Tag Archives: politics

A Couple of Supreme Court Rulings

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The Supreme Court announced its ruling in a case centered on Chevron Defense, and rescinded that precedent [citations omitted].

The only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” is for the Court to leave Chevron behind.

And

Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency acts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

The Court also announced its ruling, a couple of days prior, in SEC v Jarkesy that the SEC—government regulatory agencies in general—seeking monetary punishments must do so through an Article III court and a jury trial. As summarized in The Wall Street Journal,

The Court’s decision means most complaints by agencies seeking penalties will have to be charged in federal courts, where defendants enjoy more procedural rights including to legal discovery. Agencies also won’t benefit from a home-court advantage. They win nearly every case in their own tribunals, as you might expect.

And, especially decisively, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court wrote

A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator. Rather than recognize that right, the dissent would permit Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch. That is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands. Jarkesy and Patriot28 are entitled to a jury trial in an Article III court.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion that expanded on the CJ’s ruling and strengthened it IMNSHO [citation omitted].

The Seventh Amendments jury-trial right does not work alone. It operates together with Article III and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to limit how the government may go about depriving an individual of life, liberty, or property. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to trial by jury. Article III entitles individuals to an independent judge who will preside over that trial. And due process promises any trial will be held in accord with time-honored principles. Taken together, all three provisions vindicate the Constitution’s promise of a “fair trial in a fair tribunal.”

I put these two rulings together in this article because I see considerable synergy between them. No longer are our courts expected to defer to the judgment of Executive Branch regulators.

That means that even—especially—in both criminal and civil trial courts, after Jarkesy now the courts of first recourse for regulators seeking punishments, the judgment of regulators can be only that—judgment/opinion—and regulators’ judgments can carry no more weight than those of any other expert witness either party to the case might call to the stand—and they are just as vulnerable to showings that the expert isn’t all that.

Especially important, regulators must make their case in front of a jury of their accused’s peers.

That’s good for American liberty.

A Woke…or Something…State Judge

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A Montana State district judge, Shane Vannatta, is having trouble with reality. He has ruled a law, AN ACT GENERALLY REVISING THE LAWS TO PROVIDE A COMMON DEFINITION FOR THE WORD “SEX” WHEN REFERRING TO A HUMAN unconstitutional because

the bill’s title did not adequately explain whether the word “sex” referred to gender or sexual intercourse and that it did not indicate the words “male” and “female” would be defined in the body of the bill.

Never mind that bill titles typically do not themselves include glossaries or references to glossaries. His plaint that “sex” was unclear in its intended subject in the present title is simply disingenuous since the title explicitly states “when referring to a human”—and does not suggest, even by tenuous innuendo, “when referring to human sex practices.”

Never mind, either that the law’s first paragraph and that paragraph’s first two subparagraphs provide precisely the definitions of interest:

Section 1. Section 1-1-201, MCA, is amended to read:
“1-1-201. Terms of wide applicability. (1) Unless the context requires otherwise, the following definitions apply in the Montana Code Annotated:
(a) “Female” means a member of the human species who, under normal development, has XX chromosomes and produces or would produce relatively large, relatively immobile gametes, or eggs, during her life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of those gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this definition, but for a biological or genetic condition, is female.
(b) “Male” means a member of the human species who, under normal development, has XY chromosomes and produces or would produce small, mobile gametes, or sperm, during his life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of those gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this definition, but for a biological or genetic condition, is male.

Apparently, Vannatta’s law school training didn’t include a literacy test, nor did it train him in extending his attention span. For the good of the State, especially for the good of Montana’s citizens, he needs to be removed from the bench until he corrects those deficiencies.

Those Dumb Average Americans

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A poll run by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government indicates that former President Donald Trump (R) is preferred over Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden to handle “threats to democracy” by a 44% to 33% margin in poll respondents. Two things make that an important preference. One is that the poll also asked how important “threats to democracy” was to poll respondents, and a little more than half said it was “extremely important” to their vote.

The other was that the poll was conducted throughout six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Left has their usual answer to that poll, articulated this time by GMU’s Justin Gest, Professor of Policy and Government:

Many Americans don’t recognize Biden’s custodianship of our democracy, which is a bad sign for his campaign[.]

Those dumb, ignorant average Americans—you just can’t take ’em to raise.

Economic Travails

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This time those of the People’s Republic of China’s economy. In a Wall Street Journal editorial in which the editors, correctly, deprecate the idea that the continuing slow devaluing of the yuan is necessarily something about which to worry. Neither the falling yuan relative to the US dollar, nor the parallel weakening vs the dollar of Japan’s yen, the Republic of Korea’s won, Malaysia’s ringgit, and a number of others across Asia reflect anything other than the strength—more accurately, the lesser weakness—of our economy compared to those nations’.

Then the editors dropped this mistake:

No one can say whether an economic crisis is imminent in China, but no one should want one.

The first part is true; the mistake is in the second. Absolutely we, the rest of Asia—particularly the Republic of China and the nations rimming the South China Sea—should want one, as well as Europe and the United States. The PRC’s increasing aggressiveness and threats against those Asian nations, and its support for Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine and the threat that represents for the rest of Europe, and its economic support for a nuclear Iran and the threat that represents to the existence of Israel and the threat of Iran-nuclear armed terrorist attacks on Europe and the US—these are possible only with a strong economy with which to fund the PRC’s militarism, its supplies of military materiel to Russia, and its purchases, even at slight discount, of Russian and Iranian oil, thereby funding those nations’ misbehaviors.

An economic crisis in the PRC or, especially hopefully, a prolonged economic meltdown would be economically disruptive for the world at large in the short run, but it would be a very good event in the medium- and long term for the security, and economies, of non-PRC Asia, Europe, and the US.

Green Subsidies

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There’s this bit from Power Line:

And this quote from Severin Borenstein’ and Lucas Davis’ The Distributional Effects of U.S. Tax Credits for Heat Pumps, Solar Panels, and Electric Vehicles:

Over the last two decades, US households have received $47 billion in tax credits for buying heat pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles, and other “clean energy” technologies. Using information from tax returns, we show that these tax credits have gone predominantly to higher-income households. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%.

It’s reasonable to ask why those “bottom” quintiles—which include the middle-class folks—don’t buy more of these cool green devices. The answer is because even after the lavish subsidies, they can’t afford the devices. The remaining, out of pocket, costs still are too great. Worse, those remaining out of pocket costs comprise the entirety of the costs for much of the bottom two quintiles:

About 40% of US households pay no federal income tax, so millions of mostly low- and middle-income filers are simply ineligible for these credits.

It’s also reasonable to wonder whether Government is simply subsidizing a market until the devices become ubiquitous enough for prices to come down. Leave aside the fact that subsidies vanishingly rarely go away and protected industries just as vanishingly rarely lose their “protection.” The plain fact here is that, after all these years of pushing the devices, and even after all these years of real improvements in their performance, there is no interest in these devices across the broad market. It’s an industry that’s not going to take off without ever larger subsidies, ever increasing government pressure on us to get these devices anyway, ever increasing effort government effort to deny us access to alternative devices.

These green subsidies just give the already rich liberal Left a way to look good to each other in their solar-heated showers.

Maybe it’s time to start making the supporters of Green Politics pay their fair share.

 

H/t Ralf Longwalker