Tag Archives: government

Speculative Lawsuits

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A collection of Leftist State Attorneys General led by New York’s Letitia James has filed an amicus brief in an existing suit against the Federal government over President Donald Trump’s (R) move to defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That might leave American banks without a government watchdog, they claim in their brief.

Furthermore, [t]he AGs didn’t accuse any banks of wrongdoing. These AGs further claim

The absence of a functioning CFPB…creates a regulatory vacuum even greater than what existed before the Great Recession. The very large financial institutions that compete with state-chartered banks will have carte blanche to loosen their regulatory compliance and profit accordingly.

Further, as cited by The Wall Street Journal,

The AGs argued that the administration is creating a regulatory gap that will encourage the largest banks to game the system by taking a more lax approach, while smaller state-chartered banks will still be subject to state supervision.

Might. Will have. And those two possibles in the latter: “will encourage” and “will still be.” These are purely speculative, with no harm being alleged. No actual wrong doing, in so many words, is being alleged. Basing a law suit, or even an amicus, on speculation about an unknown future—however likely plaintiffs might claim that future to be—is anathema in the American legal system. The requirement to allege—credibly—actual harm already done prevents a potful of frivolous, of politically motivated, of purely fee-seeking lawsuits where no harm exists, even where no harm is likely to exist in some nebulous future.

The Leftist AGs’ move is typical of the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ lawfare business.

This is yet another reason why it’s so difficult for us average Americans to have nice things in our nation. It’s time to start requiring plaintiffs to pay the defendants for the costs of lawsuits which plaintiffs bring and lose, and to require those providing amicus briefs on the side of plaintiffs to share in paying those costs.

Presidential Authority

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President Donald Trump (R) is moving to reassert a President’s authority over the Executive Branch of our Federal government, lately signing an Executive Order that imposes new White House supervision over so-called independent agencies.

The editors of the WSJ center their support for this on

Article II’s command that the President “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” If Congress has charged such agencies with enforcing laws, then the President should be able to supervise how they do their job.

They’re right as far as they go, but the matter is far more basic than that. The first sentence of Section 1 of our Constitution’s Article II lays out the foundational nature of an American Presidency:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Our Executive Branch is run by a single executive officer, not by a committee of board members, especially not by an executive and a number of other executives operating independently of him and of each other.

This is the unitary executive, as some legal scholars term it. It’s long past time it got restored. Trump is entirely correct in this matter.

Lazy Congress

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This chart, via DOGE, shows the number of regulations that have been written for each law passed by Congress, just since 2010. (Right click on the image and from the drop-down menu choose “Open Image in New Tab” to get a bigger image.)

Go to the link, and mouse over the bars in the graph to get amplifying data beyond the appalling data visible in the image.

This shows how non-specific Congress’ bills are, and yet the President signs them into law. This laziness by Congress and the too-laissez faire attitude of Presidents are unconscionable. Congress needs to write laws to be complete and specific, rather than outsourcing specifity to Executive Branch entities, and Presidents need to veto these too-vague bills.

How to Handle Federal Lands

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Terry Anderson, of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has some thoughts on how best to handle Federal lands, a unaggregated expanse of some 640 million acres, 28% of US land. In their essence, his ideas are to handle those lands in a business-like manner.

…three options: raise the price of goods and services (timber, minerals, visits to national parks), reduce labor costs and liquidate money losers.

He’s right, but those are the second steps that need to be taken, not the first step.

Twenty-eight percent is far too much of American land to be retained by the Federal government. The necessary first step is the transfer of those lands to their respective States.

Anderson’s ideas, fleshed out some in the fulness of his op-ed, does recommend [t]urn[ing] ownership of some federal lands over to the states, but that’s wholly inadequate. The vast majority of those lands should be turned over.

The amount that might be retained by the Federal government, to suggest a percentage for opening discussion, would be less than 5%, and the retention purposes might be limited to protecting some historical and scenic areas for public park use, to finishing cleaning up Superfund sites of their contamination—following which those sites should be returned to the States—to maintaining (and I say expanding) our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to siting military installations, and to setting up, or finishing, nuclear waste storage sites.

The Federal government has no legitimate interest in withholding from State and private use so huge an expanse of our land. Selling it to the States and to private citizens would raise funds for paying down our national debt, too. The modern equivalent of a dollar an acre comes to mind for a suitable sale price—that original one dollar price wasn’t so much for raising money—though it did for that then small Federal budget—than to transfer the land to owners who, by paying for it, would have some incentive to make economic-based use of it.

The retained land then should be managed IAW business principles.

Bonehead Idea

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Some Federal district judges, liberal activist judges for the most part, have issued temporary restraining orders against many of President Donald Trump’s (R) and his DOGE facility’s moves to root out empirically identified fraudulent and abusive spending and to physically downsize the Federal government through terminating Federal employees and eliminated whole agencies—the CFPB, for instance.

As a result of that,

Several House Republicans are preparing articles of impeachment against the federal judges who are blocking some of [those] President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s key policies.

This is a textbook example of a bonehead idea.

Arizona Republican Congressman Eli Crane and Georgia Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde present the typical arguments for impeachment:

Our case for impeaching Judge Engelmayer is basically that he’s an activist judge trying to stop the Trump administration from executing their, you know, Article 2 powers to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed

and

I’m drafting articles of impeachment for US District Judge John McConnell, Jr. He’s a partisan activist weaponizing our judicial system to stop President Trump’s funding freeze on woke and wasteful government spending. We must end this abusive overreach

respectively.

It’ll be hard enough to prove, even in the House, much less at Senate trial, that these rulings are out of bounds for an Article III judge. Even were these Congressmen able to make the case that these judges, by their rulings, are violating their oaths of office—a certainly impeachable and convictable offense—it’ll be nearly impossible to get the two-thirds vote required for Senate conviction with so many Progressive-Democratic Party Senators in the Senate, given how knee-jerk opposed as they are to anything Trump or Republican.

In the end, these judges’ behaviors will be tacitly codified by the impeachments’ failures in the Senate, as those failures will lend credence to the judges’ naked activism. That would be even worse than the judges’ individual rulings.

The better answer is to exercise patience—something Republicans lack—and see the matters through the courts to the eventual appellate or Supreme Court rulings in their favor that will occur in the large majority of the cases.