Tag Archives: regulation

A Politicized Cabinet

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From a Hamilton Jordan memo to President Jimmie Carter on creating the Department of Education:

Political Considerations

The following are the major political considerations that you should be aware of in making this decision:

  1. The teachers organizations—particularly the National Education Association—are the fastest growing, most active, and by many standards the most effective political organizations in this country. With a membership that exceeds two million, they comprise one of the most committed and articulate political constituencies in our country.
  2. These groups—particularly the NEA—have been our political friends in the Presidential campaign and our allies on many crucial legislative battles. For the first time in its 114 year history, the NEA endorsed a Presidential candidate in the 1976 general election. . . .

Conclusion

I would strongly recommend that you support the creation of a separate Department of Education for the following reasons:

*Your unequivocal promise in the campaign to do so

*The teachers of this country have been our political friends in the past and can be our valuable political allies in the future

*The arguments for the creation of a separate department are at least as convincing as the arguments are against it

If you make the decision not to create the separate department, I would strongly recommend that we not pursue some organizational middle ground that would allow us to claim that we have met our campaign promises to the teachers. We promised a separate department, and I think that it would be an insult to our teacher friends to argue that some internal reorganization is a satisfactory substitute for the separate department they were promised.

DoE was established in the fall of 1979. It was created for purely political reasons having nothing to do with educating our children. It’s been nothing but a political organ for teachers unions and the Politically Correct Class since.

Or, maybe more properly, a political cabinet. Idealistic, maybe, but that wasn’t the purpose of Executive Branch cabinets. Get rid of the Department of Education. And, as Hamilton Jordan correctly recommended, don’t do half measures. Don’t replace the Department with anything, and return the current employees—every single one of them—to the private sector, don’t reassign them within the Federal government.

Climatistas

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These panic-mongers of their man-caused global warming fantasy are in such a panic themselves that now they want RICO investigations of those scientists and organizations so rude as to demur from the panic-mongers’ claims.

George Mason Professor Jagadish Shukla and 19 others signed a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House science adviser John Holdren urging punishment for climate dissenters. “One additional tool—recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse [D, RI]—is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change[.]”

Three things: it’s time to defund the climate pseudo-science industry and cancel/not renew any associated grants to universities and other institutions. It’s time to bring RICO cases against Shukla and his 19 accomplices. It’s time to bring a Senate ethics case against Whitehouse for his attack on free speech, his attack on scientific investigation, and his abuse of his Senate power that these miscreancies represent.

Shukla’s letter can be read here, here, and here.

White House Timidity

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President Barack Obama says he’ll veto a bill making its way through the House of Representatives that would repeal the oil export ban in place since Gerald Ford’s administration. Obama thinks he’s acting from a position of strength in saying “No” to anything Republican.

He’s actually acting from weakness and timidity. Leaving aside the destruction of potential American jobs such a veto, if carried through, would represent, there are a couple of foreign policy/national security aspects to lifting the oil.

The free flow of oil to Europe that lifting the ban would facilitate would go a long way toward weaning Europe in general and Ukraine, Poland, and Germany in particular from their current dependence on Russian oil exports.

Freely flowing oil will hold down the cost of energy and of materials industries: plastics are made from oil. Those lower costs strength the economies of all of the nations that use energy in their industries or that import other nations’ production—which is to say the economies of nearly every nation on the planer.

Both Russia and Iran need oil prices above $100/barrel in order to balance their national budgets and so to better fund their attacks on their neighbors, in Russia’s case, and to fund their terrorist clients and attacks on Israel, in Iran’s case. Freely flowing oil would keep oil prices in their current $50-ish range, if not push those prices lower.

But neither Putin nor Khamenei would like that.

Democrats’ Habit of Ruling by Fiat

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Keep in mind President Barack Obama’s penchant for Executive Orders and Executive Actions whenever he can’t get his way with Congress, our elected representatives—and so whenever he can’t get his way with us. He issues these EOs and EAs, sometimes strictly legally and sometimes unconstitutionally, but nearly always in contravention of the will of Congress—of us.

Now we get Hillary Clinton’s (Democratic Presidential candidate) plans for when she’s President. Using gun control, that long-time Democratic Party attack on our 2nd Amendment, as her venue, Clinton intends to “use executive authority”—EOs and EAs, governance by fiat in the finest Democratic Party tradition—as the centerpiece of her Presidency.

Recall that Clinton has identified herself as a Proud Progressive.

Recall the words of one of her movement’s founders, Herb Croly:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy…. [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Recall all of this in the fall of 2016.

Free Speech

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So long as the government determines what’s free to be said.

There’s this American rock band, all of whose members are of Asian heritage, who call themselves The Slants. When they tried to trademark their name, the US Patent Office refused, claiming the name is “disparaging.” The matter is now before the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the appellate court that hears such cases. The Court is hearing the matter en banc, or the whole court is handling the appeal instead of the usual three-judge panel.

The government is censoring naming. At oral argument,

Judge Kimberly Moore asked what would happen if the government started rejecting copyrights for controversial art or other expressive works as it is doing with trademarks.

Would there be “no more porn? No more crucifixes in urine?”

The government is arguing, and it’s serious,

[T]he law governing trademark registrations does not violate the First Amendment…. Its purpose is not “to help people to make a political statement or prevent people from making political statement[.],

Indeed. However, the government’s lawyer, Daniel Terry, is arguing that Government is the one that will determine what is political speech that the government must protect and what is not political speech that the government gets to censor. And Terry argued with that claim that Government has determined that a name can never be political speech.