July 18, 2023

Some Notes On Immigration

July 18, 2023/ Francis Menton

In preparation for my big Soho Forum debate a week from today, I’ve been doing some research to collect statistics relative to the subject of immigration, particularly as to the potential consequences of unlimited immigration into the U.S. Today I’ll share some of those statistics as a teaser for what you will get when you come to the debate.
The resolution for the debate is “The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease.” I have agreed to take the negative side of the resolution.
You might say that they have given me a ridiculously easy position to defend.

July 16, 2023

Come To The Soho Forum Debate On July 25

July 16, 2023/ Francis Menton

On July 25, the Soho Forum will host a debate on the resolution “The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease.”
I will be taking the negative side of the debate.
We’d love to have a big attendance for this event.

July 15, 2023

July 15, 2023/ Francis Menton

There’s always something new to report on New York’s housing follies.
The accepted housing paradigm here in blue-model New York is that elite public policy geniuses with access to infinite taxpayer funds will create housing solutions to provide perfect housing fairness and justice to all. Somehow, they keep falling short.
Nowhere is this more evident that with the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. NYCHA is the ultimate socialist-model low income housing provider, by far the largest such housing authority in the country. It owns and manages about 180,000 apartments in what are known as The Projects, home to something in the range of 400,000-500,000 people, or about 5-6% of New York City’s population. (In most other American cities, HUD-supported projects house about 1-2% of the population.) For decades, as housing authorities in places like Chicago and St. Louis were forced to dynamite many of their failed low-income projects, NYCHA was held up as the great success story of the genre.
But was the apparent success real, or was NYCHA just more artful than its compatriots in covering up its failures?

July 12, 2023

July 12, 2023/ Francis Menton

Here in my retirement, my remaining law practice consists almost entirely of working on one case in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, going by the caption Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council v. EPA. From time to time when there is a development in the case, I will report on it in a post here.
My most recent update on the case was on May 25, when the DC Circuit issued a decision throwing us out on the ground of “standing.” When a case challenges a regulation issued by a government agency, the “standing” doctrine requires that a party bringing the case show some kind of concrete injury from the challenged regulation, which here is EPA’s 2009 determination that CO2 emissions into the atmosphere constitute a “danger to human health and welfare.” Our showing was that the Endangerment Finding forces an onslaught of federal regulations suppressing consumption of fossil fuels; and that policies suppressing fossil fuels have been demonstrated in every jurisdiction that has tried them to lead to large increases in electricity prices.
But the court in its wisdom ruled that the plaintiff electricity consumers were not “directly regulated by the challenged rule,” and that we had “fail[ed] to provide any evidence of injury.”
I titled my May 25 post, in the aftermath of that decision, as “At CHECC We’re Down But Not Out!” And indeed we have now bounced back!

July 10, 2023

July 10, 2023/ Francis Menton

Here in New York, we proceed giddily along shutting down our functioning and reliable mostly-fossil-fuel based electricity-generating system, in anticipation of an imminent future of clean and free “renewables.”
After all, our Climate Act (officially, the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019”) has decreed that we must do so. A Climate Action Council — created by the statute and packed with politically-appointed climate activists with next-to-no expertise in how the energy system works — cooks up “Scoping Plans” that direct the little people to go out and create an entirely new energy system on a politically-determined timetable.
And almost nobody so much as raises any questions as to whether this can possibly work.

July 06, 2023

July 06, 2023/ Francis Menton

Just over a year ago, on July 5, 2022, I had a post titled “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice.” The post was occasioned by the then-brand-new issuance (June 30, 2022) of the biggest decision of the Court’s last term, West Virginia v. EPA. Justice Kagan had authored a dissent on behalf of herself and the other two liberal justices (Breyer and Sotomayor).
My post also discussed two other significant decisions of the 2021-22 term where the three liberals had again dissented as a bloc: Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS and NFIB v. Department of Labor.
And now we have several more big decisions just issued with the same 6-3 voting split (Justice Jackson having replaced Breyer). The most significant is SFFA v. Harvard.
So suppose you want to learn how to think like a liberal Supreme Court justice. If so, I submit that there is no better place to look than the dissents in cases where the three liberal justices dissent as a bloc.