Government Funding of Speech

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PBS has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the latter’s moves to defund the service.

The system is centering its beef on two things: free speech and the potential to upend public television.

Last thing first. The risk of upending public television is wholly irrelevant. What’s relevant here is what our Constitution and the statutes cited in their suit say. What our Constitution says about PBS‘ business model or about any public business model is…nothing. There is no Constitutional right to a particular business model, and disruptions to models occur all the time, ranging from competitors to changing consumers to governments’ decisions to donate money or not.

PBS‘ crying about its business model is just cynical fear mongering.

PBS‘ free speech argument might have some force, but that one is centered on President Donald Trump’s (R) commentary regarding how little he likes PBS‘ own commentary and editorial decisions. However, Trump’s comments are irrelevant, also; what is relevant here, too, is what our Constitution and the cited statutes and Trump’s defunding EO say.

What our Constitution says about funding PBS is…nothing. There is no Constitutional obligation for our government to donate any money to it or to any public enterprise. The cited statutes create no such obligation. What Trump’s Executive Order says is this:

Government funding of news media in this environment [today’s, vs mid-last century when Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created] is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.
…
No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.  The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality:  the CPB may not “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.”

And this [emphasis added]:

The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS.  Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter.  What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.

In the end, whatever Government, or Trump, say about others’ speech, neither Government in general, nor the Trump administration in particular, are obligated to fund it; the only obligation is to not block it except under a few tightly circumscribed situations: lying under oath, false advertising, making threats or otherwise inciting violence, and the like. This is supported by PBS‘ own words:

After careful deliberation, PBS reached the conclusion that it was necessary to take legal action to safeguard public television’s editorial independence, and to protect the autonomy of PBS member stations[.]

What better way to safeguard public television’s independence and protect the autonomy of PBS member stations than to stop receiving corrosive government money, a point Trump made in the opening of his EO?

Why So Slow?

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The  International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran hasn’t been cooperating with inspection efforts and that it has continued to greatly enrich uranium, increasing its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February. That’s enough to produce 10 nuclear warheads. That compares with my estimate of the number of nuclear bombs that, if used and they worked, would destroy Israel as a nation and as a people: 4-5.

It would take only two weeks to enrich those ~400kg to the 90% purity needed to make a nuclear warhead.

The slowness problem as I see it:

The IAEA has said it can’t verify that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

And

The report is an important steppingstone in the European powers threat to reimpose the sanctions lifted from Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal.
…
European diplomats have said if Iran failed to cooperate with the agency, they would follow up Saturday’s report with a push to declare Iran in noncompliance with its obligations as a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. …
A noncompliance resolution could be voted on at the coming meeting of the IAEA board of member states, which starts June 9.

And this bit of unconscionable dithering:

European officials have said they will decide by the summer whether to press ahead with the so-called snapback of sanctions on Iran at the UN Security Council, if Tehran doesn’t start to fully cooperate with the nuclear probe. The option of reimposing the sanctions expires in October under the 2015 agreement.

9 June is a week off—half the time Iran would need to produce nuclear warheads. Then the European government men and women will dither and hem and haw through the summer before they think about taking action—and that predicated on whether Iran merely begins to cooperate. Then these Wonders would go argue the matter at the UN, knowing full well that the Security Council doesn’t have the votes among the veto-capable members. And: even were sanctions snapped back via a miraculous Security Council decision, it would take days to weeks to implement them, and it would take months for them to start to interfere with the Iranian economy—while never reaching the impact level necessary actually to stop enrichment and production.

Keep in mind these two things, also: the Iranian government men have sworn to destroy—exterminate—Israel, and those government men care not a single dinar about their own people; sanctions won’t be a practical impediment.

Time is nearly up. Iran needs to receive a kinetic elimination of its nuclear weapons development program, and it needs to receive it promptly.

Ending a Market Distortion

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The Trump administration is moving to eliminate tax credits for buying battery cars. The Left and their news writers don’t like this.

The removal of the credit, created to incentivize US consumers to purchase electrified vehicles, would likely lead to a drop in EV sales and production.

NSS. The credit was created explicitly to “encourage” purchase of battery cars. On the other hand, Lauren Fix, a co-host of Talk 2 DIY Automotive, has this:

Getting rid of this $7,500 tax credit should not impact [Tesla] sales. People buy Teslas because they like the product…. They know what their customers want, and those that like Teslas will continue to purchase that product.

And [phrase substitutions in the original, emphasis added]

Once that tax credit goes away, I’m expecting [electric vehicles] to be about 2% of sales. There will still be electric vehicle sales, Tesla will still survive, and [Elon Musk] will do well. And other brands will make what consumers want.

There’re hints there. Get rid of government-created market distortions, and the market will produce economically viable products at far less cost without our tax dollars added in. That product mix will include plenty of battery cars as soon as they become technologically and economically viable—and are what us consumers want at prices we’re willing to pay without taxpayer handouts.

It Doesn’t Matter

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The Supreme Court has said that the Trump administration can go ahead with its plans to deport 500,000 “migrants” from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, ruling that the administration can cancel, as a preparatory step, the Temporary Protected Status the Biden administration had granted those illegal aliens. It’s only a partial victory, though, as the Court merely stayed a lower court ruling that barred the TPS cancelation while the matter works through the courts on its merits.

Two activist Justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, centered her dissent on the premise of the

devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.

I’ll omit comment on the cynicism of the “noncitizen” characterization. Whether cancelation and potential subsequent deportation are good or bad policy, whether the removal is disruptive of the lives of those 500,000, these are political and social considerations, and so they are wholly irrelevant here. What does matter, all that is relevant, is whether the Trump administration is acting within the law. That is all that an American court can adjudicate; political and social considerations are the province of the political branches of our government and are explicitly outside the scope of our judicial branch. The judicial branch has no jurisdiction whatsoever on purely political/social matters.

All that matters to the judges, all that should matter, is what the stature before them and the relevant clauses of our Constitution say, not what judges think they should say.

That May Be

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The Trump administration is moving to withdraw the visas for People’s Republic of China students at American colleges and universities. There is concern that the loss of these students at those schools would negatively impact the schools’ bottom lines.

A Trump administration announcement Wednesday that it would “aggressively” begin revoking visas for Chinese students confronts universities across the US with the prospect of a hit to their finances and talent pool.

There is, of course, a hue and cry from the press and their Party politicians. For instance, “US experts,” one of the many childhood imaginary friends so often consulted by news writers and opinionators, claim

A big decline in Chinese enrollment could severely cut into schools’ bottom line [sic] and damage US competitiveness[.]

And this: the People’s Republic of China “buys”—the news writer’s term—

education-related services, including spending on tuition and books, from the US, at $14.3 billion in 2023, 21% more than the $11.8 billion spent by students from India, and more than six times as much as students from South Korea, another major supplier of international students to the US.

That may be, but it isn’t relevant. Stipulate even that most of the PRC’s students here are entirely on the up and up. The question is not how much money the PRC spends on our schools, it’s the risk from the many who are here to spy directly, or are here to learn our technologies and our social techniques in order to take them back to the PRC to use against us.

The breadth and depth of that risk makes the group of them not worth the trouble to vet—an imperfect process at its best. The schools can adapt and adjust their budgets.