A Bogus Beef is Swatted

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When Congress passed and President Joe Biden (D) signed the recent debt ceiling bill, one of the items included was a requirement for construction on the Mountain Valley Pipeline to proceed to completion and for the pipeline to begin operation. In conjunction with that, the bill removed from lower courts their jurisdiction over questions  regarding the natural gas pipeline.

The Fourth Circuit, when “environmentalists” got their cases to it, blocked construction while it sorted out whether it could rule on the matter.

The Supreme Court has sorted the matter out for the Fourth Circuit, at least temporarily: the pipeline will be completed with no further delay; the Court has lifted the Circuit’s stay.

The “environmentalists'” beef was this, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

stopping legal challenges before the Fourth Circuit violated the separation of powers clause of the Constitution, in effect giving Congress the power to decide the outcome of judicial proceedings.

This would be risible, were it not so cynical. No judicial proceeding is being predetermined by Congress. What has been specified, as allowed under our Constitution, is the jurisdiction of courts below the Supreme Court; in this case, that lower courts do not have jurisdiction to hear cases involving the MVP. Nor have the courts as a whole been denied jurisdiction; such cases still can come before the Supreme Court, should that Court choose to hear them.

This Will Be Instructive

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Of course, Israel’s newly enacted judicial reform bill, limited in reform as it is, will go before Israel’s Supreme Court; an initial hearing is set for September.

Israel’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that it would hear a petition challenging the constitutionality of a judicial overhaul law enacted earlier this week, setting up a possible showdown between the court and the government.
The court, however, didn’t issue an immediate injunction, as petitioners had requested.

It will be instructive to see the Court’s ruling and how anxious those Justices are to hang onto their power—political, especially, as well as judicial.

Talk About Violating Separation of Powers

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In an effort to impose costs incurred by progressive States in their efforts to build out their “green” energy infrastructure onto conservatively governed States, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) is demonstrating his allyship.

Schumer is directing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to stick red states with the bill.
Mr Schumer last week sent a letter demanding that FERC expedite a “strong transmission planning and cost allocation rule” to deliver more “clean power to Americans.”

In particular,

Mr Schumer writes that FERC should order states that “act as free riders” to pay for transmission upgrades. He also wants FERC to clarify its “backstop authority” to issue permits when states won’t. In other words, if West Virginians don’t want to pay for connecting New Jersey offshore wind farms to the grid, FERC should mandate that they pay anyway.

Quite apart from whether Schumer’s move is a good or bad idea for our energy industry or economically—it isn’t; it’s a terrible idea—this is a cynical, and I say deliberate, disregard for our Constitution’s separated powers structure for our Federal government.

In our system of governance, legislators, whether as a group or as individual Senators (or Representatives), don’t get to dictate to Executive Branch agencies what they must or must not do. If they want to influence such an agency, or the Executive Branch as a whole, the Congress as a whole must pass a bill that does so and get the President, the head of the Executive Branch, to sign off on it. Alternatively, the Congress as a whole must believe strongly enough in its move to muster a supermajority of legislators in each House to override the President’s veto.

That Schumer chooses to ignore that aspect of our Constitution is all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt of and disregard for our Constitution.

Us ordinary Americans need to remember this in 16 months.

American Worker Shortage

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have taken note of our nation’s workforce problem and its relation to our immigration problem.

The birth rate has been sliding for years, and it’s about to translate into a shrinking labor force. By 2040, according to a study out this week, America could have more than six million fewer working-age people than in 2022. The only way to counter the domestic trend is by attracting workers from abroad.

One thing that would help with this worker shortage would be to raise the Social Security full retirement age to 70, or even 75. When Social Security was first developed at a national level, some 85 years ago, full retirement was 65, the worker:retiree ratio was 7:1, and life expectancy in retirement was on the order of 7 years. Today, the worker:retiree ratio is less that 3:1 and falling, and life expectancy in retirement is on the order of 15-20 years. Raising the retirement age would increase the number of workers in the labor force.

That by itself, though, would be only a Band-Aid fix outside the strong benefit it would provide to Social Security survival.

What’s far more broadly needed is to build the “big, beautiful wall” all along our southern border, pierced every mile with a border crossing station through which legitimate immigrants and guest workers could enter (and the latter leave), with that combined with a vastly streamlined legal immigration system that removed visa quotas, sped up vetting of immigrant wannabes, and applied requirements that the immigrant wannabes have economic value to add to our nation.

Even that, though, would be insufficient as a stand-alone fix. Our tax regime and our welfare program badly want reform. With lower tax rates on individuals and businesses, there’s more incentive to work and to hire. That incentive can be further expanded by eliminating the areas of overlap among our welfare programs (which will include eliminating some programs and combining parts of others into single programs) and adding work requirements to remaining programs.

Biden’s Ongoing Betrayal of Ukraine

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The lede in the Wall Street Journal article says it all.

The slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian invaders is dimming hopes that negotiations for an end to the fighting could come this year and raising the specter of an open-ended conflict, according to Western officials.

The terms of negotiation have been clearly, and repeatedly, stated by Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy. President Joe Biden (D) has steadfastly ignored them, as he’s more terrified of Russian President Vladimir Putin than he is supportive of actual Ukrainian victory, territorial integrity, and national sovereignty.

And this, in the immediately following paragraph:

A potential stalemate would test President Biden’s stated strategy of pouring billions of dollars in military aid into Ukraine, to enable Kyiv to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength.

It’s a stalemate created entirely by slow-walking—and outright blocking—delivery of the weapons, ammunition, training, and logistic support the Ukrainian defense establishment needs to win quickly and decisively. It’s a stalemate proximately created by Biden with his refusal to deliver the weapons and ammunition the Ukrainians needed to begin their offensive last winter. Instead, Biden’s timidity in front of Putin delayed the Ukrainians’ start for months, transferring to the barbarian, instead, those months for him to prepare his present defenses.

Then there’s this bit of despicable-ness in the article:

The US stay-the-course strategy holds some risks, however.

There should be no such strategy, and there never should have been. There should have been—and there still should be, with very good effect—a constant acceleration of delivery to Ukraine so that it could have, and still could, win decisively and quickly. Instead, Biden is perfectly happy to have Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including women and children, bleed and die for Biden’s battle between democracy and authoritarianism.

It’s also an immediate Ukrainian battle for national survival, for Ukraine’s very existence. But Biden doesn’t care about that.