Tag Archives: regulation

The Democrats Don’t Like Speech?

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At least when it’s not been approved by them. This Constitutional Amendment passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday on a straight party line vote:

                       JOINT RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United

States relating to contributions and expenditures intended

                       to affect elections.

1 Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives

2 of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two

3 thirds of each House concurring therein), That the fol

4 lowing article is proposed as an amendment to the Con

5 stitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all

6 intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when

7 ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several

8 States:

1                          “ARTICLE—

2 “SECTION 1. To advance the fundamental principle

3 of political equality for all, and to protect the integrity

4 of the legislative and electoral processes, Congress shall

5 have power to regulate the raising and spending of money

6 and in-kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections,

7 including through setting limits on—

8          “(1) the amount of contributions to candidates

9 for nomination for election to, or for election to,

10 Federal office; and

11         “(2) the amount of funds that may be spent by,

12 in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.

13 “SECTION 2. To advance the fundamental principle

14 of political equality for all, and to protect the integrity

15 of the legislative and electoral processes, each State shall

16 have power to regulate the raising and spending of money

17 and in-kind equivalents with respect to State elections, in

18 cluding through setting limits on—

19         “(1) the amount of contributions to candidates

20 for nomination for election to, or for election to,

21 State office; and

22         “(2) the amount of funds that may be spent by,

23 in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.

1 “SECTION 3. Nothing in this article shall be con

2 strued to grant Congress the power to abridge the freedom

3 of the press.

4 “SECTION 4. Congress and the States shall have

5 power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate

6 legislation.”.

Sections 1 and 2 are identical other than Sect 1 addresses Congress’ power, and Sect 2 addresses States’ power. The key phrase is this: shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including through setting limits on together with its applicability to limiting contributions. It’s open-ended. A party in the majority would be fully empowered by this Amendment, were it to pass, to set the limit at zero regarding candidates of the opposing party. Even were the limits found required to be applied equally to all candidates, the incumbents would have the critical advantage of already having, for instance, name recognition and the bully pulpits of their elected offices to spread their messages—advantages denied the other candidates by their inability to purchase air and newspaper time, or to stump.

This is a guaranteed incumbency amendment, and nothing else.

The EU, Immigration, and National Sovereignty

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Germany can’t require the spouses of Turkish immigrants to show a basic knowledge of the German language before granting them visas, the European Union’s top court ruled on Thursday, overturning a condition aimed at preventing forced marriages and at promoting integration.

Foreigners, after all, shouldn’t be expected to assimilate into the culture and country to which they emigrate; they should continue to live apart from their new community, leading in the aggregate to the fractionation of their new “country.”

There are complications in this particular case (there always are when law is involved), but that’s the thrust of this ruling. The court went on:

A new restriction might be permitted if it were justified by an overriding public interest, and didn’t “go beyond what is necessary in order to attain it,” the court said.

However, Germany’s language requirement didn’t meet those conditions, the court said.

Because assimilation and integration into the host society, the host and sovereign nation, isn’t an overriding public interest. But then, the EU doesn’t want its constituent members to be unified and sovereign countries, anyway—fractionation facilitates the current push for political union of the European Union into one nation by weakening government’s ability to resist the push.

Gina “Joe” McCarthy

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…is at it again. Operating carefully in the proverbial dead of night, burying its new rule in the 80,000 page Federal Register and unadorned by any other announcement,

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly floated a rule claiming authority to bypass the courts and unilaterally garnish paychecks of those accused of violating its rules….

The EPA also has fast-tracked passage of this rule in an effort to get it into effect before anyone knows it’s there. Until it’s applied. The EPA has justified the fast-tracking by claiming, with an absolutely straight face, that this isn’t a “significant regulatory action.”

On top of that, Gina “Joe” doesn’t feel any need to explain herself.

EPA officials did not respond to repeated questions by The Washington Times about why they thought it was necessary to garnish people’s wages.

The explanation she’s reluctant to say out loud, though, clearly is, “Courts? We don’t need no courts! I don’t have to take you into any stinkin’ courts!”

The Obama Administration and Education

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Here’s just one example, via The Wall Street Journal. Last month,

Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s [Colleges, a for-profit college system with campuses across the USS] access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 US campuses.

Never mind that, among other things, DoE itself can’t figure out how to measure job placement for college graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the DoE, found itself tasked with generating just such a metric, but in 2011, it was forced to admit that the challenges of using institutional tracking of students, which include the reporting burden on institutions as well as the potential for inconsistent documentation and reporting, simply wasn’t feasible.

Then there’s the data the DoE demanded of Corinthian:

  • a list of all students placed by name and Social Security number
  • the students’ most recent telephone numbers and cell phone numbers
  • graduation dates and academic programs
  • job titles
  • start dates
  • employers’ names and contact information

Never mind the difficulty of collecting those data from folks who’ve already graduated and moved on with their lives. Think about the invasion of privacy this administration demanded Corinthian perpetrate on those graduated adult American citizens.

Corinthian couldn’t meet DoE’s data delivery deadline, despite having assigned an additional 100 employees the single full time task of collecting these personal data from its hundreds of thousands of students. As a result, it’s had to close its doors—that funding freeze.

This is this administration’s arrogance at its most powerful and its worst.

A…Misunderstanding…on the Supreme Court

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The liberal wing of the Supreme Court is at it again. The three women of the wing are furthering their demand that women generally are entitled to get their contraceptives via OPM, rather than with the women’s own money—apparently, it seems, because these three female Justices think women generally are too helpless to have their own money. These three also are continuing their demand that access to contraceptives must take priority over the religious tenets of the ones they would require to make the provision.

Writing for the dissent to a Supreme Court order advising that Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois, need not continue to provide birth control coverage absent filing a form with its insurer asserting its religious objections, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the following:

Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today. After expressly relying on the availability of the religious-nonprofit accommodation [in Hobby Lobby to justify expanding exemptions from contraceptive coverage to closely held commercial businesses], the court now, as the dissent in Hobby Lobby feared it might, retreats from that position.

Of course, the Court’s opinion created no such reliance, as Justice Sotomayor knows full well. The “religious non-profit exemption” was one of a couple of possible alternatives proffered in the Court’s opinion that illustrated less restrictive means of facilitating women’s ability to obtain contraceptives. The Hobby Lobby ruling included this potential alternative in a part of its discussion of the requirement that a government-generated religious burden (or burden of any sort) be applied through the least restrictive means possible:

The least-restrictive-means standard is exceptionally demanding, see City of Boerne…and it is not satisfied here. HHS has not shown that it lacks other means of achieving its desired goal without imposing a substantial burden on the exercise of religion by the objecting parties in these cases. See §§2000bb–1(a), (b)(requiring the Government to “demonstrat[e] that application of [a substantial] burden to the person…is the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest” (emphasis added)).

The most straightforward way of doing this would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections. This would certainly be less restrictive of the plaintiffs’ religious liberty, and HHS has not shown, see §2000bb–1(b)(2), that this is not a viable alternative.

That the opinion went on at greater length about the “religious non-profit exemption” in no way alters its status as one of at least two hypothetically offered alternatives for satisfying the (hypothetically accepted) government interest in providing contraception free to the user. There plainly is no basis to any claim that filing for a “religious non-profit exemption” is the sole means of being…excused…from providing religiously proscribed contraception.

Another aspect that makes the Wheaton matter interesting here, though, is the question of the form itself that Sotomayor insists that Wheaton should be bound to file in order to get that “religious non-profit exemption.”

As Wheaton correctly notes, it’s not who pays for the provision that’s at issue, it’s that Wheaton would be required to sanction the provision by still being required to have contraception coverage done in their name.

“Wheaton believes that authorizing its [insurance administrator] to provide these drugs in Wheaton’s place makes it complicit in grave moral evil,” the college said in its injunction application filed Sunday with the court. “Wheaton can neither provide the mandated coverage nor execute and deliver” forms that prompt others to do so.

This is clear enough to all but the Progressive who cannot distinguish the pecuniary from the moral.