Tag Archives: politics

Clinton State Department and Influence

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Shortly after Hillary Clinton left the Obama administration, the State Department quietly took steps to purchase real estate in Nigeria from a firm whose parent company is owned by a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, records obtained by Fox News show.

This should have been a routine expression of interest and possibly consummated (in the event, it never was) Department real estate transaction, as James Rosen noted in his piece.

However.

The principle in the proposed deal is Ronald Chagoury,

the brother and business partner, in the Chagoury Group, of Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-born businessman whom federal records show has donated between $1 and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The real estate in question is—was (and maybe still is; the exposed records are not all the story)—reclaimed land:

[A] staggeringly ambitious undertaking: the dredging of millions of tons of sand from the sea floor off Victoria Island and the creation of an estimated 3.5 square miles of new land, on which the Chagourys aim to establish what they call a “21st century city…for residential, commercial, financial and tourist development.”

As Citizens United President David Bossie described the thing,

A month after Bill Clinton visits a Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury-run land project in Nigeria, the US State Department wants to buy the same land.  Who could be so lucky?  A major donor to the Clinton Foundation, that’s who.

Hmm….

What’s also interesting about this story is that the rest of the media are spiking it.  Yes, it was a Fox News exclusive, but since Fox News broke the story on Wednesday, none of the rest of the media have picked it up: NBC, CBS, ABC—all are studiously ignoring it.

Again, hmm….

Another Obama/Clinton Outcome

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Russia now is running airstrikes against Syrian targets from an airbase in Iran.  Russia also is making use of these missions to exercise its Cold War military assets in the process, running many of these strikes with one of its long-range bombers, a TU-22 variant.  Other runs are being made with its newer Su-34 tactical bomber, and all of them are being escorted by Russia’s newer Su-30 and Su-35 fighter aircraft, giving all those pilots valuable live fire, combat experience.

This isn’t just the fact of a few runs, either—it’s a broad range of aircraft, with a commensurately broad range of support crews, and with all of that, a broad range of compatibility training with their Iranian hosts.

Of as great importance as that use of Iranian basing facilities is the fact that those Russian striking aircraft have to overfly Iraq or Turkey to get to Syria, and Russia has been working cooperation deals with both of those nations—even after the kerfuffle involving Turkey’s shootdown of a Russian fighter.

President Barack Obama’s (D) and Democratic Party Presidential candidate and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reset with Russia once again is proving enormously expensive.

What’s in Store

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…for the rest of us.  Kate Vershov Downing is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.  She is—or was until she resigned—a member of the Palo Alto, CA, Planning and Transportation Commission, the city’s central planning facility for all things a private citizen might want to do.  Here’s an excerpt from her letter of resignation from that Commission, via PJMedia‘s Tom Knighton.  (Unfortunately, she’s not completely learned the mugging lesson; she and her husband are moving to another California city.)

After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year—an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

There’s more—much more—in her letter of resignation.

It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction.

But Palo Alto’s fellow commission members, Liberal Planners all, either don’t care, don’t understand, or perhaps worst of all: they got theirs, and the rest can go hang.

Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

But the P&T Commission as a whole Knows Better and has steadfastly refused to allow private citizens, private enterprises, to do these simple things.

This Council has…charted a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development….

Because the Commission members are fortune tellers and seers; they Know what’s going to happen before it happens.

Downing closed with this bit of irony:

We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today.

This Know Better attitude is what we can look forward to nation-wide if the Progressive-Democrat Party wins the White House this year and with it the Senate.

If You Like Your Plan

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Aetna Inc will withdraw from 11 of the 15 states where it currently offers plans through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, becoming the latest of the major national health insurers to pull back sharply from the law’s signature marketplaces after steep financial losses.

This is playing out exactly as President Barack Obama (D) and his Democratic cronies knew it would ‘way back in 2010—they knew because health experts told them.  These experts advised the Democrats that mandating insurance purchases and paying the sick to get it (those Federal subsidies) while requiring plan providers (no longer can they be called insurers) to provide coverage to all at the same “low” price would emphasize the sick over the healthy getting coverage.  The experts also pointed out that this emphasis on sick customers relative to healthy ones would explode plan providers’ costs.  Obama and his, though, chose to disregard this advice and to go with what they wanted to hear: the self-serving huzzahs of the likes of AARP, who thought they could make money by fronting for the plan providers and collecting a piece of the resulting premium stream through referrals and reselling plans.

Recall, too, that Aetna has merger plans with Humana that Obama’s Department of Justice is suing to block on the speculative grounds that at some future date the new entity might engage in anti-competitive practices.  Never mind that the merger might also have allowed the combined insurers to be large enough to remain in Obamacare.

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration might know of some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that they might be interested in selling us.

A Thought on Chevron Deference

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Chevron Deference is a Supreme Court-created doctrine flowing from an appeal by Chevron Corporation to NRDC v Gorsuch, in which the Natural Resources Defense Council, during the Reagan administration, sued the EPA over a then-newly enacted regulation that allowed manufacturing plants to get pollution emission permits for new equipment that didn’t meet EPA emission requirements so long as the plant’s total emissions didn’t increase following the new equipment’s installation.

The Supreme Court found for the NRDC in Chevron’s appeal (Chevron USA v NRDC) and in the process created their Chevron Deference doctrine.  The heart of the doctrine, as articulated by Justice John Paul Stevens in writing for the majority, is this two-part test [citation and footnotes omitted]:

When a court reviews an agency’s construction of the statute which it administers, it is confronted with two questions.  First, always, is the question whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter; for the court, as well as the agency, must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress. If, however, the court determines Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue, the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation. Rather, if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.

“The power of an administrative agency to administer a congressionally created…program necessarily requires the formulation of policy and the making of rules to fill any gap left, implicitly or explicitly, by Congress.”

Eliding the specifics of the case and appeal, what Chevron Deference says in essence is that the Court owes Executive Branch offices considerable deference in those offices’ interpretations of statutes and the regulations those offices implement to enact those statutes: the Courts’ opening position should be that those offices are correct in their interpretations and implementations.  The problem, though, is in Stevens’ last sentence and in the sentence he quotes:

…whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute[,]

and

The power of an administrative agency to administer a congressionally created…program necessarily requires the formulation…of rules to fill any gap left, implicitly or explicitly, by Congress.

Here is what the Constitution has to say on…gaps:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Legislative powers—every single one of them—are the sole province of our United States Congress, and not any other body.  That Congress, too, consists solely of a Senate and House of Representatives; it does not include Executive Branch offices or Cabinets…or Agencies, administrative or otherwise.

What about those gaps in legislation?  All legislation, of necessity, fills gaps, whether those gaps exist de nihilo or they exist, or develop, as the law is seen in operation and/or as society evolves—else there’d be no legislation.  That includes, naturally, gaps in legislation.

When an (administrative) agency creates a rule to fill a gap in legislation that agency is authorized to administer, it is doing far more than formulating policy, or setting out rules for carrying into effect aspects of the legislation.  It’s legislating into that gap, which only Congress can (not may) do.

There’s also a problem with the concept of deference.  Regulating agencies are subordinate entities of the Executive Branch, and as such they cannot have any status but a subordinate one to each of the three branches of our Federal government.  From the other side of this relationship, the judiciary is a coequal branch of our Federal government, equal in status, hierarchy, and power and authority to each of the other two.  As such, Courts owe no deference at all to either of the other two branches, much less to agencies subordinate to either of those branches.  The mindset that the Courts do owe deference is a dangerous one.

The Chevron Deference doctrine is wrong.  The right answer for a Court in adjudicating a regulation has a different second step:

First, always, is the question whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If the intent of Congress is clear, that is nearly the end of the matter; for the court, as well as the agency, must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress—so long as that intent is implemented in a constitutionally permitted manner, for if it has not then regardless of intent, the statute cannot stand.  If, however, the court determines Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue, the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, or allow an administrative interpretation to stand. Rather, if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the answer for the court is to return the matter to the legislative (political) branch of the government so it can address what is strictly a legislative and a political question.