The dirty pool the Very Stable Genius is considering resorting to to make recess cabinet appointments

 Eye-opening stuff from the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Ed Whelan at The Washington Post:

President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.

Yes, the president's power to make recess appointments is provided for in the Constitution, but Hamilton regarded it as “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.” 

Here's what seems to be getting cooked up:

It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.

Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.

Whelan conclude with what is obvious to anyone with a working moral compass: that Speaker Johnson must make clear that flimsily justified recesses ain't happening.  

Yeah, yeah, I found the first few appointments interesting (I absolutely love Marco Rubio's hallway exchange about his views on a Gaza ceasefire with a "peace activist"), but about the time the Very Stable Genius got to prolific procreator (with several different women) Pete Hegseth, I had questions. Then came Tulsi Gabbard, she of the 2017 visit to Syria and some strong evidence of coziness with China and Russia.  Then came Matt Gaetz.

It's pretty clear that the VSG intends to surround himself with a covey of yes-people as quickly as possible so the machinery is in place for any further damage to Mr. Madison's document he feels he needs to do. 

 

 

More at peace with myself by the day for writing in a presidential choice in 2020

 This post deals with a matter that's a recurring theme over at my Substack, Precipice, namely, the ever-narrower sliver of ideological terrain I inhabit.

My latest post here at LITD, "The Institutional Right In America Is At Least As Sick As It's Been for Eight Years," mentioned a couple of recent developments that particularly stand out as substantiation for my assertion. There are some updates for those. Not only does the speaker lineup for this year's CPAC make clear that that gathering has devolved into an irredeemable sewer, but it now appears organizer Matt Schlapp has a scandal issue, having allegedly felt up a Hershel Walker campaign worker, as well as in-the-pits staff morale.  And the documented coverup by Fox hosts and executives regarding MAGA claims of a stolen 2020 election has now gotten real.  Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are collectively suing Fox for $4.3 billion in damages. (Fox only has $4 billion in cash on hand.) News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said under oath in a Dominion-case deposition that he let the on-air talent continue to spew nonsense because it ensured the greatest flow of dollars to Fox.

I offered a whiff of that narrow-sliver-of-terrain stance by mentioning my misgivings about The Bulwark and Principles First. 

The shorthand for why I harbor misgivings is this: many prominent figures associated with those entities have publicly stated that they voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

That's a bridge too far for this conservative.

And no, I didn't vote for the Very Stable Genius in either 2016 or 2020. I wrote in Evan McMullin and Ben Sasse, respectively, in those elections.

Joe Biden has been happy to take his administration as far to the left as the most progressive elements in his party want to go.

He has taken the phone-and-pen notion of law-making by executive fiat even farther than his old boss Barack Obama. 

The CHIPS and Science Act, duly passed by Congress and signed into law by Biden last August, was already a collectivist leap, all about "investment," read wealth redistribution, in making the US semiconductor industry impervious to what the Chinese were doing. Now, Biden says these subsidies come with conditions. US manufacturers will have to have onsite daycare for employees, limit stock buybacks, and share "excess profits" with the government.

I hope you don't need me to point out what makes this so pernicious.

But in case you find yourself in a discussion about this with someone less steeped in principle-driven thought, here are the most obvious objections:

• It blurs the lines between the executive and legislative branches beyond what is constitutional.
• It engages in social engineering - specifically, in weakening the family.
• It demonizes profit, which is the gauge by which business organizations monitor their health.
• It uses bribery to tell private organizations how to conduct their affairs.

Biden is using the same tactic with regard to student loan forgiveness.  Per Dan McLaughlin, writing at the New York Post:

On Tuesday, the Court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a trillion dollars cancelling the college and graduate school debts of 43 million people.

With whose money? The national debt, of course, because Congress didn’t appropriate funds for this or raise taxes or fees to pay for it. 

Biden claims to be using the emergency powers of the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to let presidents suspend some student loan rules for soldiers serving abroad. 

Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s own Department of Education warned him that he didn’t have the power to do this.

And as if his Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government executive order of January 2021 wasn't enough of an identity-politics intrusion, now comes the order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. It creates "Equity Teams" in every stinking agency of the Beltway leviathan that will  annually submit "Equity Action Plans" to the Office of Management and Budget.

A question: Does there come a point at which these "underserved communities" are no longer "underserved"? That is, does this annual-submission-of-equity-plans edict have an anticipated shelf life?

Actually, I have another question. What does "underserved," and, by inference, "served," mean? What kind of "serving" falls within the proper purview of government?

No, I can unequivocally state that voting for Joe Biden in 2020 was no act of rectitude. 

Now, here's where we get back to the narrow-sliver-of-terrain metaphor. The main reason the Biden is getting away with these crowbar whacks to our freedom is that nearly everyone decrying them is a Neo-Trumpist wackadoodle. They happen to be correct about the Democrats, even if they are every bit as poisonous to the American experiment. 

I didn't quit being a conservative when I quit being a Republican.

Some folks whose intellects would be useful right now did.

It's a good thing the gout in my right foot is subsiding. It's getting every harder to maintain my balance on this sliver. 

 

Student loan forgiveness - initial thoughts

 1.) I have to believe a court case over this will happen sooner rather than later. Biden has not offered even a  flimsy attempt at justifying a purely executive-branch move. Congress was completely sidelined.

2.) It encourages a shrugging-off-responsibility mindset throughout our society. Now that the precedent has been set, how long is it before progressive policy types start opining that car loans and home loans need forgiving? It erodes the principle at the heart of the free market: that an economic transaction occurs when two parties, a buyer and seller, agree on the value of the good or service to bee exchanged, and each understands the obligations he or she is undertaking.

3.) Why is college so expensive? Look at the rate of growth of administrative staff over the last 40 years compared to that of faculty. 

4.) Expect that trend to continue. Insitutions of higher learning, or whatever it is they're dispensing these days, have been given a green light.

Elizabeth Warren is pursuing two aims with her current crusade

 In the wake of the Dobbs, decision, she's zeroing in on a target that really sticks in her craw:

“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.

Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration. Warren does not seem to have considered who might do this job in a future Republican administration.

This advances two of the dearest aspects of the progressive vision.

Obviously, it puts on full display the Left's dark, nihilistic vision of the value of human life. To have women considering options other than ending their children's lives is anathema to those who harbor rage against the universe's inherent and divinely designed architecture. 

But it also furthers progressives' belief that an administrative state - that is, an executive branch of the federal government bloated with bureaucratic "experts" supplanting law with regulation - is necessary for effective governance in modern times.

The murkiness surrounding the tern "misleading" in this case is of a piece with the problematic nature of the use of the term "reasonable" as applied to gasoline prices by the likes of Joe Biden and others who speak of "price gouging." 

It also gets at the heart of what the Supreme Court struck down in West Virginia v EPA: an executive-branch agency telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs without being authorized to do so by Congress.

That this gets an airing as a reasonable public-policy position is just the latest example of how shattered, bitter and in need of prayer this society is.   

Another great SCOTUS ruling

 The robes - at least the majority - have been knocking it out of the park this week.

This is another one of those that, like the narrative that was ready to go upon issuance of the Dobbs ruling, that "abortion rights" were taken away, when what the Court ruled was that the Constitution does not say that abortion is a right, substantive due process fans notwithstanding, is already getting couched in certain corners as bad old fuddy-duddies standing in the way of what "needs" to happen. It's already getting framed as a setback in the "fight against climate change."  (BTW, I thought this new CNN CEO, Chris Licht, wanted to point the network in a more objective-journalism direction.)

No, what this does is go a long way toward dismantling the century-plus-old progressive vision of unelected pointy-headed bureaucratic "experts" in executive-branch positions making law:

Roberts led a 6-3 decision in West Virginia v EPAthat has significant repercussions for agency jurisdiction. The court ruled that the EPA could not use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions without a more specific grant of that authority from Congress, although Roberts kept the decision as narrow as he could:

The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent, saying that the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

The ruling appeared to curtail the agency’s ability to regulate the energy sector, limiting it to measures like emission controls at individual power plants and, unless Congress acts, ruling out more ambitious approaches like a cap-and-trade system at a time when experts are issuing increasingly dire warnings about the quickening pace of global warming.

The implications of the ruling could extend well beyond environmental policy and further signal that the court’s newly expanded conservative majority is deeply skeptical of the power of administrative agencies to address major issues facing the nation and the planet.

The New York Times notes that this draws a pretty clear line in the sand from this court about agency jurisdiction and authority. It also parallels the CDC eviction-moratoria case, they note, in which the court rebuked the CDC for overstepping its jurisdiction and authority, granted by Congress in its enabling statute. If Congress wanted to expand that authority, then Congress should have acted, Roberts ruled at that time.

Roberts writes today that not only did Congress not specifically authorize the EPA to regulate carbon emissions in the manner they planned in their Clean Power Plan, Congress explicitly rejected such proposals:

The dissent also cites our decision in American Elec. Power Co. v. Connecticut, 564 U. S. 410 (2011). Post, at 20. The question there, however, was whether Congress wanted district court judges to decide, under unwritten federal nuisance law, “whether and how to regulate carbon- dioxide emissions from power plants.” 564 U. S., at 426. We answered no, given the existence of Section 111(d). But we said nothing about the ways in which Congress intended EPA to exercise its power under that provision. And it is doubtful we had in mind that it would claim the authority to require a large shift from coal to natural gas, wind, and solar. After all, EPA had never regulated in that manner, despite having issued many prior rules governing power plants under Section 111. See, e.g., 71 Fed. Reg. 9866 (2006); 70 Fed. Reg. 28616; 44 Fed. Reg. 33580; 36 Fed. Reg. 24875 (1973).

Finally, we cannot ignore that the regulatory writ EPA newly uncovered conveniently enabled it to enact a program that, long after the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions “had become well known, Congress considered and rejected” multiple times. Brown & Williamson, 529 U. S., at 144; see also Alabama Assn., 594 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 2); Bunte Brothers, 312 U. S., at 352 (lack of authority not previously exercised “reinforced by [agency’s] unsuccessful attempt . . . to secure from Congress an express grant of [the challenged] authority”). At bottom, the Clean Power Plan essentially adopted a cap-and-trade scheme, or set of state cap-and-trade schemes, for carbon. See 80 Fed. Reg. 64734 (“Emissions trading is . . . an integral part of our BSER analysis.”). Congress, however, has consistently rejected proposals to amend the Clean Air Act to create such a program. See, e.g., American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, H. R. 2454, 111th Cong., 1st Sess.; Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, S. 1733, 111th Cong., 1st Sess. (2009). It has also declined to enact similar measures, such as a carbon tax. See, e.g., Climate Protection Act of 2013, S. 332, 113th Cong., 1st Sess.; Save our Climate Act of 2011, H. R. 3242, 112th Cong., 1st Sess. “The importance of the issue,” along with the fact that the same basic scheme EPA adopted “has been the subject of an earnest and profound debate across the country, . . . makes the oblique form of the claimed delegation all the more suspect.” Gonzales, 546 U. S., at 267–268 (internal quotation marks omitted).

In this case, it wasn’t just the regulation that crossed the line, but also its arbitrary nature. The EPA attempted to impose caps that didn’t have any relation to the statute nor to a rational and objective standard, Roberts wrote:

First, unlike Section 111, the Acid Rain and NAAQS programs contemplate trading systems as a means of complying with an already established emissions limit, set either directly by Congress (as with Acid Rain, see 42 U. S. C. §7651c) or by reference to the safe concentration of the pollutant in the ambient air (as with the NAAQS). In Section 111, by contrast, it is EPA’s job to come up with the cap itself: the “numerical limit on emissions” that States must apply to each source. 80 Fed. Reg. 64768. We doubt that Congress directed the Agency to set an emissions cap at the level “which reflects the degree of emission limitation achievable through the application of [a cap-and-trade] system,” §7411(a)(1), for that degree is indeterminate. It is one thing for Congress to authorize regulated sources to use trading to comply with a preset cap, or a cap that must be based on some scientific, objective criterion, such as the NAAQS. It is quite another to simply authorize EPA to set the cap itself wherever the Agency sees fit.

Finally, Roberts concludes that any such policy with the magnitudes of impacts that this scheme has needs a specific and explicit act of Congress to authorize. This is the “major question” doctrine at work:

Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible “solution to the crisis of the day.” New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 187 (1992). But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Justice Neil Gorsuch goes farther in rebuking the dissent. First, his concurrence offers a lengthy review and support for the major-questions doctrine as a means to rein in the increasingly expansive bureaucratic state, which he notes presents a threat to constitutional order and self-governance anyway. The doctrine is born of necessity to ensure that unelected officials remain responsive to both Congress and the president, and also that they do not intrude on matters that properly belong to the sovereign states.

Rexford Tugwell is surely rolling in his grave. 

Joe Biden, unmistakably Democrat

 Wednesday, January 20 - up through early afternoon, and I want stress that point - brought the nation the sigh of relief and the moment of Constitutional stability and plain decorum for which it had yearned (save for the handful of post-bitter-enders who will probably insist that November's election was stolen the rest of their mortal lives). The performances by Lady Gaga, Amanda Gorman and Garth Brooks were all appropriate to the moment. The talk of unity and turning down the temperature may have been merely obligatory, but they had a calming effect.

But after the crowd, such as it was, dispersed, President Biden, as promised, came back up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office and served notice that his was going to be an unmistakably twenty-first-century Democrat agenda, steeped in identity politics, climate alarmism and disregard for the nation's economic health. 

There was a stack of executive orders awaiting him and he dug right in.

He himself admitted that on some of the fronts, legislation will be needed to flesh out details. 

Um, yeah.

I was gratified to see Mitch McConnell address this on the Senate floor, in a speech that struck a measured balance between an attitude of willingness and a firm assurance that Republican legislators would not gloss over areas of absolute disagreement, but rather forthrightly voice opposition to such measures that Biden has put forth.

More broadly speaking, is this now a permanent fixture of the federal-government landscape? Is it going to be an entrenched tradition for a new president to sign executive orders right after being sworn in, the net effect of which is to say, "I hereby render all the measures my predecessor took by executive order null and void"? So much that ought to be codified - or rejected - in the legislative branch, a lot of it with immediate and profound impact on Americans' daily lives, becomes a ping-pong ball bounced back and forth every four or eight years. 

In any event, reversals were the order of the day.

In the immigration realm, three abrupt changes will be made to policies that, whether the Very Stable Genius truly grasped the real reason behind them or not, were about the rule of law and national sovereignty. In short, they were among the handful of policy moves the VSG got right. Biden has revoked the 2017 order that prioritized the arrest of illegal aliens. The "remain in Mexico" policy will now be reversed. Biden's administration will preserve the DACA program.

Then there's the disbanding of the 1776 Commission. No discussion of whether its scope or focus needed any reexamination,. Nope. Just pulling the plug on it. 

Again, I'm pretty sure the Very Stable Genius, the historically illiterate non-reader that he is, did not grasp the full depth of what he was setting up with this commission. The bottom line, though, is that it was a good idea, especially one to get underway in such an inflamed year as 2020. It served as a corrective to the lie-filled and America-hating 1619 Project, which, like critical race theory and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, has insinuated itself in the curricula of school systems across the country, poisoning impressionable young minds and deeply damaging the field of history as a scholarly endeavor.

It's understandable why Biden did it. He goes all in for the idea that there is still systemic racism in American society, and a commission like that doesn't contribute to that narrative. 

No, the era now dawning is going to bring us diversity and inclusion on steroids. 

Exhibit A is another one of Wednesday's executive orders, this one saying that people who "feel" like they're the sex opposite of what the DNA in every cell of their bodies makes clear that they are have "rights" - to use the public restrooms they "feel" like using, and to join sports teams designated for the sex opposite of the one their DNA tells us that they are. 

This is another step, like the pronoun-usage laws in effect in various municipalities, toward making people indulge the delusion harbored by transgendered people, further distancing language and reality from one another. 

He's even appointed such a person to be assistant HHS secretary. The photographs of this individual  make clear that he's not fooling anybody. That's a dude with long, stringy hair.

Then there's the cancelling of the Keystone XL pipeline construction. Very stupid, on several fronts. It's a poke in the eye to our good neighbor to the north. Canada may at present have a soft-left government, but it is, as it always has been, in America's inner circle of allies. This move also throws thousands of skilled tradesmen out of work.

Democrats would rather you not think through the lack of logic in this move. Transporting oil by pipeline means you are not introducing the fossil-fuel exhaust of freight trains into the atmosphere. It's the clean way of getting it from Point A to Point B. 

I made this move the subject of an entire LITD post the other day:

Lots of Canadians are not okay with this:

Former TC Energy executive Dennis McConaghy is not surprised the project is among the first decisions by the new administration.

"I have consistently said Biden would indulge in this rescinding of the permit immediately because it's something he has to do largely to follow through for expectations of his political base and many of his donors," McConaghy told CBC's Kyle Bakx on Sunday.

The decision would likely lead to disappointment in the Canadian oilpatch, even after so many other setbacks for the project over the last decade.

"Ideally the project should have been completed and put into operation during the Trump administration," McConaghy said. "It's a very audacious thing that is being done here by the Biden administration."

Kirsten Hillman, Canada's ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement sent to The Canadian Press that the pipeline expansion fits with Canada's climate plan.

"The Government of Canada continues to support the Keystone XL project and the benefits that it will bring to both Canada and the United States," she said.

"Not only has the project itself changed significantly since it was first proposed, but Canada's oilsands production has also changed significantly. Per-barrel oilsands GHG emissions have dropped 31 per cent since 2000, and innovation will continue to drive progress."

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air gets into some of the specific fronts on this would be a wrecking-ball move: 

This move would cause significant damage to the stakeholders in the pipeline, leading to possible liabilities for the federal government. They played by the rules and jumped through all of the required hoops to obtain that permit and then began investing heavily in the work based on their belief in the good faith of the United States government. It’s not hard to imagine them going to court to recover their losses and finding judges amenable to the idea. That would leave the American taxpayers holding the bill for this fiasco.

Let’s not forget that large sections of the pipeline are already complete, including portions that cross the border. What happens to all of that pipeline? Will it just be left to rust or will the federal government attempt to force the pipeline’s owners to spend even more money to rip everything out?

As I mentioned above, there are literally tens of thousands of jobs on the line here, ranging from the workers who are directly engaged in the construction of the pipeline to all of the supporting industries that make such work possible. Joe Biden is signaling that he’s ready to come into office and evaporate a huge number of jobs “on day one.” Wasn’t he only recently complaining about the number of people who are already out of work because of the pandemic?

Somebody who holds elected office in the United States needs to speak the plain truth about energy  policy, and not just once. It needs to be driven home repeatedly.

Dense and consistently available energy forms are by definition far less expensive than diffuse and intermittent forms. The latter are not viable in the marketplace without government subsidization. And it's fine to use the former all we want. It is not putting the global climate in peril.

The above paragraph needs to be stated emphatically in debates between candidates, on the House and Senate floors, in television appearances and in columns and articles. 

The entire climate alarmism movement has been nothing but a nauseating exercise in preening and self-congratulation over how much it cares about humanity in general, the lives of actual individual human beings be damned.

Let us just hope that the pushback and court cases that arise from this shut down not the pipeline, but rather Biden's blatant assault on human advancement. 

Rejoining the Paris climate agreement is a similar type of move. No country in the world is meeting the agreement's targets. China is approving new coal plants like there is no tomorrow. Even if every signatory nation did adhere to the letter, the effect on the global average temperature in 2100 would be negligible. All it does is erode national sovereignty and interfere with energy companies' right to determine what products to bring to market (and consumers' choices regarding what energy forms to consume). 

Then there is the matter of the extermination of fetal Americans, something that it seems a self-described devout Catholic would not be cool with. Alas, it appears that the US will once again fund health organizations that are in that grisly business. 

I can't say any of this surprises me in the least. Biden was portrayed as some kind of centrist when juxtaposed against Bernie Sanders, but the entire Democrat party has largely become a leftist enterprise in recent decades. (Ironically, the lone holdouts in the Senate, truly centrist if not slightly right-leaning Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, may have a certain kind of power to determine how far this agenda does or does not go, given the 50-50 makeup of that body at present.)

And it becomes incumbent on actual conservatives (Trumpists are not, or ought not to be, invited to participate in this discussion) to articulate their position on each and all of these matters in the most soundly reasoned, most consistent and coherent way possible, because a great many of those who disagree with us are going to try to go for the "you-worshippers-of-the-Orange-Man-had-your-day-your-views-are-part-of-that-failed-agenda" angle.

We have to be ready to say, "No, they're not. They go way back before the Trumpism infection beset our movement and they merit a ringing defense."

 We know at the outset of the new era what the lay of the land is going to be. If Biden is devout in anything, it's being a Democrat, and he's "grown" with his party at every turn since 1972.

 

Friday roundup

If there's an exceptionally exceptional piece by Kevin Williamson out on a given day - everything he writes is exceptional - we lead with it in a roundup. I can't remember a more thorough summing up of  one of the basic differences between the American Right and Left than what he offers this morning. The Left tends to view things on a national scale, where as the Right tends to look at things microcosmically, starting with individual sovereignty and moving up through the cultural distinctions of various locales and regions, and setting great store by the sovereignty of states.
He reminds us that we must consider history's nuances. For all the keep-it-local impulse that the Republican Party, particularly since the modern conservative movement has been impacting it, is informed by, there's a corporatist / grand-scheme element that dates back to the great Abraham Lincoln:

The Republican party of President Lincoln’s time had a wing that was recognizably conservative in the contemporary sense of that word, but President Lincoln, like his fellow Republican President Eisenhower a century later, was very much interested in what he called “improvements,” meaning mostly what we now call “infrastructure,” canals and railroads in one century and the federal highway system in the next. These projects were thought of as being national in the sense that they would improve the economic productivity and public life of the nation as a whole by enabling the easy movement of goods and people — and, if necessary, soldiers: It’s the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

And the argument can be made that some degree of nationwide uniformity has been necessary:

Projects that are national in scope in a country as large and complex as the United States inevitably require standardization and regimentation. In the early days of railroads, different railways used different gauges of track, a situation that was of relatively little practical consequence until the railroad network grew extensive enough that the discrete systems began to interconnect. Different parties had different political and economic interests in particular configurations of track — hence the so-called Erie Gauge War — but competition among the railroads and the economic power of the major industrial and agricultural concerns inconvenienced by incompatible tracks were sufficient to ensure almost universal standardization. The emerging Internet had standardization needs that were in many ways similar.

In our time, we think of progressives as being anti-business, or at least skeptical of the political and economic power of big corporations and business alliances. But the political thinking of the Progressive Era was profoundly influenced by the business philosophy of the time, which was not the libertarian-oriented business thinking we are used to hearing from Charles and David Koch or the Chamber of Commerce. The experience of building out the railroad network had left a profound mark on American business culture, as had the emergence of such techniques as the use of standardized and interchangeable parts in machine construction (one of Samuel Colt’s many contributions to American life), assembly lines (particularly in the automobile industry), and more systematic approaches to business management. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” philosophy was ascendant, and business and government alike was consumed with efficiency, rooting out waste and redundancy, and coordination. Many of the leading business thinkers of the time were frankly corporatist (the railroads had been a textbook example of corporatism in action), decrying “destructive competition,” duplication of effort, and the general messiness of free markets. You can still hear the echoes of that when Senator Sanders decries the many available brands of deodorant. 

Add in the foundation to this provided by the progressives - Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson et al - which posited that in an age of urbanization and industrialization, the Constitution alone was no longer a sufficient operating manual for federal government and that a cabal of pointy-headed experts needed to be appointed to executive-branch agencies to guide the nation on matters ranging from energy production to transportation to health care to education to management-labor relations, and you have a one-size-fits-all policy:

If you believe that what the world needs — what America needs — is efficient expert management, then you will pursue policy goals that emphasize size, scale, homogeneity, systematization, and regimentation. And your preferred instrument almost always will be the federal government; 50 states doing things 50 different ways is incompatible with your vision of intelligent expert administration.

This explains some of the Left's current obsessions, the Electoral College and the Senate:

It is unsurprising, then, that most of the foregoing Democratic arguments are mere demands for greater political power disguised as calls for “fairness,” an infinitely plastic concept. And we can be reasonably confident that if certain shoes had been on other feet — if Democrats enjoyed a commanding position in the states, or if Mrs. Clinton had won in the Electoral College with a couple million fewer votes than Donald Trump — that the intensity of their complaints would be diminished. But this is not only naked political calculation: The belief that the United States should be administered as a single unitary entity and that the 50 states are 50 impediments to national progress and efficient national administration is deep in their political thinking. In fact, it may even be the case that their political calculation is a lagging indicator driven in part by their policy vision: Being so focused on Washington, it is natural that the Democrats have allowed the atrophy of their political muscle in the states, leading to diminished power in them. At the same time, the people in the more rural states have not failed to appreciate that the Democrats’ Washington-first approach devalues them and their communities — precisely the problem that our constitutional order was designed to ameliorate. 

At Townhall, Allie Stuckey invites us to contemplate the sheer arrogance of this:

A viral tweet listed Republicans for which white women voted in the midterms and concluded, “white women gonna white.” 

Don’t worry, though. The Women’s March is here to help us out: “There’s a lot of work to do, white women. A lot of learning. A lot of growing. We want to do it with you.”

What this amounts to is the essential leftist message: "You will be made to get your mind right." There will be no room for this:

The claim is that we are voting against our own interests. But this assumes our interests are liberal interests—abortion, closing the “gender pay gap,” gun control, etc. And they’re just not. We women who vote Republican do so because, in general, we believe in things like the Second Amendment, lower taxes and restrictions on killing the unborn. We are not oppressed. We’re just not progressive. 

And these people will be erased from your memory:

These are the same people who completely ignore successful conservative women like Nikki Haley, Condoleezza Rice, or Carly Fiorina–not to mention the Republicans who ran in the midterms. Martha McSally, colonel in the Air Force, congresswoman and Arizona senatorial candidate certainly isn’t trying to repress women. The first female governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, doesn’t seem to be relegating women to the kitchen. Young Kim, Congress’s first Korean-American representative, isn’t exactly a slave to the patriarchy. These women, though, just don’t fit the narrative.

Rachel Larimore at The Weekly Standard says that the disgusting and insulting calling out of Mia Love (among other Republican Congressional candidates who lost on Tuesday) as having lost because she was insufficiently loyal to him (" . . . gave me no love and lost. Sorry about that, Mia.")  puts the lie to the idea that he gives an actual diddly about abortion.

The relentless march of the campus jackboots:

At Colorado State University (CSU), administrators have designated the common greeting "long time, no see" as non-inclusive language.

That's according to a student, Katrina Leibee, who writes for the campus paper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian. Leibee met with Zahra Al-Saloom, director of diversity and inclusion at CSU, who showed her a list of terms and phrases considered contrary to the university's mission of fostering inclusion.

"One of these phrases was 'long time, no see,' which is viewed as derogatory towards those of Asian descent," wrote Leibee.

Leibee also noted that administrators discouraged use of "you guys" in favor of "y'all," which is gender neutral (and ungrammatical, but this is apparently less of a concern). Her column does not claim that administrators force students to use the gender neutral terminology, just that such terminology is preferred.

Al-Saloom did not respond to a request for a comment.

Not that it will persuade the Very Stable Genius, but John Yoo, George Conway and Clarence Thomas all think the VSG's appointment of Whitaker as acting AG is unconstitutional.

And the indispensable Heather MacDonald, writing at City Journal,  (I'm currently reading her new book The Diversity Delusion, and it's excellent) says that firing Jeff Sessions was a dumb move on the VSG's part, that the VSG couldn't have asked for a more reliable ally on immigration policy and basic law and order.

The disarray at the CFPB is what you get when the executive branch exceeds its constitutionally specified mission

The basics of the situation are that the Bureau's head, Richard Cordray, rather abruptly announced that he'd be stepping down as of the end of the business day on Friday, and Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney to take his place on an interim basis. He'd be handling those duties in addition to continuing as budget director. Alas, Cordray's immediate underling, Leandra English sees the situation otherwise and is suing to keep Mulvaney from assuming the position.

Ronald Rubin at NRO provides the important backstory on Cordray:

Ambitious, cerebral, and socially awkward, Cordray had alternated between stints as an accomplished lawyer and a mediocre politician before he lost Ohio’s attorney-general election in 2010 and Elizabeth Warren, then a presidential assistant, hired him to lead the nascent bureau’s enforcement division. The following July, President Obama bypassed Warren and instead nominated Cordray to be the CFPB’s first director. In the marathon standoff that ensued, Republican senators filibustered the nomination, Obama installed Cordray by using an unconstitutional recess appointment, Democrats threatened to change the filibuster rules, and Republicans surrendered. On July 16, 2013, the Senate confirmed the temporary director to a five-year term.

Perhaps it was this two-year ordeal that turned Cordray into a cynical partisan mercenary. The University of Chicago Law School graduate understood the harm that anti-market policies cause consumers, but whenever newly elected Senator Warren and progressive groups pressured him to pursue their agenda, he faithfully delivered.

By 2017, there was no denying the ugly truth. Cordray cared about consumers, but he was consumed by politics. Since 2010, Republicans have argued that the CFPB’s unique structure — an independent agency whose single director the president can fire only for cause, with guaranteed funding through Federal Reserve Bank profits rather than the congressional appropriation process — is a recipe for government abuse, if not unconstitutional. Cordray proved them right.

Warren built a political battleship, and Cordray deployed it. The bureau’s powerful media division dictated policy to its regulatory professionals and relentlessly exaggerated the agency’s achievements in daily press releases and social-media posts. Political operatives used the CFPB’s super-independence to stonewall congressional subpoenas and hide unethical investigation tactics, internal discrimination problems, and other inconvenient facts. Republican critics were dismissed as Wall Street sycophants.

Meanwhile, millions of dollars were diverted from the CFPB to Democratic allies. From 2014 to 2017, the bureau paid $11 million a year to rent office space in an Obama fundraiser’s building. The Dodd-Frank Act allowed the CFPB to send the civil money penalties collected in its enforcement actions to a trustee of its choice, who, after taking a healthy cut, distributed the funds to ostensible victims in unrelated matters. The maneuver both enriched Democratic trustees and transformed fines extracted from defenseless businesses based on their deep pockets rather than actual consumer harm into “over $12 billion in damages returned to 29 million injured consumers.” To spread such propaganda, the bureau paid over $43 million to GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns.

The 2016 election almost ended Cordray’s tenure. Despite high-profile litigation and debate over what, if any, justification the new Republican president needed to fire him, the legal remedy for unwarranted removal would probably have been back pay, not reinstatement. Cordray survived only because the president’s advisers felt that making the director a martyr would help his expected Ohio gubernatorial campaign. They underestimated him.

Cordray spent the first half of 2017 quietly promoting and entrenching faithful Democratic employees to obstruct his Republican successor. On June 30, he awarded GMMB an additional $14.79 million contract. Ten days later, he delivered a gift to big Democratic donors in the plaintiff’s bar: a rule banning financial businesses from using contractual arbitration clauses to prevent consumers from joining class-action lawsuits. Cordray argued that the lawsuits were necessary to prevent deceptive practices because individuals rarely sue over improper bank fees and other small damages. Of course, the CFPB was created to prosecute such violations, but he said that limited resources prevented it from sufficiently protecting consumers. He then unveiled a video titled “CFPB’s New Arbitration Rule: Take Action Together,” an expensive GMMB creation reminiscent of Clinton’s “Stronger Together” ads. Republicans were forced to use the Congressional Review Act to block the rule; Democrats gained a talking point for the midterm elections. 

Joe Cunningham at Red State explains that such partisan hackery is now coming back to bite the Dems:

Here’s what happened, in a nutshell: The Democrats thought they had a permanent majority, and so they allowed Obama to consolidate this power. They created the CFPB as a means of allowing a Democratic president to regulate the financial sector without legislative oversight. They allowed unrestrained executive power over many U.S. agencies without a care as to what would happen if a Republican took over as President of the United States.

They thought that idea was laughable.

Well, here we are. We have President Trump with unfettered power across many executive agencies, including the CFPB. At best, we’ll get an argument about recess appointments, maybe, but Trump has the legal authority here, unless a court says different.

And, if a court does say that Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to make this appointment, then the Trump administration just has to point back to the D.C. Circuit’s opinion that the entire agency is unconstitutional anyway and ask Congress to cut its funding.

The Democrats have backed themselves into a corner here, not realizing that the Republicans could and would take the highest office in the land and use it to wield influence over the same agencies they were fine with their own president wielding influence over. 

When you take a wild-west approach to government rather than follow what the Constitution says about the specified functions of each branch, you are a fool for assuming that you'll always have an advantage over your adversaries. And the more loosey-goosey the "independent-agency" designation, the less sure you can be about things turning out as you intended.

The DACA post

You don't need me to tell you that the presidential order to end DACA, with a six-month delay, is a front-burner subject of discussion on news and opinion sites today.

The fault lines regarding who likes it and who loathes it are mostly predictable, but not entirely. There are conservatives of a libertarian bent who think DACA is a good thing. Paul Ryan only bolstered his image as an ineffectual leader who exhibits symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome by appealing to Trump four days ago to delay action, and now issuing a statement saying that it was the right thing to do, given that the Most Equal Comrade's executive order was unconstitutional.

But now everybody has the perfect opportunity to indulge in appeals to feelings and ad hominem attacks. Squirrel-Hair's water-carriers feel emboldened to ramp up their kick-'em-all-out-now message, and those who want to paint this as being about "diversity" and "what really makes our country strong" can once again trot out anecdotal poster children for us all to empathize with.

Jim Jamitis at Red State steps back in scope to place this issue in the context of issues generally that assume layers of complexity as government tries - clumsily - to address them:

The most intractable political problems we struggle with as a nation are not usually the result of the an issue inherently being particularly complex. More often the problem has been tied into a Gordian knot on the scale of a roadside “world’s largest ball of twine” attraction by all the ham handed attempts by Congress to fix it over the years. Health care certainly falls into this category; no one in Washington seems able to admit that the root cause of the problem is Washington and its constant meddling in the health insurance market. Immigration is also a problem which has been made ridiculous by decades of compounded failure. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was President Barack Obama’s attempt to solve a piece of the immigration mess through executive branch overreach.

That overreach split one problem into two problems. The immigration problem is what to do with people who are technically illegal aliens but who were brought to the United States as minor children by their parents. Most of them have known no other home than the United States. The second problem is abuse of power. Attempting to address one problem by capriciously exercising power not delegated to him by the Constitution, Obama only made matters worse. 

He goes on to say that the MAGA boneheads will, as is characteristic for them, refuse to admit to any nuance:

There are plenty of mouth breathers with sweat stained MAGA caps screeching that the only solution is kicking people out of the country and anyone who suggests that this is not a black and white, one size fits all problem is just a RINO squish “libturd.” (Most of them probably fall into the pseudo-alpha male category described by Jay Caruso.) I recognize that Congressional Republicans have been mostly incompetent in their attempts to address these issues, but that makes it no less stupid to suggest deporting people indiscriminately to countries they may not have even seen since they were infants.

Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast points out that for however long this limbo period is, and given Congressional Republicans' track record for avoiding resolute action like the plague, it could be of indefinite duration, the living-in-the-shadows quality of the existence of these offspring of illegal border crossers is going be somewhat more pronounced:

“Information provided to USCIS in DACA requests will not be proactively provided to ICE and CBP for the purpose of immigration enforcement proceedings,” read the White House talking points memo, which was obtained by The Daily Beast. “With that said, it can be utilized for such proceedings when appropriate.”

In practical terms, Fresco said, this means that any DACA recipient who gets arrested by police will be vulnerable to deportation. That’s because police alert a host of federal agencies, including ICE, when they make arrests. ICE officers will then be able to ask USCIS if people who were arrested have received DACA—and, thus, are in the U.S. illegally. 

The end result will be that a good chunk of the 800,000 or so DACA recipients will simply recede from public view entirely. 

“If people go back in the shadows and don’t have any interactions with law enforcement of any kind, their likelihood of being removed is not high,” Fresco said. 

“The key is doing everything you can to avoid interactions with the police,” he added. “That’s pretty much all you can do at this point.”

Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire also thinks it's a fool's errand to count on GOP legislators to come up with something solid in the next half-year:

Congressional Republicans Will Fall Apart. If Trump thinks he’s going to be able to get Congressional Republicans to act on his wall by trading DACA for it, he’s likely to be sorely mistaken. There will be Republicans who take the same purist position as Ann Coulter; there will be others, like Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who are likely to take the same position as Congressional Democrats.

And finally, there is the chance for post-America's large corporations to once again grandstand. I've often used Cummins as an example of corporate acquiescence to the Left, not only because it is headquartered in the city where I live, but because it can be counted on to take the hurl-inducing position on any issue that it deems as involving its "values." They do it with energy, they do it with human sexuality, and now their doing it with DACA.

Sunday evening roundup

Joseph Bottoms, a professor of cyber-ethics and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University has a must-read review at the Washington Free Beacon on Philip Hamburger's new book, The Administrative Threat.

A taste:

This element of the Constitution is what the modern administrative state ignores. We have now a "revival of absolute power," in exactly a way that the Founders would have understood: a use of power that stands outside the constraints of the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches laid out in the Constitution. As Hamburger writes, "Eighteenth-century Americans assumed that a rule could have the obligation of law only if it came from the constitutionally established legislature elected by the people." Twenty-first-century Americans are governed instead by unelected officials who do their own rule-making, their own enforcing, and their own judging.

Kimberly Ross has a great Father's Day piece at Red State  called "Long Live the Patriarchy."

As LITD readers know, this former Never Trumper is now in the camp of let's-assess-each-development-on-its-merits. The abrupt change in Cuba policy is one for the good-move side of the ledger.

If you'd like to consume a feast of clear, deep thinking guided by unwavering principle, sprightly touches of humor, and ah-yes-I-feel-at-home-here humanity, languish a while at the YouTube channel of Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto.

How deep is Western civilization rot? This deep:

Currently, the Defense Department is working to meet a July 1 deadline for transgender integration training.

That’s right. It’s not about military readiness. They’re teaching them to bow to the LGBTQ mafia, at the expense of the integrity of our military.

“All of this is an effort to ensure the seamless transition and the full implementation of DoD policy,” said Zenia Boswell, a representative from the Army National Guard’s Personnel Policy Division, in a Thursday press release.

As of July 1, the release went on to say, “a person’s gender status — including being transgender — will no longer be a disqualifying factor from enlisting in the military.”

But it’s more complicated than that, as DoD has not yet finalized a transgender accessions policy. In the meantime, officials said, units are continuing to get training on the existing directive for currently serving soldiers.

To be clear, an indefinite hold was put on transgender admissions, but they’re moving forward, in preparation for what seems to be an anticipated lift.

Folks, that 's why it's accurate to call our nation post-America, even though we're rid of the Most Equal Comrade.

The Most Equal Comrade makes haste while he still has his grip on post-America's throat

He intends to cement his legacy as the first US president to overtly hate human advancement:

Oh my. It’s beginning to seem as if someone could start an entire blog dedicated to nothing but the back alley maneuvers that the outgoing President is attempting in order to “cement his legacy” going forward. A better translation of that would be to say that he’s trying to plant as many landmines as possible to make any reforms intended by Donald Trump more difficult, if not impossible. Now Bloomberg is reporting that there’s a big one coming, though it hasn’t been announced by White House yet. Using a loosely worded provision from a law passed more than half a century ago, Obama is reportedly going to try to permanently ban offshore drilling and oil exploration in regions of the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast. 

President Barack Obama is preparing to block the sale of new offshore drilling rights in much of the U.S. Arctic and parts of the Atlantic, a move that could indefinitely restrict oil production there, according to two people familiar with the decision.

Obama will invoke a provision in a 1953 law that gives him wide latitude to withdraw U.S. waters from future oil and gas leasing, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision had not been announced. Until now the law has been used sparingly to preserve coral reefs, walrus feeding grounds and marine sanctuaries.

Coming in the waning days of his administration, Obama’s move — which could come as soon as Tuesday — responds to a clamor from environmental activists who have looked for a way to lock in protections before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Related actions by Canada may be announced at the same time, the people said.

The plan is one that was hatched by drilling protesters earlier this year but didn’t gain any traction at the time. Some of their attorneys were combing through dusty old records and discovered a vague provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. It deals with the procedures approved by Congress wherein the President could arrange for leases of offshore lands for energy exploration and how they would be awarded. Buried in that mountain of legalese is section 12(a) which reads as follows:

Withdrawal of unleased lands by President: The President of the United States may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf. 

What does that mean, exactly? The lawyers who have looked at aren’t entirely sure because none of this has apparently ever been challenged in court. Up until now, the provision was only invoked to set aside small sections of the shelf for the protection of certain aquatic creatures and undersea habitats, but no president thus far has attempted to use it to shut down entire sections of the shelf from drilling.

If Barack Obama does this, couldn’t Donald Trump simply undo it with the stroke of a pen? Again.. nobody is exactly sure. 

As LITD readers of any length of time know, this blog is no fan of Squirrel-Hair, but it is hoped that he gets to work right away on this, consulting the best legal minds he can summon.

Barack Obama has been a horror for the United States of America.

"The scientific cat fight of our time"

The Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, writing at The Hill, predicts the thwacking of the hornet's nest that is going to take place when the EPA under Pruitt reverses the present regime's "finding of endangerment" for CO2:

It may very well be held that the EPA remains responsible for regulation under the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision unless there is a specific act of Congress reversing its progeny policies, such as the Clean Power Plan. So the Endangerment Finding must be reversed.

But how to do it? For years, federal agencies have thrown massive support at scientists who, as human beings, serve their best interests (and their employer-universities) by generating horror-show results that also generate more support and professional advancement.

The Trump administration is going to have to stock up on scientists and administrators who are savvy to this game, and they are going to be very hard to find, as there’s very little incentive to not play along.

There’s going to have to be a massive effort to pick apart failing climate models and questionably-adjusted data. They’re going to have to find people willing to expose the current regime’s blatant abuse of logic in generating inflated “costs” of global warming, while largely ignoring the co-benefits of fossil fuel power, like doubled life expectancy and undreamt-of wealth.

The academy is going to howl, and Washington’s science lobbies, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science (headed by Democratic ex-congressman Rush Holt) are going to go berserk.
Fasten your seat belts, for we may be about to witness the scientific-cat fight of our time.

On one side will be a massive and entrenched establishment, defending models that we now know were (and this is truly shocking) often adjusted to give a predetermined result. On the other will be a dogged and far smaller clan, tearing apart the code of these models, much like the ENIGMA busters of Bletchley Park. This will get ugly.

But truth will prevail now.