There Are Three Branches

Posted on by
Reply

Under our constitutional Federal government there are exactly three branches—judiciary, legislative, and executive—neither more nor fewer. The legislative—our Congress—can, and does, create departments (other than the Constitutionally mandated State and Defense (however titled)) and agencies within the Executive Branch. Our Constitution names the President as the Chief Executive of the Executive Branch with sole responsibility for enforcing the laws that Congress enacts.

Whether Congress claims this or that agency to be “independent” or not, all of those agencies, by being within the Executive Branch, are—must be—under the control of the President, which control includes the hiring and firing of all of an agency’s employees, and the firing aspect of that includes politically appointed employees who must be confirmed by the Senate after a Presidential nomination in order to fully take office.

That firing authority was finally acknowledged by the Supreme Court in its just released ruling in Trump v Slaughter, which explicitly overruled the 91 years prior wrongly decided Humphrey’s Executor v US.

William Galston demurred from that ruling in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

While the chief justice is right that the FTC’s executive functions have expanded since 1935, it hasn’t ceased to exercise legislative and judicial functions as well. The FTC isn’t simply part of the executive branch; it was designed to be independent. It’s hard to see why Congress can’t mandate special firing procedures for such hybrid entities.

The FTC isn’t simply part of the executive branch; it was designed to be independent. That’s Galston’s error. There are only those three branches of our government; “independent” agencies cannot exist outside of those three, and being within one or another of them, they cannot be independent. Nor can they carry out, from within one of them, any of the functions of either of the others—that would eliminate the separation of powers that is at the core of our government’s structure.

Galston made this argument, citing James Madison in Federalist No 47:

Separation of powers doesn’t mean the branches of government have no role in any other branch. It means that when “the same hands” control more than one branch of government, the fundamental principles of a free Constitution are subverted.

Madison was right, but Galston’s usage is a non sequitur. “The same hands” do not control more than one branch of government except when one branch dictates to the others how they must go about their constitutionally mandated duties, as Congress attempts to do when it sets about hamstringing the President’s control over the entities in his branch.

In particular, Congress

  • cannot create a legislative agency, place it with the Executive Branch, and then tell the President he must do what that agency requires
  • cannot create a judicial agency, place it within the Judiciary Branch, and then omit the judges from that oversight, leaving that task to the Executive) Branch—to the President
  • cannot reach into either of those other branches and dictate to its chief how he must carry out any oversight
  • must place an agency with judicial functions inside the judiciary branch and leave the entirety of oversight to the Chief Justice
  • must place an agency with executive functions inside the Executive Branch and leave the entirety of oversight to the President
  • must keep an agency with legislative functions inside the Legislative Branch. Only then can Congress specify how oversight must be carried out. Of course, a Legislative Branch agency would have no enforcement capability; that is the sole province of the Executive.

Congress exercises all the control over the Executive Branch it needs and is allowed to have via its constitutionally created ability to control the funds available to the Executive and any of his Departments and agencies, and through the oversight hearings it uses to inform itself of Executive Branch doings.

Record Profits

Posted on by
Reply

Or at least near-record and with room to rise a bit more. These make those companies obvious targets for the Left and for the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, all of whom view those profits as immoral and needing to be confiscated by Government or as public goods needing to be confiscated managed by Government or both.

The net profit margin for companies in the S&P 500 rose to 14.8% in the first quarter, according to FactSet. This marks the highest net margin, a measure of the profit generated from every dollar of revenue, reported by the index since the data provider began tracking this metric in 2009. The previous peak of 13.2% was set just a quarter earlier.
It isn’t just tech companies, either. In the first quarter, multiple sectors including financial services and industrials reported net margins above their five-year averages.

Those companies would do well to pass some of those profits on to uses of their choosing, rather than just sitting on them. At the least, the companies need to state openly their plans for the future of the business and its accumulating profits and then demonstrably execute on those plans.

Those uses and plans might or might not make good business sense in the economic world, but it would make good business sense in the political world where the now-openly socialist Progressive-Democratic Party reigns over us.

Not Contentment or Fulfillment…

Posted on by
Reply

…but security in their property ownership, along with their life and liberty, from which contentment and fulfillment may well result. A letter-writer in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal has made that confusion. He wrote, in response to William Galston’s What “Created Equal” Means in America,

One of the inalienable rights with which all Americans are endowed equally by their creator is “the pursuit of happiness.” The operative word is “pursuit.” No person has a right to happiness, but all have the right to seek contentment and fulfillment by striving to live decent and dignified lives.

That’s not the happiness the inalienable right to pursue which that’s acknowledged in our Declaration of Independence, though. John Adams had made that clear beforehand in his Preamble to the Massachusetts constitution:

All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

The natural, essential, and unalienable rights of life and liberty and of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property creates the capacity for contentment and fulfillment. The latter does not exist without the formers’ prior existence.

There’s a Reason for That

Posted on by
1

As The Wall Street Journal‘s astute editors noticed, less than a dozen—10, by their count of the fingers of two hands and no toes of either foot—members of the Progressive-Democratic Party caucus in the House of Representatives are willing to oppose the Democratic Socialists of America agenda. My count via the thumbs of just one of my hands (or maybe the social finger of that hand), only one Progressive-Democratic Party Senator is willing to oppose the DSA agenda.

It’s an agenda of government control of our larger businesses (but it won’t stop there), government control of private property, government given (and so able to be taken away) national medicine, ever rising taxes because…”necessity,” and political rather than economic globalization through entirely open borders and an end to deportation of illegal aliens (there being no such thing in the DSA ideology).

Less than a dozen across our Congress. Eleven, out of an aggregate of 255 Progressive-Democrat Congressmen. Those 244 Progressive-Democrat Congressmen demonstrate pretty conclusively that the Progressive-Democratic Party is an overtly socialist party, the direction in which it began moving with the election of Barack Obama as President just 18 years ago, with the pace sharply accelerating after the election of the “squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley just eight years ago.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is rapidly and enthusiastically coming out of the closet, assimilating the DSA (or being swallowed by DSA), and openly asserting that DSA political and economic positions are its own. Those policies are what Party will attempt to inflict on our nation if it gains majorities in the House and Senate after this fall’s elections.

An Ability to Hold Two Opposing Thoughts Simultaneously

Posted on by
Reply

The ability to do that while continuing to function effectively is one aspect of intelligence. Two Supreme Court decisions, just released, illustrate that.

It took 91 years, but the Supreme Court on Monday abandoned the fiction of independent agencies (Trump v Slaughter). Yet in a somewhat paradoxical decision (Trump v Cook), the Court enshrined the Federal Reserve’s independence despite its exercise of vast executive powers.

It’s not all that paradoxical, just seemingly contradictory, for the Court to have reached those two decisions. In the one, the Court acknowledged what should have been an obvious truth: agencies within the Executive Branch are creatures of and exclusively respondent to the head of the Executive Branch, the President. From that, it should be—and should have been all along—obvious that employees of those branches, including politically appointed employees, serve at the pleasure of the Executive Branch head, and so they are fireable by that head. Congress’ desire to make the agencies and agency employees independent of their boss is plainly unconstitutional.

With one exception. The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States also is an Executive Branch agency, yet the Court, for good or ill, carved out an exception to the who works for whom rule and said “not yet” regarding President Donald Trump (R) firing a Fed governor without first providing notice and opportunity to respond. This ruling is, for good or ill, a temporary move intended to preserve the central bank’s political independence and leave it to deal with monetary matters without political distraction. (It’s temporary because, contrary to what overwrought pressmen, disagreeing politicians, and Court dissents say, the Supreme Court did not rule that Trump could not fire the governor. It only said not yet; the underlying case must make its way through the courts before a final ruling can be made.)

And the Court continues to function effectively.