Tag Archives: regulation

2nd Amendment

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Fox News is reporting that Magpul Industries, a maker of accessories for firearms—magazines, sights, grips, and the like—has told the Colorado statehouse that if a bill to restrict the size of ammunition magazines is passed, the company will relocate out of the state.

It’s a bold threat from a company that, by its founder’s admission, has distanced itself from politics.

This company deserves our support.  Perhaps it should have been more political throughout its existence (Plato’s and Pericles’ admonishments apply to our businesses as well as to ourselves), but in the present case, the company’s focus on its business makes its stand the more principled.

Naturally, Colorado’s democrats are unimpressed.  State Senator Jessie Ulibarri (D) said

When you have the means available to you at every single corner to commit a horrendous act, we will continue to see what we’ve seen, which is the status quo, where unfortunately gun violence and violence in general is prevalent in our communities[.]

Ulibarri should look in a mirror.  Those acts include the party power to ramming through ill-considered legislation that addresses the wrong problem while deprecating individual rights.

It’s an idiotic bill, too, aside from an immoral one.  As Magpul’s Founder and President, Richard Fitzpatrick, pointed out,

smaller magazines can be easily connected to each other—magazines can be hooked up to make a 60-round magazine, for example—and the company fears it would legally liable if people were to do that.

The idiocy goes further: Fox News says

Democrats have tried to ease Magpul’s fears, amending the bill to make clear that the company can still manufacture magazines of any size, as long as they’re sold only out-of-state, to the military or law enforcement.

As if that’ll keep the offending magazines out of the state.

Like I said, this company deserves our support.

Sessions on Progressive Obstructionism

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Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) in his closing remarks preparatory to casting his vote on the Jack Lew confirmation last Wednesday, had this to say on a related matter.

I would also like to place this [confirmation vote] in a wider context.

Today is the 1,400th day since Senate Democrats passed a budget.  Why has this gone on so long?  Because they decided it would be better to offer no solution, no plan to help struggling Americans, and instead to tear down anyone who dared to offer a plan to solve our nation’s economic problems.

This is the heart of the problem here in Washington right now.  We have one political party that sees the budget debate as exercise in political warfare, not problem-solving.

At the center of this strategy is the White House.

In his campaign for re-election, President Obama repeatedly said that he had a plan to “pay down our debt.”  He even ran a campaign ad saying: “I believe the only way to create an economy built to last, is to strengthen the middle class—asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way.  So we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing, and home-grown American energy, for good middle class jobs.”

But this is all totally false.

Again, this was the strategy: offer a plan that does nothing to alter our dangerous debt course while pretending the opposite.

Then, once you’ve done that, attack anyone who dares to reduce the size of the bureaucracy.  Attack anyone who suggests Washington is too powerful.  Attack, attack, attack—while never offering anything to help Americans who are struggling every day.

After the White House budget was submitted in 2011, President Obama spoke at George Washington University and, with Congressman Paul Ryan sitting in front of him, and said:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives….  It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years….  But the way this plan achieves [that goal] would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history….  This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.  And who are those 50 million Americans?  Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid.  Many are poor children.  Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome….  These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

Majority Leader Reid said of one Republican reform effort that it was “a mean-spirited bill that would cut the heart out of the recovery that we have in America today….  It goes after little children, poor little boys and girls….  We want them to learn to read.”

This is how the White House and Senate Democrat leaders approach the budget debate.  It’s the same strategy with the sequester.  And Republicans, candidly, have not done enough to stand up to these egregious slanders.  Voting against Jack Lew would be a vote against these dishonest tactics. Misrepresentation of fact.

The painful truth is, the White House strategy has been largely successful up until now.  President Obama and his Senate Majority have blocked fiscal reform and continued our path to fiscal disaster.

It is time that we pointed out that the establishment they are shielding from cuts—the big-government apparatus they are defending—is hurting people every day.  Their policies, their endless support of the bureaucracy, has created poverty and joblessness and dependency.  In cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago—governed almost exclusively by Democrats at every level—good, hardworking people are hurt every day by the policies of the Left.

  • In the city of Baltimore, one in three children live in poverty.  One in three Baltimore residents are on food stamps.
  • In Chicago, there were roughly 500 homicides in 2012.  Fifty-one percent of the city’s children live in a single-parent family.
  • In Detroit, almost one in three households had not a single person working at any time in the last 12 months.  The city’s violent crime rate is among the worst in the country.  More than half of all Detroit children live in poverty.

This should not happen.  These are the consequences of leftist policies.  We are fighting to create jobs, to create rising wages, to create opportunity, to help more people earn a good living and care for themselves financially.  We are trying to lift people out of poverty, to strengthen family and community.  And we are trying to protect the good and decent people of this country from a debt crisis.

What he said.

Yes, Virginia

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…the law applies to the Federal government, too.  At least to the SEC, as the Supreme Court has ruled.  In a case involving alleged special treatment for a mutual fund advisor—the fund supposedly allowed one investor to engage in frequent trading of the fund in violation of a rule that applied to all of the fund’s other investors—the SEC claimed it could alter, on its own recognizance, the statute of limitations for bringing an action against the trader.

As The Wall Street Journal described the matter,

The SEC faced a five-year statute of limitations on bringing a case.  The agency alleged the market timing took place between 1999 and 2002, but it didn’t bring a complaint until 2008.  The defendants, Marc J Gabelli and Bruce Alpert, argued the agency’s five-year clock ran from the time of the alleged offense, but the SEC said the clock should have started later, in late 2003, when it says it discovered the conduct.

The Supremes waved the BS flag at that claim.  Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous Court, said

This Court, how­ever, has never applied the discovery rule in this context, where the plaintiff is not a defrauded victim seeking recompense, but is instead the Government bringing an enforcement action for civil penalties.

Roberts expanded on his statement:

There are good reasons why the fraud discovery rule has not been extended to Government civil penalty enforcement actions.  The dis­covery rule exists in part to preserve the claims of parties who have no reason to suspect fraud.  The Government is a different kind of plaintiff.  The SEC’s very purpose, for example, is to root out fraud, and it has many legal tools at hand to aid in that pursuit. The Gov­ernment in these types of cases also seeks a different type of relief.  The discovery rule helps to ensure that the injured receive recom­pense, but civil penalties go beyond compensation, are intended to punish, and label defendants wrongdoers.  Emphasizing the im­portance of time limits on penalty actions, Chief Justice Marshall admonished that it “would be utterly repugnant to the genius of our laws” if actions for penalties could “be brought at any distance of time.”

The opinion can be read here.

Obamacare, Again

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Here’s another reason why the fight to repeal Obamacare must be continued and driven to a successful conclusion.

The GAO’s report, at the link, opens with this abstract and graph [emphasis added]:

The effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), enacted in March 2010, on the long-term fiscal outlook depends largely on whether elements in PPACA designed to control cost growth are sustained.  As shown in the figure below, there was notable improvement in the longer-term outlook after the enactment of PPACA under GAO’s Fall 2010 Baseline Extended simulation, which assumes both the expansion of health care coverage and the full implementation and effectiveness of the cost-containment provisions over the entire 75-year simulation period.  However, the federal budget remains on an unsustainable path.  Further, questions about the implementation and sustainability of these provisions have been raised by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Office of the Actuary and others, due in part to challenges in sustaining increased health care productivity.  The Fall 2010 Alternative simulation assumed cost containment mechanisms specified in PPACA were phased out over time while the additional costs associated with expanding federal health care coverage remained.  Under these assumptions, the long-term outlook worsened slightly compared to the pre-PPACA January 2010 simulation.

Those “challenges” to sustaining productivity include keeping doctors, hospitals, et al., in the field under the draconian controls Obamacare imposes on them.  The “phase-out” of cost controls will have been driven by the need to…relax…those controls in order to sustain even a level of performance commensurate with the British failed NHS.  Absent those controls, national debt growth is no better than without Obamacare.

At best, Obamacare does nothing to our finances.  However, the GAO also provides this:

Under the Fall 2012 Alternative simulation, spending for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and federal exchange subsidies almost doubles as a share of GDP by 2035.

That 2012 Alternative is from Senator Jeff Sessions’ (R, AL) request that GAO  re-do their simulations without the administration’s artificial assumptions, eliminating, for instance, the administration’s cynical assumption requirement that the GAO’s original simulation use Obamacare’s initial 10 years—which included only 6 years of costs—as their start point.

The GAO report also has this:

[A]s [the] figure shows, the primary deficit under our Alternative simulation [Sessions’ removed artificial assumptions] increased by 0.7 percent of GDP during this time period [the 75 years of the simulation], due largely to increased spending on Medicaid, CHIP, and exchange subsidies.

That increase works out to over $6 trillion more down the sewer, courtesy of Obamacare.

The Efficacy of Government-Held Databases on Citizens

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Here’s an all too likely outcome from letting government maintain databases on its citizens, ostensibly for the safety of those citizens.

A Muslim US Air Force veteran who had trouble entering the country last year to visit his terminally ill mother was barred again Saturday from trying to return home to Qatar, the second time this month that he’s been prohibited from boarding a flight in Oklahoma City because his name appears on a government no-fly list.

The reason?  There isn’t one, really:

[Saadiq, who is an American citizen as well as a vet] Long said a TSA agent told him that he was “still on the list” and he would have to contact the FBI.

Pass that buck.  But

Long said the FBI has not told him why he is on the no-fly list[.]

It’s entirely possible this is on the up and up.  There’s no information to support that thesis, though.  On the other hand, database errors happen, but it’s deucedly hard to get government to correct their errors.  Bureaucracy, don’t you know.