Beautiful and glorious!

Good on ya, DoJ:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday announced that it is siding with a district court ruling that found the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.

The move is an escalation of the Trump administration's legal battle against the health care law.

The DOJ previously argued in court that the law's pre-existing condition protections should be struck down. Now, the administration argues the entire law should be invalidated.

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled in December that the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate is unconstitutional and that the rest of law is therefore invalid.

The DOJ said Monday that it agrees the decision should stand as the case works its way through the appeals process in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

"The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed," the department said in a short letter to the appeals court.

The notion of the government making people buy a particular product was always as offensive and counter to everything about America's essence as anything ever foisted on the nation. Ditto the notion of the government making private organizations offer particular products and price them according to governmental dictates.

Now, can we please try an actual free-market approach?

 

Not only did Corey Booker pursue an out-of-line line of questioning, he pretty clearly showed that he thinks Christian doctrine is obsolete

And good on Ted Cruz for calling hum out on it:

On Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a 2020 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, asked Trump judicial nominee Neomi Rao if she considered homosexual relationships to be sinful. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) immediately called Booker out on this line of questioning.

Booker seized on Rao's 2008 article opposing the Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized homosexual activity. He then directly asked her, "Are gay relationships in your opinion immoral?"

"I am not sure the relevance of that," Rao responded.

"Do you think gay relationships are immoral?" he continued.

"I do not," Rao said.

"Do you believe they are a sin?" Booker pressed.

"My personal views on any of these subjects are things I would put to one side," the nominee said.

"So you're not willing to say whether you believe it is sinful for a man — for two men — to be married?" the senator pressed once again.

"No," Rao responded.

"Excuse me?" Booker said.

"My response is that these personal views are ones that I would put to one side. Whatever my personal views are on the subject, I would faithfully follow the precedent of the Supreme Court," the nominee said.

Booker later launched into a speech about the struggles LGBTQ Americans have faced.

"You know LGBTQ Americans have faced a long history of discrimination, long histories of violence, intimidation, bullying. Young LGBTQ youth in America report not going to school because of fear for their own safety at rates that are unconscionable," he said. Finally, he asked a question, "Why is this administration currently trying to do so much to roll back transgender right protections and the like?

"I think civil rights and equal protection of the laws are two essential values in our system," Rao responded. "If I were to be confirmed as a judge, I would firmly uphold that."

Unsatisfied, Cory Booker asked, "Have you ever had an LGBTQ law clerk?"
Rao, who has never yet served as a judge, noted that she does not have law clerks.
"Sorry, someone working for you," the senator responded.

"To be honest I don't know the sexual orientation of my staff. I take people as they come. Irrespective of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, I treat people as individuals. Those are the values that I grew up with and those are the values I would apply if confirmed," the nominee responded. 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) slammed Booker for his line of questioning, arguing that questions about what is sinful should be utterly off-limits in confirmation hearings. He cited the Constitution's ban on a religious test for public office, and declared, "I don't believe this is a theological court of inquisition."

"The Senate Judiciary Committee should not be a theater for twisting nominees' records or views, nor should it be an avenue for persecution," Cruz declared. "We have seen a growing pattern among Senate Democrats of hostility to religious faith. I was deeply troubled a few minutes ago to hear questioning of a nominee asking your personal views on what is sinful. In my view that has no business in this committee." 

Corey Booker is a perfect example of why the Democrat party is an enemy of Western civilization.

Tuesday roundup

A WSJ editorial on how the leftist media is trying to give the person who will probably take Brett Kavanaugh's old seat on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals the Kavanaugh treatment:

Ms. Rao cleared the Senate for that post with bipartisan support—unusual in the Trump era—after an uneventful confirmation process. She’s certainly qualified for a judgeship. Ms. Rao clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, taught for a decade at George Mason University’s law school, and worked in George W. Bush’s White House counsel’s office. She’s an expert on administrative law, which is valuable for a court that hears many challenges to federal regulation.

But here comes BuzzFeed with the scoop of the year that Ms. Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.” Yes, apparently this is why some people get into journalism. The story is clearly an oppo-research dump, probably from the left-wing Alliance for Justice, which is trying to torpedo Ms. Rao.

Not long ago, before everyone’s entire life was politicized, college was a period of intellectual development. Students are young and often write with more passion than wisdom. If writing or remarks at age 22 are disqualifying for public life, then every Member of Congress might as well resign now.

Ms. Rao’s sins aren’t that she was inflammatory but that she is conservative. Ms. Rao took a dim view of racial preferences in a piece about the great African-American scholar, Thomas Sowell. She also wrote that progressives preach tolerance but too often don’t practice it. Q.E.D. Some of her writing is infelicitous or sophomoric, but none of it is relevant to how she might rule as a 45-year-old judge with adult life experience.

One supposedly damning piece touches on how alcohol complicates student relationships. “It has always seemed self-evident to me that even if I drank a lot, I would still be responsible for my actions,” Ms. Rao wrote in the Yale Herald. “A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.” We look forward to the same people who assailed Brett Kavanaugh for drinking too much beer finding fault with Ms. Rao’s sobriety.

The real motive for destroying Ms. Rao is maintaining progressive control of the D.C. Circuit to rubber stamp the left’s agenda on climate change, health care and more. Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid packed the court during the Obama years, but Ms. Rao replacing Justice Kavanaugh won’t alter the composition of the court.

Kamala Harris tries to pull that with-Medicare-for-all-there-won't-be-any-cumbersome-bureaucracy crap, but Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is having none of it:

TAPPER: Just to follow up on that, correct me if I’m wrong. To reiterate: You support the Medicare for All bill, I think initially co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, you’re also a co-sponsor.

HARRIS: Yes.

TAPPER: I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance. So for people out there who like their insurance — they don’t get to keep it?

HARRIS: Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us has not had that situation where you’ve got to wait for approval, and the doctor says, “Well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this”? Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.

Spoken like someone who never had to deal with Medicare, which — contrary to Harris’ claims here — requires every single step she claims to detest. The biggest fib here is that switching to Medicare eliminates the approval process. It most certainly does not, a fact easily found with about two seconds’ worth of research on the website for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

Medicare coverage is limited to items and services that are reasonable and necessary for the diagnosis or treatment of an illness or injury (and within the scope of a Medicare benefit category). National coverage determinations (NCDs) are made through an evidence-based process, with opportunities for public participation. In some cases, CMS’ own research is supplemented by an outside technology assessment and/or consultation with the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC). In the absence of a national coverage policy, an item or service may be covered at the discretion of the Medicare contractors based on a local coverage determination (LCD).

That’s no different than dealing with private insurers, whose coverage is similarly limited by “reasonable and necessary” clauses. Furthermore, Medicare requires plenty of its own paperwork and red tape, with response times that routinely exceed those of private insurers, at least those outside the HMO model. Private insurers also manage care, but at least consumers have some choice for insurers and options for potentially better service and more tailored coverage.

Furthermore, we already know how government-run single-payer systems in the US operate, because we have two of them besides CMS: The Veterans Administration and Indian Health Services. The latter is a disgrace which Congress keeps ignoring, while the former is often a disgrace that Congress can’t quite ignore. Every ill Harris assigns to private insurers is amplified in both systems — delays, red tape, lack of accountability, and arbitrary services. 

There are rumblings in the Freedom-Hater party that perhaps AOC should be primaried.  

Dennis Prager sees in the current spate of disparagement of the institution of NFL cheerleaders the overall war on immutable human nature in microcosm He builds his case by citing some examples of said disparagement:

In The Boston Globe, Margery Eagan, Globe columnist and co-host of NPR's "Boston Public Radio," wrote a column titled "It's time to say goodbye to the NFL cheerleaders." She described NFL cheerleading as "creepy and demeaning."

USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour came to the same conclusion: "The underlying premise of NFL cheerleaders is degrading. ... NFL cheerleaders need to go."

Chicago Tribune sports reporter Shannon Ryan wrote, "The league has shown only that it regards cheerleaders as pieces of sideline eye candy." To make her point, she asked, "why aren't there scantily dressed male cheerleaders and dance teams?"

Only the well-educated could ask such a stupid question -- because only the highly educated deny that, with few exceptions, the only people who would like to see scantily dressed male cheerleaders are gay men.

In USA Today, Yale Divinity School Director of Communications Tom Krattenmaker added a theological voice to the anti-cheerleader chorus. "It's time," he intoned, "to call this out for what it is: demeaning to women and an anachronism that ought to be beneath the male fans to whom this titillating eye candy is served." This sentence, and his whole piece, is what goes for deep thought on the left today. He doesn't explain how being an NFL cheerleader is "demeaning." He simply declares it so. Did he bother to interview any cheerleaders? I did, and the consensus among cheerleaders is that it is one of their greatest life experiences.

Here's what's really going on:

Why do leftists have contempt for cheerleading and cheerleaders (who, after all, choose to be cheerleaders -- and for virtually no pay)?
A Vanity Fair piece on cheerleaders gave the game away: "The league profits from selling a retrograde notion of masculinity -- big, strong men, unafraid to take a hit, surrounded by enthusiastic, scantily clad women."

Or as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article titled "Pro cheerleading 'should be abolished'" reported, former professional basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson said, "Cheerleading implies that women's proper role is to support men, smile at men and fulfill the sexual fantasies of males." 

The left has contempt for masculinity and the male sexual nature that is part of it. The new emasculated man will not look at sexy women. And the new defeminized woman will not want to "support men," let alone appear sexy for them. 

Cathy Young at Reason looks at just how furious the current crop of feminists is.

Modern feminism, with its framework of male privilege and female oppression, takes a simplistic and one-sided view of gender dynamics in modern Western societies. It ignores the possibility that some gender-based biases (such as the expectation that males will perform physically grueling and/or dangerous tasks, paid or not) may benefit women or disadvantage men. It disregards the vast diversity and flexibility of cultural norms. It refuses to recognize that there is no perfect solution to the problem of dispensing justice when someone alleges a crime with no witnesses and both parties tell a credible story.

Rage-driven activism can be particularly destructive when it targets and politicizes interpersonal relationships, an area in which the sexes are probably equal but different in bad behavior. Victoria Bissell Brown's verbal abuse of her husband is hardly a typical example, but even Traister sees nothing wrong with the fact that, at the height of #MeToo, her husband once marveled, "How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?"

Anger can be productive, usually as an impetus for short-term action. But rage feminism is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness. It demonizes men, even turning empathy for a male into a fault, and dismisses dissenting women as man-pleasing collaborators. It short-circuits important conversation on gender issues.

Victoria Bissell Brown penned a particularly silly op-ed a while back:

In October, a few days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post published one woman's account of channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband. "I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead," wrote retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, entirely unapologetic despite conceding that her hapless spouse was "one of the good men."

 

Three House members from the Freedom-Hater party are saying incredibly stupid things about the US stance toward the current situation in Venezuela, a stance shared by most South American and European countries. The three are AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Tulsi Gabbard. Omar in particular sounds like a 1980s apologist for the Sandinistas:

“We cannot hand pick leaders for other countries on behalf of multinational corporate interests."

Listen up, toots. Venezuelans are eating zoo animals and selling their breast milk in order not to starve.

Tuesday roundup

Alan Dershowitz piece at The Hill entitled "Time To Tell the Truth About the Palestinian Issue." It's a refutation of a New York Times Sunday Review column entitled "Time To Break the Silence About Palerstine."

There is no silence to break. What must be broken is the double standard of those who elevate the Palestinian claims over those of the Kurds, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Chechens, the Tibetans, the Ukrainians, and many other more deserving groups who truly suffer from the silence of the academia, the media, and the iternational community. The United Nations devotes more of its time, money, and votes to the Palestinian issue than to the claims of all of these other oppressed groups combined.

The suffering of Palestinians, which does not compare to the suffering of many other groups, has been largely inflicted by themselves. They could have had a state, with no occupation, if they had accepted the Peale Commission Report of 1938, the United Nations Partition of 1947, the Camp David Summit deal of 2000, or the Ehud Olmert offer of 2008. They rejected all these offers, responding with violence and terrorism, because doing so would have required them to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, something they are unwilling to do even today.

Not just a state, but a vibrant, robust one:

Had the early Palestinian leadership, with the surrounding Arab states, not attacked Israel the moment it declared statehood, it would have a viable state with no refugees. Had Hamas used the resources it received when Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 to build schools and hospitals instead of using these resources to construct rocket launchers and terror tunnels, it could have become a “Singapore on the Sea” instead of the poverty stricken enclave the Palestinian leadership turned it into.

He dismantles a number of egregious assertions she makes about how Palestinians inside Israel live. A definite red-the-whole-thing piece.

Speaking of refutations, Maria Bartiromo obliterates AOC's 70-percent taxation idea:

Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, however, isn’t convinced or amused by Ocasio-Cortez’s complete lack of common sense and her economic naivete. Appearing on ox News on Tuesday from the World Economic Forum, Bartiromo began ripping apart Ocasio-Cortez’s frail economic plan like a wolf on a deer carcass.

“What is that going to do to the economy if you make it so economically difficult for the highest earners?” Bartiromo said. “Let me just point out that according to Tax Foundation, the top 10 percent of earners already pay almost 80 percent of all taxes.”

Bartiromoro said it all reminds her of something New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio said recently about all the wealth being in the wrong hands, to which the Fox Business host proceeded to tear apart the idea that the rich are somehow horrific, greedy people who use their money only for evil as people like Ocasio-Cortez like to insinuate.

“What exactly is the wrong hands?” Bartiromo said. “Is the wrong hands Ken Langone — the billionaire that gave $100 billion NYU medical school so that NYU could give out free medical school educations? Or maybe it it’s in Steve Schwarzman‘s hands — who just gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the New York Public Library, so that people can have access to new technology in the library? Or maybe it’s someone like David Koch, or someone who has given so much to medical schools?”

Bartiromo wondered allowed about what would happen to all of this charitable giving by the rich should all of their taxes be raised to such absurd levels.

“You have to wonder what those billionaires would do with their money if the first thing they have to do is give 70 percent of it to the government,” Bartiromo said. “And let’s talk about productivity for a second — a whole ‘nother conversation. Are you going to work incredibly hard with the belief that you can earn great success, and you can get better and more wealth? Are you going to work really hard if you know that, at a point, you’ll have to give it all to the government? I don’t think so. So those comments, to me, seem quite naive.” 

The Supreme Court does the right thing. Our military is no place for experimenting with putting mentally ill people in stressful situations on which our national security hinges:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with its plan to restrict military service by transgender people while court challenges continue.
The high court split 5-4 in allowing the plan to take effect, with the court’s five conservatives greenlighting it and its four liberal members saying they would not have.

Have you stopped to wonder who would be filling Brett Kavanaugh's  old position? Hopefully, this lady:

If you are uninitiated about Neomi Rao, chances are you’ll get to hear her name quite often very soon. Rao, the Republican pick to replace the old seat of judge––now Justice––Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is suddenly under scrutiny by “liberal advocacy groups” for her college writings.

The Freedom-Haters' specific gripes?

So, what are Rao’s “appalling views”? USA Today cites some of them. Rao, a fine judicial mind even in her early years, seems to be quite poised and evenhanded for a college kid. She advocates for a single national identity instead of hyphenated Americans, because that is the only way to build up real solidarity, through healthy civic nationalism instead of individualism and appealing to tribal identity.

Rao wrote: “multiculturalists…separate and classify everyone according to race, gender and sexual orientation. Those who reject their assigned categories are called names: So-called conforming blacks are called ‘oreos’ by members of their own community, conservatives become ‘fascists.’ Preaching tolerance, multiculturalists seldom practice it…”

Her strongest words were against egalitarianism, and on advocating prudence. On charges of sexual assault, she wrote: “Unless someone made her drinks undetectably strong or forced them down her throat, a woman, like a man, decides when and how much to drink. And if she drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice…implying that a drunk woman has no control of her actions, but that a drunk man does strips women of all moral responsibility.” 

Quoting Camille Paglia, Rao wrote something considered poison in the current climate, that there is currently a “dangerous feminist idealism which teaches women that they are equal. Women believe falsely that they should be able to go anywhere with anyone.” Needless to say, the reactions to these have been swift from liberal publications, which are increasingly indistinguishable from activism blogs.

Sociologist and public intellectual Nathan Glazer passed away recently at the age of 95. Here is an essay he wrote for Commentary in 1976 about how the United States is the only country that has tied its national values to its foreign policy.

 In England, France, Germany, Japan, or India, only the Right speaks of national values and insists that they be made significant in the shaping of policy. In America, however, liberals as well as conservatives are given to asserting that national values should affect foreign policy. I think there is one important reason for this: in the United States when we speak of national values, there is no implication of a primordial past, lost to memory, no suggestion that our values arise from race, blood, and soil. To speak of American values is to speak—still, and for most people—of founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers—known to all, clearly available, existing in the full light of history, and propounding what have by now become universal values, whether or not they are realized in practice. 

 To really become an American is to embrace those principles. It's why this country stands as a symbol to so many around the world in a way that other countries do not.

 

Federal judges must not be de facto legislators

Excellent piece at NRO by John Yoo and James C. Phillips that one ought to really digest so as to use the next time one gets in a snit with a leftist who tries to frame conservative federal judges as GOP mouthpieces. (I recently got into a near shouting match with a lesbian who took that position. Her line of "reasoning" quickly devolved into the infantile assertion that Brett Kavanaugh is "against gay rights.")

Anyway,  I've rarely if ever seen such a lucid explanation of how the Left thinks in terms of how a particular judicial appointment is going to affect particularly demographic groups:

Democratic senators, as well as their expert witnesses called in opposition, advanced a view of a judge as simply the enabler of a political party’s policy preferences. They cross-examined Judge Kavanaugh on the specific outcomes he had reached in cases relating to certain groups of interest: minorities, women, environmental organizations, and the like. In their view, the only difference between a judge and a congressman is the former wears a robe.

Influenced by the Legal Realism movement, which is the basic approach taught in most American law schools today, these Democrats find law and facts to be mostly smoke and mirrors. Instead, to them, judges really exercise raw and unchecked political power in determining winners and losers. Judging is about outcomes, not process. To be a good judge is to pick the right winners. Lady Justice is not blind — she metes out justice with both eyes wide open so that she can favor the preferred class or group.

If judges simply advance political goals, then Democrats were at least honest in their desire for a judge who sympathizes with their favorite groups. That’s why President Obama said he was looking for judges with “empathy,” though undoubtedly it was not empathy for corporations, for example, but for groups he favored. Under this view, if you are a Democrat, you should only pick judges who vote for unions, racial minorities, and criminal suspects. If you are a Republican, you want judges who always vote for corporations and the police.

Republican senators, however, rejected this approach. Their view requires judges to be indifferent to the demographics of the parties before them. In Chief Justice John Roberts’s metaphor, judges are umpires who call balls and strikes, but do not promote personal preferences or prejudices. In other words, as Justice Kagan put it in her confirmation hearings, “the question is not, ‘Do you like this party or do you like that party? Do you favor this cause or do you favor that cause?’ . . . The question is what the law requires.”

The outcome of a case should not be the point, in other words — it’s the process judges use to interpret the law and apply it to the parties that really matters. Thomas Jefferson viewed judging as mechanical. He hoped for machine-like judges who would take the law, written by someone else, and apply it to facts presented by the parties. Of course, judging is not easy, and judges are human. But that ideal — that everyone is equal in the court of law, that there are no favorites before blind Justice — is as old as the Republic itself. Properly applied, it should make the judiciary, in Alexander Hamilton’s words, the “least dangerous [branch] to the political rights of the Constitution.”

But this is why leftists tremble in fear at the prospect of originalist majorities on federal benches. It requires them to get their agendas enacted by legislators, as the Framers intended, and that means convincing a sufficient number of their fellow voters of the merits of what they want to impose on society to elect legislatures favorable to it. Far more daunting than getting five black robes to seal the fate of certain cultural issues for at least decades if not forever.

But maybe that's not any less daunting, as it turns out. They certainly spent every last ounce of effort in trying to get that result a few weeks ago, and came up short of the mark.

Seven most important considerations pertaining to Judge Watson's ruling on the travel ban

1.) Where is any reference to previous cases, or the Constitution?

2.) Hawaii has no refugees from the six countries specified in Trump's executive order.

3.) It further obliterates the president's clear legal authority to decide what kinds of persons get to enter our country, and under what terms.

4.) It further obscures the plain fact that non-citizens have no rights that can be guaranteed by US law.

5.) What the hell does Hawaii's tourism industry or its university system have to do with the legal question being decided here?

6.) Ditto whether Hawaii has a "pluralistic and inclusive society"?

7.) How are statements by Trump from when he was a candidate legally relevant to this case?

A federal judge with his head on straight

Saying no to the nature-distortion madness, and the totalitarianism issuing therefrom:

On New Year's Eve, a federal judge in Texas issued an injunctionagainst what has become known as the "transgender mandate." The injunction prevented enforcement of a new federal regulation issued this spring whose consequences have been hotly debated, which would have gone into effect on Jan. 1.

The Becket Fund, which litigated on behalf of religious healthcare provider networks, has argued ever since the rule was promulgated that it will require many doctors to perform procedures related to gender reassignment, even on children, and even where it violates their medical judgment, let alone their religious beliefs about sex changes.

The state plaintiffs in the case, who had sued alongside the providers, argued (among other things) that their state laws requiring doctors to act on their best medical judgment would be overturned by this new federal rule. They also argued that the rule would require them to provide state employees with insurance plans that cover sex reassignment procedures.

Judge O'Connor felt that a trial victory for the plaintiffs was probable, and wanted to prevent harm to their cause.  Good on ya, sir!

But can we please dismantle the Health and Human Services Department so we have one less blunt instrument whereby Leviathan can attempt to redefine "sex" and make us all do likewise?

A federal judge gets one real, real right

An encouraging development in a world that could use a few:

A federal judge in Texas has blocked President Barack Obama’s unilateral and unpopular November plan to award work permits to four million illegal immigrants, starting this week.

The late-night injunction will scramble the Senate’s immigration stand-off, and could help conservative Republicans push confident Democrats on the defensive — if it is not quickly reversed by appeals court judges.

The lawsuit was filed by 26 states, and is expected to be decided by the Supreme Court in 2016.

The reasoning looks solid to me:

The 123-page judgement ruled that Obama’s November amnesty violated the Administrative Procedure Act by ignoring Congress’s laws.
The amnesty also improperly imposed burdens on the states,  ruled Judge Andrew S. Hanen, of the Federal District Court in Brownsville. ”The court finds that the government’s failure to secure the border has exacerbated illegal immigration into this country. … The record supports the finding that this lack of enforcement, combined with the country’s high rate of illegal immigration, significantly drains the states’ resources.”
Hanen was nominated in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush.
The injunction is needed, Hanen declared, to stall the amnesty while the lawsuit is debated by various appeals courts.

“The court agrees … any subsequent ruling that finds DAPA unlawful after it is implemented would result in the states facing the substantially difficult — if not impossible — task of retracting benefits or licenses already provided” to beneficiaries, he wrote. 

Of course, the regime has gone right to work on a way to dispute this on legal grounds.  Should be interesting to see what the sovereignty-haters come up with.