive.
Roosevelt didn’t simply “enlarge” the federal government; he right-sized and reformed it for the conditions of modern society. His initiatives rescued and dramatically upgraded capitalism, as witnessed by the unmatched performance of the US economy in the post-World War II decades. The New Deal gave to the exceptionally fortunate “greatest generation” a scaffolding of institutions and practices that reduced risk in sector after sector of American life, brought stability and predictability to millions, nurtured the shared prosperity and consequent trust that ended the Jim Crow era, and positioned the US for world leadership to century’s end and beyond.

Kennedy’s own mischaracterizations begin with his Roosevelt didn’t simply “enlarge” the federal government; he right-sized and reformed it for the conditions of modern society. This is his cynical arrogance of presenting that claim as though it’s received fact rather than the matter of opinion that it so plainly is.

Kennedy’s other serious mischaracterization is his risible claim that Roosevelt’s New Deal created the conditions for US leadership in producing global prosperity and stability. This is a just-as-cynical omission of the simple fact that in the aftermath of WWII and the war’s global destruction of assets and of lives (the latter far beyond the merely killed), during those decades of the Greatest Generation, the US was the only economy in the world that could function. Nearly any “scaffolding” would have put us in the global economic driver seat.

How much better could we and the world have done without Roosevelt’s wage and price controls, still intact today in one form or another (minimum wage laws directly controlling wages, and price controls indirectly in place with Roosevelt-populated Supreme Court rulings like Wickard v Filburn, which made it illegal for farmers to grow for their personal (and so wholly intrastate) consumption without counting it in their interstate commercial production, a ruling that also called a farmer’s strictly intrastate commercial production a part of interstate commerce)?

Roosevelt’s expansion both artificially created jobs for a bloated civil service, it straitjacketed our free market capitalist economics.

Some Arithmetic Regarding Social Welfare

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This arithmetic centers on the Western canonical welfare State of France, but the lessons apply to us also.

Today there are 39 seniors for every 100 working-age people in France. But by 2070 working-age French will account for only 50% of the population, down from more than 55% in 2023.

That works out to ratios of 1.8 working age persons for every retiree and 1 working age person per retiree, respectively. Each working age person in 2070 will have a retiree on his payroll whether he wants that or not.

That’s the outer bound.

[M]any of France’s working-age ranks aren’t actually working. The French unemployment rate was 7.7% in October 2025….

That reduces today’s ratio to 1.6 actually working person for each retiree. That’s an outer bound on the burden actually laded onto the worker. Those working age unemployed, those 5+ of the 100 who are unemployed, are being supported him, too.

Our demographics are only a couple of generations behind France.

Red Tape Redundancy

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal was rightly concerned about red tape redundancy, but he missed the mark on one form of it.

One can’t work with children without undergoing specific training and, in many states, extensive background checks. There’s value in those measures, but how about some coordination?
While living in New Jersey, I was fingerprinted for my teaching license in Somerset County and, later, in Middlesex County, despite having permanent certification in New York. I was then fingerprinted for gun purchases, coaching recreational soccer, and teaching Sunday school. At some point, it all becomes too exhausting.

There’s nothing redundant about being checked via immutable personal characteristics at each of those application points. Fingerprinting is an important way of determining that the person doing the applying is who he claims to be. Those multiple applications may or may not be by the same person.

Having been IDed by fingerprints and confirmed to be the same person across those multiple applications, though, there should be no need to repeat the rest of the applications beyond what’s unique to the function being applied for. Those repeats are what would be redundant and want better coordination.

Academic Hysteria

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Texas Tech University’s Chancellor has published a decision tree/flow chart regarding the inclusion or exclusion of advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice in the courses the university teaches, and the ideologs in the professorial population are in an uproar. The decision tree (see the link) clearly reins in the heretofore unfettered professors’ ability to “teach” whatever ideology they felt like and requires them, instead, to show the relevance of their material, first to the course and second to the purpose of the course.

The reaction of the ideologs in that population is hysterical. Andrew Martin, Texas Tech Professor of Drawing and Painting, for instance (although, to be sure, at least he has the integrity to go on the record with his concerns):

This is disastrous. History is full of examples of what happens when authoritarian governments gain control of the educational institutions of a country or a society. That is the death of freedom.

No, today’s examples, rather, center on the results of one-sided, extremist control of education. The Chancellor’s move is a restoration of balance and of a focus on actual education.

Martin’s hysteria continued with this bit:

[I]f I welcome a student, whose identity is controversial, to my classroom, and they make work about that identity, is that advocacy? Does that mean I’m subject to disciplinary action?

The decision tree plainly deals only with what the professor professes; there is no mention of what the students do in his classroom. In Martin’s own example, his concern should be with technique and symbolism in the student’s art effort, not with the professor’s approval or disapproval of the art’s content. That’s clear to anyone not overcome with hysteria over being reined in and returned to a focus on the material he’s hired to teach.