This is Idiotic

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD) is putting the SAVE Act up for a vote this week, but he opposes using a talking filibuster to get it passed. Aside from not having the Republican votes and support for that—he’s right on that score; there are far too many timid Reluctant Republicans presently in the Senate—his rationale includes this bit:

In the end, you’re family and this is a team and we need the team to succeed, and you have differences of opinion along the way, and you know, you don’t always get 100% of what you want[.]

This is the idiotic part. The Progressive-Democratic Party Senators don’t agree that they’re part of any Senatorial family, nor are they members of any team but their own. They’re holding themselves apart, attempting to dictate to the Senate and impose their demands, regardless of what any other Senator—or us average Americans—might think. It’s only necessary to see their behavior vis-à-vis their shutdown of DHS over their personal demands regarding ICE to understand this.

When half the Senate believes itself not part of any family, when that half holds itself out as their own team, it’s idiotic for the other half to act like the whole is a family or that there’s some sort of teamwork available.

Lowered Going Away Fees

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The State Department has greatly reduced the cost to an American citizen of renouncing his citizenship.

The US State Department has cut the fee all the way down to $450 from $2,350.

Even though this just restored the I Quit Fee to its 2010 level, it’s still a big deal.

It’s also not all bad. The quitters shouldn’t let the door hit them in the fanny on the way out. We won’t miss them.

Even better: our nation will get a little bit more conservative and a little bit less Precious- and Progressive-infested with each departure, since those who love our nation, Left or Right, will be staying and continuing to work to improve it.

A Small Separate Matter

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A US Federal Circuit Court judge has been suspended from hearing additional cases, and she’s suing and looking to get the Supreme Court to hear the matter. Her suspension is unconstitutional, she argues.

She’s right, but my concern concerns this claim, which Just the News included at the end of its article. The claim is from the DC Circuit, which heard the judge’s initial appeal of her suspension:

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit last summer found its binding precedent barred review of her claims.

This is, to use a term of the art, idiotic. No precedent is completely binding, to the point of preventing and other outcome, on the court that issued the precedent. Every court that issues a precedential ruling is fully capable of modifying, overruling, or rescinding its own precedent. Even the judges of this famously liberal circuit court understand this.

The FJC Has Become Unreliable

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Federal Judicial Center writes a manual that it alleges—and too many judges and Justices accept at face value—to be an unbiased source of information to help judges make unbiased assessments about scientific testimony.

It has ceased to be that. The Wall Street Journal has written before that the FJC‘s manual had a thoroughly biased chapter on so-called climate science, and that when that chapter was exposed for the disinformation section that it was, the FJC removed the chapter.

But wait—there’s more.

In the climate science chapter, footnote 77 says “discussion of attribution research has been adapted, and, in some cases, excerpted from the authors’ prior publications on this topic.” A review by American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Roger Pielke Jr noticed that one of those earlier publications was co-authored with a third person who wasn’t named as an author in the climate chapter.
Mr Pielke says the mystery author is Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center [of which the late chapter’s lead author is a Senior Fellow]. But here’s the shocker. He is also of counsel at Sher Edling, a plaintiff firm pushing climate-related lawsuits. The firm has promoted dubious legal theories, suing fossil-fuel companies for failure to warn about climate effects and public nuisance over the “cost of weather induced events.”

As nakedly biased as this chapter was, and which the FJC removed only when exposed, and whose authors defended the bias of their chapter with no correction of that disinformation, the obvious question becomes: what other nakedly biased “educational information” is included elsewhere in its manual that hasn’t been discovered yet?

The FJC, by rendering itself unreliable, has made itself irrelevant. Judges and Justices need to rely on their native intelligence and on better—or at least more and more varied—advisors.

Most of all, judges and Justices need to limit themselves to the evidence, scientific or otherwise, actually presented at trial. Outside sources of information are irrelevant and should be disregarded, even when disguised as “information” by sources like the FJC manual.

An EV Mandate Lawsuit

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California has enacted regulations restricting automobile emissions that are far stricter than national requirements. The Federal government is suing on the theory that Federal regulations, along with Federal law, preempt State regulations. If successful, this would render California’s regulations illegal and without force. The Federal government should win this suit easily, even if California drags it out and into the Supreme Court: our Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme Law of the Land—is pretty dispositive.

On the other hand, no one is forcing the companies to build cars for sale in California in the first place. It’s expensive to do so, and those increased costs get spread across customers nationwide, because the car makers build all their cars to meet California’s requirements. Those car makers could both reduce their costs of production and so their prices charged the rest of their customers, if they simply built cars according to national standards and stopped selling in California. That would result in a increase in ex-California national sales that would swamp the per-car price reduction, which in turn would produce large aggregate increases in revenue, and profit.