Tag Archives: regulation

More Disingenuosity

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The Supreme Court has ruled—7-2—in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other organizations. The Court upheld the Trump administration’s rule exempting these employers from an Obamacare requirement to provide insurance coverage that includes contraception.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court:

We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

…this Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets.

Ginsburg is being disingenuous in this. Contraceptives are dirt cheap in Walmart and drug stores. It’s no great burden for “women workers” to pay for contraception “out of their own pockets.” If it’s a burden to seek “contraceptive coverage” from other sources, that’s the direct result of Obamacare driving up the cost of all coverage.

Ginsburg is being sexist in this. Condoms are nearly as cheap and even more widely available. But Ginsburg is blithely assuming that contraception is solely the responsibility of the woman.

Revolution

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On the eve of the 2008 Presidential election, then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama (D) bragged

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

In 2015, then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D) insisted

[D]eep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.

Current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is declaring via tweet

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.

Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI) all are calling for the elimination of police departments. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) are demanding nakedly wealth redistributive tax codes.

Progressive-Democrat supporters are busily assaulting, attempting to tear down (and too often succeeding) statues to our Founders and to heroes who supported and fought for equality under law for all Americans—statues to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln (including a statue celebrating the emancipation and Lincoln’s welcome of a rising, newly freed black to his new life), Ulysses Grant, Frederick Douglass, Mathias Baldwin, the Shaw Memorial.

Now we have this, from Jamal Chapel:

We need a revolution in order to overthrow this system, bring a whole new communist world into being that can actually ensure the rights of black and brown people.

This is the fundamental change we’re in for if we elect a Progressive-Democrat government. And not just this fall. Ever.

A Judicial Error

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The Supreme Court has ordered a restructuring of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: its single director, removable only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, among other things, was an unconstitutional abridgment of Executive Branch authority.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, said that the

setup meant the CFPB’s director was unaccountable to the executive branch, creating an unconstitutional diminishment of presidential power.
“The CFPB’s single-director structure contravenes this carefully calibrated system by vesting significant governmental power in the hands of a single individual accountable to no one[.]”

And then,

To address the problem, the court changed the CFPB removal provision to make the director subject to presidential removal for any reason.

That’s the error. The Court’s position of the unconstitutionality of the CFPB’s structure is entirely correct. The Court’s remedy is entirely wrong.

With this ruling, the Court has unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, a thing it does far too often for far too long.

The correct remedy would have been to strike the CFPB entirely as unconstitutional and return this inherently political matter to where it belongs: the political branches of the Federal government, Congress and the Executive Branch for new legislation. And to We the People, the owner-boss of our Government, both the two political and the judicial branches.

A Judicial…Misunderstanding

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The Supreme Court has struck Louisiana’s abortion law that required doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital before they could be permitted to carry out abortions. The ruling was by a 5-4 vote; the five hung their ruling on the Court’s 2016 Whole Woman’s Health decision holding that there were “no medical benefits” to such a requirement, and so “a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy” was circumscribed.

One of the five was Chief Justice John Roberts.

Here’s his rationalization for his vote:

I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today however is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong, but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.

Wow.

If the decision being used as precedent was wrongly decided, the correct response is to overrule that precedent and correct the error, not to flip and bureaucratically uphold the error and, by doing so, codify it.

Codifying error as precedent also has a strong whiff of legislating from the bench.

With his logic, maybe Roberts would have argued against going to war to overrule a Dred Scott, or argued against altering Plessy.

The Party of Economic Sense

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A Sunday editorial in The Wall Street Journal provides some pretty dispositive data concerning State economic behaviors during the present Wuhan Virus situation.

The baseline: the national unemployment rate for May was 13.3%.

Ten States remained above even 15% in their individual unemployment rates:

  • Nevada 25.3%
  • Hawaii 22.6%
  • Michigan 21.2%
  • California 16.3%
  • Rhode Island 16.3%
  • Massachusetts 16.3%
  • Delaware 15.8%
  • Illinois 15.2%
  • New Jersey 15.2%
  • Washington 15.1%

These States also had some of our nation’s most draconian lockdown requirements.

States with no lockdown or very light-handed stay-home instructions coupled with very early reopening include these, and their May unemployment rates:

  • Georgia 9.7%
  • Arkansas 9.5%
  • Arizona 8.9%
  • Utah 8.5%
  • Nebraska 5.2% (our nation’s lowest rate)

It’s a nearly pure Progressive-Democrat vs Republican view of the importance of economic health, and so of overall health. As with most things, though, there are a couple of exceptions.

Massachusetts, in that top-ten list of poor performance, has a Republican Governor and Lieutenant Governor, although it has Progressive-Democratic Party veto-proof majorities in both houses of the State’s legislature.

Colorado, Progressive-Democrat-run, isn’t on the list of top-five best performers, but that government ended its lockdown very early, and its unemployment rate is below the national average and falling further: from April’s 12.2% to 10.2% in May.

Notice that. The economic recovery rate is markedly improved by early release from lockdown gaol or by not locking up the citizens in the first place.

Keep in mind who has the better sense—economic, liberty, health—this November.