What’s the Deal with Little Liam?

Recall that little Liam Ramos was seized and held by ICE agents a few days ago. Or at least that’s the narrative an intrinsically dishonest “news” media has been peddling. Some facts, though, are coming to light despite the best efforts of the core of that guild, courtesy of some few news writers who have different ideas regarding reporting news.

The Department of Homeland Security said ICE was conducting an operation to arrest Liam’s father, who the department said was in the country illegally, when the father fled and left Liam alone in a vehicle.

This is a little boy’s father abandoning his son in his own attempt to escape to continue violating US laws.

And

Agency spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said an officer stayed with Liam while others apprehended his father.

Making sure the little boy wasn’t just left to wander.

Then,

Officers made several attempts to get his mother, who was inside the house, to take custody of him, saying she wouldn’t be detained if she did so, McLaughlin said.

Several attempts. Because the little boy’s mother was more worried about her own neck than she was about her son. Today, both the little boy and the man who may be his biological father but who has in no way acted in that role are being held in a Texas facility that’s set up to handle both adults and children. The boy is there because, ultimately, his biological mother refused to take him, despite those repeated ICE attempts.

Keep in mind that ICE is the agency that took care of a little boy who’d just been deserted by his parents and which a leading Minnesota candidate for the US Senate, along with incumbent Congressional Progressive-Democrats, want to completely defund and abolish.

This is how little Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters—all of whom have become mainstream left, no longer being an extremist fringe—care about facts. This is how little those folks care about a little boy, all of five years old, mind you, who was deserted by his parents.

Wrong Answer

House and auto insurers’ profits and the rate increases they charge policy holders are coming under political scrutiny, but politicians’ proposed solutions are badly counterproductive.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) this month became the latest state lawmaker to advocate profits caps on insurers, to tackle escalating home- and “crushingly expensive” auto-insurance rates.
Her plan would require home insurers with “outsized profit margins” to lower or justify their rates, and review the profits threshold at which auto-insurers are required to refund customers.
Also this month, lawmakers in states including Oklahoma proposed profit caps targeting insurance.

No.

Government definitions of “outsized profit margins” have nothing to do with business imperatives or what happens in a free market. Those definitions serve only the personal political ambitions of the politicians doing the defining, and they’ll vary across politicians and their political parties.

Beyond that, all price caps do is limit the availability of the product being capped—whether oil and natural gas and gasoline, rental housing availability and quality…or insurance policies. The limit on supply, too, hurts those on the lower economic rungs of our economy first and hardest.

Requiring insurers to justify their rates and the profit levels at which policy holder refunds are paid is a good idea, but government is the wrong crowd that must be satisfied.

Better simply to require insurers to disclose their profit margins and the basis on which they arrive at their definitions of profit. Their policy rates already are publicly available; making both sides of that process public would let the public more effectively shop for policies that suit their individual needs.

Doing that within an increasingly deregulated (not unregulated) insurance market environment would move the industry closer to a truly competitive market within which insurers would reap fair profits and insurees would pay fair premium amounts for the policies they want. And the Critical Item: “fair” would be defined within that competitive market by those market participants, not by any government.

Trump’s Board of Peace

President Donald Trump (R) is looking to stand up a Board of Peace that would seek to broker peace deals between belligerents and between soon-to-be belligerents. In many respects, this BoP would supplant the UN, which is famous for its failure to create peace and infamous for its failure to maintain any peace in which its peacekeeping forces are involved.

Some nations, like putative allies France and UK are reluctant to join it. Enemy nations like Russia and the People’s Republic of China also are reluctant to join.

UK and France…worried about joining an organization subject to Trump’s whims that could give equal status to authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Board of Peace, whether or not led by Trump, may or may not be a good idea, but the plaint that the BoP would give folks like Putin an equal status is just silly. He, and the PRC’s President Xi Jinping, already have equal status in the UN via their positions as permanent members of the Security Council and their veto authority in that body.

Different Purposes

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors missed on this one. Their editorial’s headline and subheadline lay out the editors’ case.

NATO Is the Board of Peace
Trump’s new coalition couldn’t do better than the Atlantic alliance.

Their editorial goes on in that vein, and that’s the editors’ miss.

NATO looked good for a while, maintaining the bluff that the alliance members, acting collectively, could respond to a Soviet Union- (read Russia-) led Warsaw Pact invasion, and by that capability deter such an invasion. The alliance’s apparent deterrent capability did, in fact, deter the Warsaw Pact. Or successive Russian leaders of the Pact recognized how weak its military establishment was, in fact, offering no guarantee of victory in an invasion even in the absence of NATO. That’s speculation regarding a history that didn’t occur.

However, with the demise of the Soviet Union, an unfettered even a little bit Russia has shown no reluctance to expand by force, as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his open threats against NATO members that used to part of Russia’s Soviet empire has shown. NATO, far from an operational alliance, has been exposed an aspirational alliance only.

For all that, NATO as an avowed defensive alliance was even operationally only a reactive one, intended to win a war already in progress that it had failed prevent. Deter, then fight.

Trump’s Board of Peace is an entirely different kettle of fish, with an entirely different imperative. The proposed Board of Peace does not have as its DOC either deterrence or fighting. The Board is intended to broker peace between conflicting nations on the brink of war or during their war.

However well or poorly NATO functioned and however well or poorly the Board of Peace will function once it’s stood up, the two are not comparable. The allegation that the Board would do no better than NATO is a non sequitur.

“That’s Unconstitutional”

Many politicians, primarily but not exclusively of the Progressive-Democratic Party, when they decry the actions of President Donald Trump (R) loudly declaim that whatever it is that he’s doing is “unconstitutional.”

It’s instructive that these worthies usually omit to cite the clause of our Constitution that’s supposedly being violated, but when they do cite something, they center their claim on the 10th Amendment.

Here is what that Amendment says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Article I, Section 10, lays out specific powers prohibited to the States:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Included in the powers not delegated is this one from Article II, Section 3:

…he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed….

Here is what the Supremacy Clause of our Constitution says, from Article VI:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

There is nothing in the supreme Law of the Land  that has been delegated to the States or to the people. That supremacy has been retained by the Federal government, and that supremacy includes actions of Federal law enforcement agencies and their personnel in the course of their enforcement of Federal laws in Progressive-Democrat-run “sanctuary” jurisdictions; the latter’s protestations to the contrary are irrelevant.

No part of a President’s authority or obligation to enforce the Laws are reserved to the States. Nor does the 10th Amendment’s delegations include any State-level authority to block or otherwise interfere with Federal law enforcement actions.