Tag Archives: law

California’s Problem

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Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law a resolution rescinding the Biden administration’s EPA’s last-minute waiver for California to mandate more stringent rules for gasoline and battery cars than the Federal government’s—and that EPA’s—rules. That Biden EPA waiver allowed California to mandate only battery cars to be sold in California; average Americans who also are citizens of California would be required to buy battery cars after 2035 if they wanted another car, whether they wanted a battery car or not. The interstate market for transportation vehicles being what it is, that would have been tantamount to a requirement for all of us average Americans all across our nation to buy only battery cars after 2035.

Hours later, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom led a lawsuit against the Trump administration asking a Federal court to find the waiver rescission…unconstitutional.

Newsom called it “the latest illegal action by a president who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.”

Newsom’s Progressive-Democrat State AG Rob Bonta:

We will continue to fiercely defend ourselves from this lawless federal overreach[.]

How dare our elected representatives act against the wishes of California? That’s illegal.

It’s plainly unlawful for Congress to pass a national law of which the State of California disapproves.

Newsom and his syndicate bleat about an allegedly lawless Trump administration. The real lawlessness, though, is Newsom’s claim that a waiver granted by a government agency cannot be rescinded by the elected representatives of the United States, the Congress and the President.

That’s lawlessness, and it’s instructive of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s use of a Newspeak Dictionary to cloak their claims. This is what we can look forward to the moment the Progressive-Democratic Party returns to power.

Bad Idea

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Socialist Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Angus King (I, ME) are proposing a new law that would

ban pharmaceutical manufacturers from using direct-to-consumer advertising, including social media, to promote their products.

This is a bad idea. Not just singly bad; it’s bad on three grounds.

One is the ground of free speech. We don’t get to ban speech based on who’s doing the speaking any more than we get to censor speech based on what’s being said. That includes pharmaceutical companies that want to advertise their wares, so long as they don’t misrepresent them. Truth in Advertising laws, though, are agnostic regarding both advertisers and products.

Our nation went over who is allowed to advertise when lawyers wanted to engage in direct advertising, including via television ads, lots of years ago. Our courts, and we as a nation, came down on the side of free speech when we all decided lawyers advertising was entirely jake. The worst that got us is ads like The Texas Hammer‘s.

It’s a bad idea because it’s insulting to us average Americans. We are not as droolingly imbecilic as these two Wonders of the Left insist that we are. We are fully capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to take pharmaceutical company’s word at face value or our doctor’s advice. Certainly the advertisements can lead us to peppering our doctors with questions, but we should be doing that, anyway, regarding his diagnoses and proposed treatments. That some of us are foolish enough to remain willfully ignorant about our own health and blithely (and blindly) accept our doctor’s word unquestioningly is between us and our doctors. It’s no excuse for government censoring other parties.

That brings me to the third reason this is a bad idea. It’s not government’s role to protect us from ourselves, or even from each other except on criminal matters. Government’s role is to protect us from external criminal elements and threats to our nation as a whole. It’s not even the Federal government’s sole role to protect us from domestic criminal elements—that is primarily the role of each of our several State governments, with help from the Feds only when invited in by the States.

This is a move that only Socialists and their monarchist Progressive-Democratic Party ally could love.

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.

An Irrelevant Argument

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Or it should be.

Recall that the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has canceled Harvard University’s authorization to enroll foreign students over that school’s decision to not bother in any serious way to protect the safety and free speech rights of Jewish students and to keep enrolling “students” who then engage in anti-American and pro-terrorist riots, building seizures, and vandalism, along with its refusal to expel and bring charges against those “students” already enrolled who’ve engaged in those behaviors. These school administration decisions could rise to the level of civil rights law violations, similar as they are, to Columbia University’s decisions which has resuled in that school being charged by HHS with civil rights law violations.

Harvard’s situation:

Harvard enrolls about 7,000 international students—more than 25% of the student body—and like many US universities it relies on their tuition payments, which are often full-fee.

As Noem noted,

It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments[.]

This echoes SecState Marco Rubio’s acknowledgment that even getting a visa (student or otherwise) in the first place is a privilege and not a right. Both acknowledgments also carry the flip side that our government has no obligation to grant visas and no obligation to authorize colleges or universities to enroll foreign students.

Still, Harvard has filed an appeal to Noem’s decision and is seeking an injunction, trying to get a judge to once again dictate from the awesome heights of a district court knoll top what a coequal branch of our government can do regarding foreign policy. In his letter “to the community,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote that the cancelation,

imperils the future of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams[.]

This is both cynically specious and wholly irrelevant. That Harvard has designed its business model to be so dependent on foreign student enrollment in no way obligates our government to allow such enrollment. Further, in no way do future “thousands of students” or “scholars” have any intrinsic right to a student visa, or any other form of visa.

The DHS decision here certainly should serve as a warning to others at colleges and universities, and at any other institution or enterprise, that coming into our nation for any purpose is a privilege and not a right, and that granting such a privilege incurs an obligation on the grantee to obey all of our laws, including the free speech rights of others and the sanctity of property, whether privately held or government held.

There is no part of Harvard’s argument that is relevant to the case. What matters—all that matters—is what does the law say? Is this cutoff permissible under existing law?

If the cutoff is permissible, then a non-activist judge who obeys our Constitution and his oath of office, must deny the injunction request. Harvard should have two basic choices: shape up and stop coddling rioters and vandals, or work to change the law.

Unfortunately, the case went before just such an activist judge. Federal District Judge Allison Burroughs has issued Harvard’s requested injunction staying the DHS cancelation.