The Latest Political Scam -- "Affordability" -- Is Really Taking Off

/

  • If you want to run for office as a Democrat, there is a new catchword that you need to make as your main promise: “Affordability.”

  • As anybody paying attention knows, the cry of “affordability” was the central theme that carried the Democrats to victory in all the big races this year, most notably those of Zohran Mamdani for Mayor in New York City, Abigail Spanberger for Governor in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill for Governor in New Jersey. The same theme also carried two Democrats to victory as Public Service Commissioners in Georgia — the first victories by Democrats in statewide elections for state office in Georgia since 2006.

  • But here is the question: Is the promise of “affordability” by these politicians something that has any prospect of being delivered through their proposed policies? Or are the proposed policies instead more likely to be useless, or even counterproductive, thus making the promise of “affordability” a scam from the outset?

Read More

Federal District Judges Running The Executive Branch: Even Justice Jackson Draws A Line

/

  • The first nine months of the President Trump’s second term have seen repeated instances of a Federal District Court judge temporarily enjoining some action of the administration, only to have the Supreme Court stay the injunction while the litigation proceeds. Examples of this pattern of events have occurred in cases involving such things as funding rescissions, staff lay-offs, and deportation procedures.

  • A recurring feature of this pattern has been dissents from the three liberal Supreme Court justices — Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson — who would have left the temporary injunctions in place during the pendency of the litigation.

  • Justice Jackson, in addition to joining other two liberal justices, has also issued several individual dissents strongly criticizing her conservative colleagues for vacating temporary injunctions from District Courts.

  • The question of whether the administration gets enjoined while litigation proceeds, versus an injunction getting issued only at the conclusion of full litigation, is very consequential.

Read More

Can President Trump Deploy The National Guard To Portland Or Chicago?

/
Can President Trump Deploy The National Guard To Portland Or Chicago?

  • The first nine months of the second Trump administration have seen extraordinary litigation efforts by opponents of the government seeking to block its initiatives of every sort.

  • This page at Lawfare Media tracks some 190 active cases challenging Trump administration actions; and I don’t think that that list of 190 is comprehensive. The cases cover subject matter areas ranging from spending reductions to employee terminations to migrant deportations to regulatory actions, among many others.

  • Those following these litigations, or some of them, have undoubtedly noticed a pattern whereby a District Court judge, usually in a blue state, enjoins the administration’s action, only to have that injunction stayed by a Court of Appeals or by the Supreme Court within a few days or weeks. This pattern has been repeated multiple times in areas including spending reductions and migrant deportations.

  • Although none of the cases has yet reached full merits review at the Supreme Court, nevertheless there is a growing sense of District Court judges going beyond their job of enforcing the law, and instead seeking to supplant legitimate executive authority with their own policy preferences.

  • The latest series of cases involves the efforts of President Trump to deploy units of the National Guard to Portland and Chicago to support the efforts of ICE in those cities to enforce the federal immigration laws.

Read More

Biggest Hogwash Of The Week: Justice Department Independence From Politics

/

  • Late Friday afternoon (September 26) the U.S. Justice Department filed an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The indictment is extremely brief — barely one page of text — and focuses only on a single statement made by Comey in sworn Congressional testimony given on September 30, 2020, which statement is alleged in the indictment to be false.

  • Note that essentially every other commentator on this subject is in the same position that I am in of not being able to make a full analysis of the merits of the indictment. That has not prevented the usual suspects from criticizing President Trump for pushing for the indictment. To some degree, I agree with these criticisms, or at least I am sympathetic to them, to the extent that they criticize the President for seeking to use the justice system to get back at his political enemies.

  • But then, seemingly in each case, the critics go farther, and assert that with this indictment President Trump has done something totally new and different, and has entirely broken or transformed (or maybe “trampled on”) the former longstanding and proper norms of the Justice Department of never, ever abusing the justice system to attack political opponents. These assertions are not potentially appropriate criticism, but rather are complete hogwash.

Read More

Do Not Give Up The High Ground On Freedom Of Speech!

/

  • The four years of the Biden presidency were a terrible low point for the protection of freedom of speech in the U.S. A web of government agencies and allied NGOs sprang up with remarkable rapidity to identify and ban disfavored speech, almost always of conservatives.

  • As just a few examples: the White House itself pressured social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech on politically sensitive topics like Covid and climate change; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency collaborated with universities and NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory to get disfavored speech banned or suppressed; the Department of Homeland Security formed a Disinformation Governance Board to coerce social media companies to suppress speech deemed “disinformation”; and the FBI conducted wide-ranging investigations of Republican politicians and organizations.

  • The entire enterprise got the accurate nickname of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

  • This was an extremely important issue that drove many voters to Trump. After Trump was elected, we had every reason to expect that efforts like those of the prior administration to coerce the suppression of opponents’ speech of would come to an end. And, for the most part, they have.

  • However, the past week has seen two bad unforced errors on the freedom of speech front by high-ranking members of the Trump administration:

Read More

Susan Monarez Tries To Justify The CDC And Herself

/

  • By some strange coincidence, no sooner did I write yesterday’s post about the thoroughly corrupt CDC and its recently-fired Director, Susan Monarez, than there turns up in today’s Wall Street Journal an op-ed by the same Ms. Monarez trying to justify herself and the agency with regard to HHS Secretary RFK, Jr.

  • The headline is “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC and Me.” The sub-headline (online edition only) is “I was fired after 29 days because I held the line and insisted on rigorous scientific review.” The article is behind the Journal’s paywall, so I will provide some substantial quotes.

  • The theme of the piece, well-summarized in the sub-headline, is that Ms. Monarez, with the help of CDC colleagues, was fired for trying to hold the line against “pressure to compromise science itself.”

Read More