Take it from Britain, folks: net zero amounts to government telling you to adjust your lifestyle, and play-like energy forms won't be able to step in and keep you warm

 Over in Albion, government is "recommending" "behavior change" to the subjects and folks need to step it up with making those changes :

this news (via the Daily Telegraph) is another reminder of how net zero is a step back:

Millions of families will be urged by a green quango not to heat their homes in the evening to help the Government hit its net zero target.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) said people should turn off their radiators at peak times as part of a wider drive to deliver “emissions savings”.

In a document on “behaviour change” the body recommended Britons “pre-heat” their houses in the afternoon when electricity usage is lower.

It said the move would save families money, but critics suggested the real reason was that renewables will not be able to provide enough energy to cope with peak demand.

“Critics” are almost certainly correct.

A quango (for those who don’t speak British-English) is, to quote Wikipedia,

an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies. The term was originally a shortening of “quasi autonomous NGO”, where NGO is the acronym for a non-government organization.

The CCC, explains the Daily Telegraph’s Nick Gutteridge,

is an independent body set up by ministers in 2008 to advise the Government on how to hit its climate targets.

In its latest report, the committee criticises No 10 over its “worryingly slow” action on climate.

It states that Downing Street’s support for new oil and coal exploration and the expansion of airports meant Britain was no longer a global green leader.

“No longer a global green leader.”

And this little aspect of the situation points up something I've long observed: that hypocrisy becomes a problem when pointy-headed overlords aren't doing what they'r telling the subject to do. It's especially galling when they admit that it's because they can't afford to:

The CCC, it seems, still clings to some remnant of British imperial nostalgia. And, as for its “independence,” all that that means is that the CCC has become a playground for climate fundamentalists. It also advises the U.K. government on an “appropriate” level for its “carbon budgets.” It is largely unaccountable, apart from the occasional embarrassment.

The Daily Telegraph:

The use of “carbon budgets”, which set the Government legally binding targets for reducing emissions, has increasingly come under fire from Tory MPs.

Last month the head of the CCC revealed that he still has a gas boiler in his own flat even though his committee is urging Britons to switch to heat pumps.

Chris Stark said more than four years ago that he was “keen” to switch to an electric heating system but admitted that he had not been able to do so.

He also acknowledged that heat pumps were too expensive for many people and that it was “very difficult” to install them in existing flats like his own.

Oh.

The reason why this issue needs to be front and center is not because there's some need for urgency in addressing a climate "crisis." It's because the overlords are bringing human advancement, comfort and convenience to a screaming halt. 

 

 

The proposed SEC mandate on the ag sector is not a done deal yet, and there's an encouraging amount of pushback

 As if there weren't enough supply-chain hose-ups and factors increasing food prices already, the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to impose new levels of cost and bureaucratic distraction on the nation's ag sector.

The SEC's pointy-heads seem to be oblivious to how this kind of thing has worked out elsewhere:

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

This would be yet another instance of the big dogs at the top of the supply chain getting all up in the business of the small operations that continue to provide quality product at reasonable prices because they have time to focus on that instead of a bunch of resource-consuming record-keeping:

Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.

“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”

What's driving this is the ESG movement and the institutional investors who think it's the way to go:

The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.

While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinarput on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.

The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.

“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.

Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.

In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.

However, there is an encouraging amount of pushback:

Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”

But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.

Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.

Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“If the Commission insists on taking the same inappropriate course, we will be ready to act once again,” the letter stated. “We urge you to save everyone years of strife by abandoning the Proposed Rule.”

It's not just Republicans, though. At least one Democrat with his head on straight is concerned as well:

In a Senate hearing earlier this month, Gensler sought to assuage concern over the proposed rule voiced by Democrat Jon Tester, Montana’s senior senator and a lifelong rancher.

“If the public company says, ‘Hey, we need you … to tell us how much fuel you used, how much fertilizer you used, what your inputs were,’ and all that, it becomes an issue, especially for the little guy…” Tester said.

Gensler responded: “That’s not the intent of what we did … that’s the benefit of public comment.”

Just who are these institutional investors? Well, two of them, Ceres and Trillium Asset Management, have been around forty-plus years. They were both founded by Joan Bavaria, who was instrumental in getting this ball rolling as a "pioneer in socially responsible investing."

A network of activist companies like Ceres with large private equity and financiers on board are working to “transform” the economy over climate concerns, according to Ceres’ self-description.

In adherence, farmers will have to recreate their business model.

“Addressing these emissions will require a shift in agricultural production to more sustainable and regenerative methods…” Kate Monahan, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, said in an interview this month with ESG Clarity, a website trafficking in ESG news directed at the financial sector. “It’s imperative that food companies keep improving measurement of their Scope 3 emissions’ sources to be able to prioritize actions that reduce their emissions hotspots.”

Let's hope that, even though the SEC's comment period for this proposal, which was extended for 30 days beyond the standard 60 due to the flood of response, is closed, opposition to this disastrous scheme continues to be loud and resolute.

It will increase the cost of food.

It will be tyrannical ("'transform' the economy").

It will deaden souls. 

 

 

 

 

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.   

Government's garbage justification for coming after the home-appraisal industry

 It was one of those news items I filed away in my memory bank, with a mental note to keep my eye out for refutation of the premise being reported.

Well, here's the refutation. 

Once again, the pointy-headed do-gooders are set to tinker with the free market in the name of combatting - wait for it - raaaacism! 

The home-valuation industry has become the federal government’s latest target for a massive and unjustified power grab. Unless stopped, the government, not markets, will set home prices, which could have catastrophic consequences.

To justify its takeover, the government is trying to scapegoat the appraisal industry—which is 97% white, 70% male and not well-organized—for having caused large disparities in racial wealth and homeownership. Cue last week’s report from the Interagency Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity, or PAVE, led by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge and the director of the president’s Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, which asserted the existence of “inequities within current home lending and appraisal processes” for communities of color.

The justification for this inequities-for-communities-of-color is beyond flimsy:

 The government’s case is unsubstantiated. The PAVE report relied on three pieces of research. The first one was a blog post by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which quoted 16 examples of racially charged language out of millions of appraiser reports but refused to disclose the total number of occurrences. The second was what Freddie Mac—one of the two mortgage giants—called “exploratory research” that was later directly contradicted by a report from the other giant, Fannie Mae. The third was a report by the Brookings Institution, which boldly claimed that 23 variables could completely account for all possible non-race-based factors affecting a home’s value. This left only racial bias as the explanation for the remaining value differences between white and black neighborhoods, which research we did for the American Enterprise Institute thoroughly discredits.

PAVE’s blatant disregard of pertinent research, use of cherry-picked data and discredited research lead it to flawed conclusions. This suggests either a lack of interest in getting to the truth or, more likely, that the report is only a pretext for centralizing valuation regulation under a new Federal Valuation Agency.

Here we go again. Centralizing regulation under a new federal agency.

And all because the overlords are determined that we all get our minds right about race. Never mind that behaviors that anybody of any race can engage in are the main determinant of how nice a home he or she can buy.

More-rigorous research shows that rather than being the fault of the appraisal industry, the racial homeownership disparity exists because of the failure of past efforts on welfare, school quality, crime, urban renewal or public housing by the federal government to address differences in socioeconomic status. The data clearly show that Americans with higher income and who are married have higher homeownership rates regardless of race. When they were of similar socioeconomic status, black, white and Hispanic households all had similar outcomes when we replicated the Brookings and Freddie studies.

We don’t dispute a legacy of past racism and lingering racial bias, which leaves blacks at a large income and wealth disadvantage, but history shows that government attempts to solve socioeconomic gaps through housing policy often backfire.

Examples abound, but consider these two. The 1967 Presidential Task Force on Housing and Urban Development proposed a 10-year housing program to eliminate all substandard housing in the U.S. It ended up destroying many American cities through a combination of lax lending to underqualified borrowers, careless government oversight (particularly in appraisals), and predatory business arrangements between the Federal Housing Administration and lenders. In the end, these actions wreaked havoc on black households and neighborhoods.

Or consider HUD’s 1995 National Homeownership Strategy, designed to achieve a homeownership rate well in excess of any in the nation’s history. The housing boom it unleashed went bust, leading to more than 10 million foreclosures and costing taxpayers dearly. Black homeowners and neighborhoods were among the hardest hit.

And also once again, distortions in the free market are going to sock the demographic ostensibly in need of policy rectification the hardest.

If home prices were no longer determined by markets but instead by a politicized valuation process, it is easy to see how the results could exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities in wealth and homeownership. The politicization of home prices to address perceived valuation inequities could lead to misvaluations on a massive scale. The areas most affected would be minority and rural areas, where home sales generally are sparser. This could engender even larger home price peaks and troughs, ultimately hurting lower-income households, which have the least wherewithal to withstand price declines.

Don't expect anybody in the current administration to give a flying diddly about the points made here. 

This has the same odor wafting off of it that two other recent acts of grandstanding have had: this newly passed Emmett Till law, which addresses lynching, a form of murder for which there have been state laws on the books for years, and, more to the point, has not been an issue in our country for over half a century, and Biden's plan to come after rich people's unrealized capital gains. 

This is why, even though it's still as important as ever to wrest real conservatism away from the clutches of Trumpism, it's equally important to defend the principles that serve as the foundation of that real conservatism.

 

 

Putting Deep-State-ism in perspective

One of the most unnerving aspects of polemical discourse is when it's approached on the level of latching onto arcane bits of behavior by public figures in an attempt to point out some supposedly pivotal moment in national history. Players in web-of-intrigue scenarios are reduced to villain and hero stick figures whose nefariousness or nobility can be discerned from some phone calls they made, or emails they sent, or meetings they took.

This is why I have not had much to say about the whole bag of snakes that comprises the Mueller report and subsequent revelations such as Susan Rice's January 17, 2017 email to herself.

If one has to go to such lengths as proclaiming, "Tonight I will show you that this newly unearthed chain of emails is a bombshell the likes of which American history has never seen!," it casts a great deal of doubt on the depth of one's basic convictions about the life of the nation generally.

In other words, let's not get all shook about this, okay?

Look, it doesn't take someone with extraordinary powers of perceptivity to see that Hillary Clinton was a power-mad presidential aspirant for decades, driven by a sort of feminist determination to prove she had at least the chops for the job that her husband, whom she has always disliked intensely, had, as well as more basic motives such as greed and getting a kick out of having as many people under her thumb as possible. She's also always been quite arrogant, which is why she continued to conduct official correspondence on her private server even after she'd become Secretary of State.

It's also obvious that the meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch was fishy as hell, especially given the timing.

There's probably a lot in all of it that should send some folks to the hoosegow, but is it really worth tying up the resources of the current iteration of the Justice Department to keep pursuing it all?

Now, the July 5, 2016 presser that Comey gave continues to perplex me. He spent fifteen minutes outlining why the DoJ ought to prosecute Madame Bleachbit, only to wrap things up by recommending that they not.

Comey's perplexing generally. Prior to all this, he'd had a reputation as an uncontroversial straight shooter. He helped prosecute the Gambino crime family. He stood by severely weakened John Ashcroft, who was in an intensive care unit with gall bladder surgery complications and was being pressured to continue the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Bush himself was impressed enough by this display of integrity and loyalty to make changes to the program. Comey was a registered Republican until recently.

And then came all the events looked at by the Mueller investigative team.

It's pretty clear that there was a clique within the DoJ / FBI that had it in for Donald Trump once he became the Republican presidential nominee. You don't have to do too deep of a dive to see that Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe thought it would be horrible if Donald Trump became president, and conducted themselves professionally driven by that sentiment. The FISA warrants, the Steele dossier and the role of Fusion GPS - all shady as hell.

Then there's the role of Michael Flynn. Was he set up? A pretty solid case can be made that he was. Of course, the overheated types would chime in with, "Hell, yes, he was! They ruined the life of a distinguished civil servant!"

Now, let us remember that he did tell a falsehood about his Russia contacts, and he was a paid foreign agent of both Turkey and Russia. In the hand-off-the-baton meeting Obama and Trump had in January 2017, Obama advised Trump not to hire Flynn as national security adviser:

Obama’s warning pre-dated the concerns inside the government about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, one of the officials said. Obama passed along a general caution that he believed Flynn was not suitable for such a high level post, the official added.

The overall point here is that palace-intrigue scenarios are the wrong places to go looking for answers to the question of whether someone is fit to be us president or not.

My reasons for vehemently opposing Barack Obama did not have much to do with the scandals that arose during his time in office, even the "scandal" Trump calls Obamagate. My problem with Obama, my moniker for whom here at LITD during his time as a figure of central focus was The Most Equal Comrade, was that he'd been a hard-core leftist pretty much all his life. His mentors were the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers. He thought America was fundamentally unfair and needed to be transformed. I'm far more disturbed by the plain old policy-level stuff he was able to get enacted - think the "Affordable" Care act, EPA regulations, the JCPOA - than scandal-type matters.

And my reasons for vehemently opposing Donald Trump are that he is solely motivated by self-glorification. He is a phony. He doesn't care about the Republican Party, much less conservatism. He doesn't have the slightest grasp of the foundational principles of Western civilization. He gives lip service to Christianity for entirely self-serving reasons. He doesn't read anything, from briefing papers to novels to works of philosophy or history. He has no depth. He has a track record of sybaritic abandon that I suspect he's till proud of. He's petty and vindictive. He demands loyalty but does not return it.

So I don't consider this whole re-dredging of the web of shenanigans discussed above a front-burner issue. The existence of a so-called Deep State is not among the five most pressing issues on our nation's plate at the moment.

Don't fixate on the shiny object. Reserve most of your focus for the pandemic, the economic situation, the leftist agenda of the Democrats and Donald Trump's obvious unfitness to be president.

The EU still does not seem to get what Britain is doing

The EU still seems to think that the UK wants to be guided by pointy-headed bureaucrats in Brussels. The fact that there short-lived Teresa May era gave way to Boris Johnson becoming PM and Labor taking its worst drubbing in nearly a century doesn't appear to be sinking in:

. . . the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier . . .  in a recent essay shares his vision of the future relationship. Mr. Barnier begins by expressing regret at Britain’s determination to exit but, in a spirit of equanimity and good will, looks forward to the “opportunity to forge a new UK-EU partnership.” Taking a page from former premier Theresa May, he reiterates that though the “UK may be leaving the EU … it is not leaving Europe.”

Instead, Mr. Barnier outlines three areas of mutual interest. One such step will be “to work together and discuss joint solutions to global challenges.” Another, “to build a close security relationship.” Can anyone contend against these aspirations? Britain pursues its international agenda with myriad intergovernmental agencies, be it the United Nations, NATO, or World Trade Organization. No serious impediments exist from extending its collaborative reach to former colleagues in the EU.

Mr. Barnier’s third area for cooperation, however, sets the cat among the pigeons. “We need an economic partnership that reflects our common interests, geographical proximity, and interdependence.” Innocuous, so far as it goes. Even praise for competition in the areas of “skills, innovation, and quality” would not raise an eyebrow among Mr. Johnson’s Conservative cabinet.

Trouble emerges only when the EU’s Brexit mandarin hoists his true colors. “We know that competing on social and environmental standards … leads only to a race to the bottom,” a race that places “workers, consumers, and the planet on the losing side.” Such assertions may be common parlance among the Brussels bureaucracy, but at Westminster they’ll raise a raucous. The Labour Party took such a stand at December’s general election; its trouncing at the ballot box speaks of its limited appeal among weary Britons.

Neither will the British government be sanguine as to Mr. Barnier’s ultimatum for a future deal, “Any free-trade agreement must provide for a level playing field on standards, state aid, and tax matters.” It is as if the 2016 referendum to leave never happened, an “exit” commitment reaffirmed two short weeks ago.

Mr. Barnier’s line-in-the-sand makes a mockery of Tory reforms. Mr. Johnson went to the polls promising to cut unnecessary red tape, use state spending to source infrastructure and training schemes, and lower taxes to unleash entrepreneurial innovation, thus encouraging employment and economic prosperity. The EU’s chief negotiator would have all this at naught.

Mr. Barnier’s “poison pill” is doubtless administered to those in the City of London who aspire to turn their capital into “Singapore-on-the Thames.” (Arch Remainer Philip Hammond pooh-poohed the Singapore model when Chancellor of the Exchequer.) This Asian economic powerhouse consistently ranks in the top five of the Heritage Foundation’s “Index of Economic Freedom,” scoring high marks on rule of law, regulatory efficiency, government size, and open markets. (The UK currently ranks #7, while America scores a respectable #12. As for the EU’s major players, Germany ranks #24 with France a distant #71.)

Is there any mistaking why Mr. Barnier has singled out as “non-negotiables” those very measures essential to economic dynamism? Measures that Mr. Johnson has made the foundation of Britain’s post-EU future, measures on which most of the EU-membership fail abysmally. (Ireland is a notable exception.)

A prescient Prime Minister will see in these EU moves to frustrate Brexit the shadow of Brussels bureaucrats that use intimidation and obfuscation (for example, ignoring populist pushback in member states) to spook conformity from countries that run counter to their will. 

The horse is out of the barn, Mr. Barnier. Britain wants to move in the other direction, toward sovereignty, economic liberty and common sense. As other European nations see the results of Brexit, they, too, may opt for being in charge of their own destinies, and you may have to find some other line of work besides cajoling them into acting against their best interests.

Wednesday roundup

David French has moved from National Review to The Dispatch, the new project of Steven Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. Among the things he'll be doing there is a regular newsletter. In today's edition of that, he looks at how the Supreme Court may well dismantle Elizabeth Warren's signature achievement, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

For years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Warren’s political biography is littered with landmines. Yes, she’s known for inflating claims of Native American heritage, but did you also know that she (strangely enough) claimed to be the “first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey”? A Boston Herald writer spoke to a New Jersey Judiciary official who said there was no way to verify her claim. Women had been taking the New Jersey bar since 1895, and the official was “not aware their nursing habits were ever tracked.”

But her academic career isn’t even quite as glittering as you might think. In 2010, Megan McArdle wrote a fascinating analysis of Warren’s scholarship and found a “persistent tendency to choose odd metrics” that inflated the case for her leftist causes. McArdle said Warren’s famous scholarship on medical bankruptcies “isn't Harvard caliber material—not even Harvard undergraduate.” McArdle is hardly the only serious critic of Warren’s academic work, and the theme of the criticism is much the same—that she had a history of “overstating her findings to make ideological points.”

Now, I know that these critiques can feel like nit-picking when she’s running to take on a Republican president who is one of the most extraordinary (and ignorant) fabulists in the history of American politics, but sloppiness in her biography and sloppiness in her scholarship extend to sloppiness in her public policy positions, and this cuts directly against the core of her political image—as the person who has the “plan for everything.” What if her plans are illegal or unconstitutional? What if the veneer of wonkiness is hiding the unworkable substance?

And this brings us to the Supreme Court. Earlier this month SCOTUS granted certiorari in a case called Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The court will decide two issues:

(1) Whether the vesting of substantial executive authority in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency led by a single director, violates the separation of powers; and (2) whether, if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is found unconstitutional on the basis of the separation of powers, 12 U.S.C. §5491(c)(3) [it] can be severed from the Dodd-Frank Act.

Let’s put this in plain English. The CFPB is quite fairly described as Warren’s signature public policy achievement. She proposed, she built it, and she initially hoped to run it. Now the nation’s highest court is set to decide whether it’s structurally unconstitutional. The governing statute places substantial restrictions on the president’s ability to remove the CFPB director, and the smart money is betting that the Supreme Court will rule against the bureau.

SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe describes the stakes:

If the justices agree that the restrictions violate the doctrine known as the separation of powers – the idea that the Constitution divides the different functions of government among the executive, judicial and legislative branches – their ruling could potentially unravel all the CFPB’s decisions in the nine years since its creation.

And what is the precise constitutional problem? Here’s a nice summary from a CATO Institute amicus brief:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the most independent of independent agencies in the federal government. Despite its significant power, it is essentially accountable to no one. A single director heads the CFPB, this director serves a five-year term, and the director can be removed only for cause. The CFPB does not need Congress to approve its budgets because its funding requests must be rubber-stamped by another independent agency—the Federal Reserve. The CFPB has regulatory authority over 19 federal consumer protection laws, for which it is empowered to write regulations, investigate potential violations, and bring enforcement actions in its own administrative proceedings. This concentration of power in the hands of a single, unelected, unaccountable official is unprecedented and cannot be squared with the Constitution’s structure or its purpose of protecting individual liberty from government overreach.

In other words, the Obama administration created in essence a fourth branch of government. The CFPB exists almost outside our constitutional system of checks and balances. It’s an executive agency not truly run by the president. It’s a statutory creation not truly funded by Congress. 

It is true that the Ninth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit have upheld the CFPB’s structure, but there is one very notable dissenter from the D.C. Circuit’s en banc opinion—then-Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh. This was his assessment of the CFPB director in January, 2018:

Because the Director acts alone and without Presidential supervision or direction, and because the CFPB wields broad authority over the U.S. economy, the Director enjoys significantly more unilateral power than any single member of any other independent agency. By “unilateral power,” I mean power that is not checked by the President or by other commissioners or board members. Indeed, other than the President, the Director of the CFPB is the single most powerful official in the entire U.S. Government, at least when measured in terms of unilateral power.

There is no such thing as a foregone conclusion at the Supreme Court, but given the number of justices who’ve signaled a willingness to rein in the administrative state, Warren’s political creation is likely in for a rough ride. 

To uphold the structure of the agency, the court would have to extend the present understanding of the ability of Congress to create independent bureaucracies— and that’s exactly the opposite way that the Supreme Court has been trending. So, look for the court to rebuke Warren in the middle of a presidential campaign. 

It would be one thing if the CFPB was simply one constitutional swing and miss, but Warren has a habit of making policy proposals that cross legal lines. 

Can she keep her promise to “ban fracking everywhere”? No, she cannot. Her plan plainly conflicts with the Energy Policy Act, passed by Congress in 2005. 

Can she pass a wealth tax and raise hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for an explosion of progressive policies? No, she cannot. Her tax likely violates the 16th Amendment, which holds that any “direct tax” must be “in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration.”

She wants to create a national statutory right to abortion that overrides restrictive state laws. But once again she has proposed a plan that contradicts relevant Supreme Court authority limiting congressional authority under the commerce clause. 

Elizabeth Warren makes promises she can’t lawfully keep, and when those flawed promises become unconstitutional laws, they impose real economic and legal costs on American citizens. 

Great piece by Noah Rothman at Commentary entitled "The Blue State Model Is Failing." How have big, resource-rich states like California  and New York gotten to the point of deliberate blackouts?

Satan is on the prowl in Austin. Fortunately, a significant number of parents aren't taking it lying down:

On Tuesday morning, the Austin Independent School District (ISD) school board approved a radical new sex-education curriculum for grades 3-8 that encourages all kinds of sex at young ages, urges kids to join LGBT "pride" parades, and aims to redefine biological sex and erase the words "mom" and "dad" from children's vocabulary.

More than 100 people testified against the new curriculum on Monday night, and testimony lasted until after midnight. Yet the school board unanimously approved the new curriculum.

"This vote by the Austin ISD Board sends a clear message: people of faith and traditional moral values are not welcome in Austin ISD," David Walls, vice president of Texas Values and a parent in Austin ISD, said in a statement. "By passing this curriculum, Austin ISD has broken the sacred trust that parents put in their children’s schools. Austin ISD parents have no reason to entrust their children to a school district that weaponizes education to indoctrinate children into the LGBT political movement."

Do the right thing, Philippines:

An Iranian beauty queen who has spent almost two weeks inside Manila's international airport says she will be killed if she is sent back home and is seeking asylum in the Philippines.

Bahareh Zare Bahari, a contestant in the recent Miss Intercontinental pageant in Manila, claims Tehran is attempting to silence her because of her public stand against the government.

In a press release last week, the Philippines Immigration Department said the international police agency Interpol issued a worldwide request to arrest Bahari, known as a red notice. The statement did not specify which country requested the red notice, but Bahari told CNN that an immigration official told her Iran requested one in 2018. 

"I have been living here since 2014 and I've not gone back to Iran. I explained to them many times, how can I have a criminal case in Iran when I've been living here?" she told CNN by phone.

Bahari said she has been confined to a passenger room in Terminal 3 of Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport since she arrived from Dubai 12 days ago. "I'm really mentally sick," she said, adding that the uncertainty over her case is wearing her down. 

Bahari believes she is being targeted for supporting the exiled Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah of Iran overthrown in the country's 1979 revolution. 

The beauty queen blamed the situation on Iranian authorities, saying it came up because she used an image of Pahlavi and the flag of the former Iranian monarchy as props during a recent competition. Bahari said she made the statement "to try and be the voice of my people."

She also believes she may be targeted because of her social activism in Iran. Bahari said that she became a teacher there because she wanted girls to learn "they are not things, they are not toys, they are human and they have same right as boys."

The Philippines Department of Immigration and Department of Justice have not responded to CNN's request for comment. Requests for comment made to the Iranian embassy in Manila and the Iranian government in Tehran have not been answered. 

AOC is a walking caricature of her own worldview:

On Wednesday, far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linked the death of her grandfather to white people.

According to the socialist’s logic, “predominantly white” corporations and communities have set climate change in motion with their fossil fuel admissions; climate change apparently caused and/or amped up Hurricane Maria, a devastating Puerto Rico storm in 2017; AOC’s grandfather died in the aftermath of the storm, ergo: white people are connected to, if not the cause of, his death.

“[T]he people that are producing climate change, the folks that are responsible for the largest amount of emissions, or communities, or corporations, they tend to be predominantly white, correct?” the 29-year-old asked during a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing on civil rights and civil liberties, according to The Washington Examiner.

“Yes, and every study backs that up I know no one is intentionally trying to kill people and hurt people,” National Wildlife Federation’s Mustafa Ali answered the NYC rep. 

“My own grandfather died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria,” Ocasio-Cortez highlighted.

“We can’t act as though the inertia and history of colonization doesn’t play a role in this,” she added. 

At The Imaginative Conservative, Louis Markos imagines how Dante might have corresponded with us in the twenty-first century about the Beatific Vision.

Barney & Clyde - episode 8

Ah, there you are!  We saved you a seat at the libation station. We have a number of items on the national plate to dish from the libertarian and conservative perspectives: how the free market is the best cure for bigotry and racism, how tariffs have already eaten away tax cut benefits, the Oberlin College - Gibson’s Bakery situation, the fun Texas governor Greg Abbott has been having signing pro-freedom bills on social media, and the US Agriculture Department employees having a hissy fit about moving from DC to Kansas City. Along the way, an interesting array of figures make cameo appearances: Frederic Bastiat, Charles Grandison Finney, William Barrett Travis and Pee Wee Crayton, among others. 

A shameful demonstration by some snot-nosed ingrate government workers

I'm writing this shortly after noon, so there's a pretty decent chance that you've already come across this news item, but in case it's still news to you, here goes:

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced today that two research agencies would be relocating to Kansas City. This makes perfect sense given that it puts the researchers much closer to the center of the industry they are supposed to be regulating. It also means the cost of living goes down for lots of these employees, which helps with wage adjustments later for the department. The overall cost of facilities and operations will drop as well.

The response of those gathered in the auditorium where he made his announcement? They turned their backs on him en masse.

If you have already seen any commentary on this, you'll have seen the following points made:

• If these people's top priority was to be near what they were researching, they'd applaud this move. 
• In any private company, the entire roomful of snot-nosed ingrates would have been fired on the spot.
• It has to be Acela Corridor snobbery. As the excerpt above points out, the cost of living will be lower for these people in Kansas. 

Consider this: You and I are really these people's ultimate bosses. Our taxes pay their salaries and benefits.

Now pack your bags for Kansas or find other jobs, you brats.

Education thoughts

I have to give lefties thanks when it's due for bringing things onto my radar that might not otherwise show up.

Today, several rants showed up on my Facebook newsfeed about Betsy DeVos and her views on budget and funding matters for her department. I'd been busy thinking about Kim Foxx and the implosion of the Southern Poverty Law Center and missed coverage of DeVos' appearance before a House committee.

Here's a fairly objective report about it:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday defended deep cuts to programs meant to help students and others, including eliminating $18 million to support Special Olympics, while urging Congress to spend millions more on charter schools.

"We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results," DeVos said in prepared testimony before a House subcommittee considering the Department of Education's budget request for the next fiscal year.
It was the first time that DeVos, a wealthy former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and school choice advocate, had been called before a Democratic-led panel in the U.S. House to explain President Donald Trump's spending priorities.

While proposing to add $60 million more to charter school funding and create a tax credit for individual and companies that donate to scholarships for private schools, DeVos' budget proposal would still cut more than $7 billion from the Education Department, about 10 percent of its current budget. President Trump proposed a $4.7 trillion overall budget this month with an annual deficit expected to run about $1 trillion.

It calls for eliminating billions in grants to improve student achievement by reducing class sizes and funding professional development for teachers as well as cutting funds dedicated to increasing the use of technology in schools and improving school conditions. In many cases, DeVos said the purpose of the grants has been found to be redundant or ineffective.

In the case of the $17.6 million cut to help fund the Special Olympics, a program designed to help children and adults with disabilities, DeVos suggested it is better supported by philanthropy and added, "We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget." 

A fair number of the FB rants focused on the Special Olympics cuts.  I did not see any of the ranters address her assertion that that enterprise is better supported by philanthropy. And that leads me to a very basic question: Why should the federal government be in the Special Olympics business at all?

Seriously. What the hell does it have to do with the core functions of government outlined in the Constitution?

Which in turn leads to the larger question I've asked for years: What justification is there for a federal Department of Education?

In my coverage of local government for some radio stations and a website, I am constantly amazed at the number of local things that happen - some in the education area, but also in stuff like bridge construction and community corrections staffing - as a result of federal grants.

I suppose there's a tilting-at-windmills element involved in asking why that money couldn't stay in our city and county in the first place and not be run through the DC filter where various layers of bureaucracy take their cut for - well, indeed, for what? I guess to come up with the acronyms for the programs by which they send it back to us. The whole scheme is so entrenched in our way of operating as a nation that no one seriously proposes looking at dismantling the whole apparatus, even though it would be the sensible way to proceed.

With the table thus set, may I recommend a piece by the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess at Forbes entitled "The Problem With Senator Harris' Proposal to Have Uncle Sam Boost Teacher Pay." He says that teachers, many of whom do indeed deserve more pay, ought to look at what really erodes their chances of getting it: good old administrative bloat:

. . . here’s the bizarre dynamic at the heart of the challenge: Teachers have a legitimate gripe about take-home pay, even though school spending has steadily gone up over time. Nationally, after-inflation teacher pay actually declined by two percent from 1992 to 2014, even as real per-pupil spending grew by 27%. This disparity is mostly a product of two realities. The first is that schools have added staff—particularly support staff—at a rate that far outpaces growth in student enrollment. Nationally, between 1992 and 2014, student enrollment grew by 20%, the number of teachers by 29%—and non-teaching staff by 47%. The second is that the cost of teacher pensions and health care have eroded paychecks. Nationally, between 2003 and 2014, even as teacher salaries declined, the per-teacher cost of benefits rocketed from $14,000 to $21,000. That’s $7,000 a year that would, other things equal, be showing up in teacher paychecks.

And federalizing teacher pay is only going to add more bureaucrats to the mix.

The first step in curing post-America's education problems is for someone somewhere to quit taking for granted that the federal gravy train ought to be ridden, since it's there. It would take guts, but everything about returning post-America to its previous identity as the United States of America is going to take guts.

And I daresay that hopping off the gravy train would go a long way to rectify the damage being done by the social-justice jackboots. They'll get weeded out as local taxpayers insist on some accountability. Teachers aren't going to be as likely to stand at the front of the classroom and prattle on about gender fluidity and the global climate being in some kind of trouble if no one is goading them with federal dollars.

And people who personally know Special Olympic athletes and care about them and cheer them on in competition would feel a greater sense of connection, since there would be no faraway filter between their dollars and the games and meets.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to any alternative. It also has a far greater human touch.