Category: U.S. Constitution

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Accountability general freedom government transparency ideological culture insider corruption moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Invulnerable Government

cfpb, Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, director, Richard Cordray, Mick Mulvaney, deep state, administrative state, bureaucracy

As of this week, there are two heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Two claimants to the throne, so to speak.

The bureau’s previous director, Richard Cordray, resigned last week, and as he left he appointed a deputy director, Leandra English. Ms. English sent out a nice Thanksgiving email, billing herself as “Acting Director.”

Meanwhile, in advance of Cordray’s exit, President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney to fill the role. Mulvaney showed up at work yesterday and took possession of the director’s office. He ordered a hiring freeze . . . and brought donuts.

It gets juicier. English has filed suit against the president and his appointee, claiming to be, herself, the directorship’s rightful heir. She cites the enabling legislation, which allowed for deputization by the director. And she cites her commitment to the agency’s mission, of which Mulvaney and Trump have none.

Republicans generally regard the agency as having gone rogue.

And the squabble over the directorship sure seems to validate that charge.

The legality? Presumably, the legislation that established the agency — which deliberately insulated the CFPB from oversight by funding it from the Federal Reserve — does not void an established law, the Vacancies Act, which does allows the president to fill vacated posts.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has taken up English’s side in the dispute, because she believes in the agency’s mission.

Now, I get it: to make government as impregnable as a high mountain fortress is an idea that many folks flirt with, from time to time. But the results are always the same: government secure from democratic checks and constitutional balance.

Come on, Democrats! Give democracy a chance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Good vs. Freedom?

Second Amendment, gun control, freedom, Washington Post, Elizabeth Bruenig, pope, Middle Ages

Politicians regularly argue for new “gun control” laws, even while ignoring the execution and enforcement of laws already on the books.

Exhibit A, as I wrote at Townhall.com yesterday, is the failure of the military to provide the FBI with the information that would have blocked the Sutherland Springs church shooter from getting his guns.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post’s Outlook section, Elizabeth Bruenig takes a more . . . philosophical perspective. She contends that “Western thought moved from seeing freedom as a means to an end — what philosophers call ‘the good’ — to seeing freedom as an end in itself. Thanks to our liberal heritage, we regard freedom as an intrinsic good, perhaps the highest one of all. The more of it we can get, the better off we are. Right?”

Right!

But Bruenig’s answer isn’t in the affirmative.

Instead, she points to Vatican elections during the Middle Ages in which “canon law enshrined the right of eligible individuals to cast their votes. But their choices . . . could simply be overturned [by church officials]. Freedom mattered, in other words, but was always subordinate to the highest good, which could sometimes place limits on liberty.”

Ah, the Post advises us to embrace the Middle Ages . . . just so our freedom doesn’t get out-of-hand.

Bruenig also thinks that “we largely lack the framework to ask what gun ownership is for. . . .”

Huh? The Second Amendment answers that gun ownership is “necessary to the security of a free state.”

In terms of both scholarship and insight, the Founders’ constitutionalism far outshines the Post’s shiny new neo-medievalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Government Control

gun control, shooting, church, government, violence, 2nd Amendment, rights

“When do we say enough is enough?” asked California Senator Kamala Harris after Devon Patrick Kelley murdered 26 churchgoing Texans in cold blood, last Sunday.

“The terrifying fact is that no one is safe so long as Congress chooses to do absolutely nothing in the face of this epidemic,” argued Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

President Trump, on the other hand, not only pointed out that criminals will violate gun laws to acquire weapons, he speculated that had Stephen Willeford, the former National Rifle Association instructor, not come upon the scene, armed, “instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”

After previous mass shootings, Democrats pushed legislation that, even if it had been the law, would not have prevented that particular killer from obtaining the weapons. This time it’s different, since the killer should not, by current law, have been allowed to purchase the firearms he used. Kelley’s conviction for domestic violence, while serving in the Air Force, disqualified him.*

But the Air Force did not do its job, failing to report his record to the FBI. So the background check found . . . nothing.

“The Pentagon has known for at least two decades about failures to give military criminal history information to the FBI,” the Associated Press informed, “including the type of information the Air Force didn’t report about the Texas church gunman.  . . .”

The Obama administration, through its command of the military, failed to execute the law designed to keep guns out of dangerous hands. And it sounds like this failure dates back to Bush and Clinton days.

Where does the buck stop?

We don’t need gun control; we need government control.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Note also that the murderer, as Ben Shapiro recounted at National Review: “escaped from a mental institution in 2012, threatened his superior officers and attempted to smuggle weapons onto a military base to carry out those threats, cracked the skull of his infant stepson, beat his wife, abused a dog.”

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Accountability First Amendment rights folly media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Our Royals Are Not Amused

Dianne Feinstein, First Amendment, free speech, censorship

“You created these platforms,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) informed the top legal minds at Facebook, Twitter, and Google, “and now they’re being misused.”

“And you have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will.”

Take that as a threat.

But also take it as the grand moment when the Establishment showed its hand.

Consider: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (a Google product) are “media platforms.” So are books, libraries, newspapers and newsstands. Imagine being a king right after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Very quickly, the world changed.

People thought differently. And they began demanding change from government. The sovereigns had to make room for subjects-turned-citizens.

Royalty and aristocracy did try to regulate the new platforms of information and opinion. Censorship was all-too-common. The rulers killed upstarts for writing the wrong things, saying the wrong things.

So, which side would you be on, Mrs. Feinstein?

That is Scott Shackford’s basic take on this. I’m with him.

I just wish to expand: in my lifetime the media platforms of newspapers and television were regulated. Heavily. Mergers and business purchases were subject to government permission; the electromagnetic spectrum was licensed rather than treated as private property, and the actual content of radio and TV shows were regulated by the FCC.

And the Feinsteins of Washington got awfully secure in their positions. Had the regulation of American media done its trick?

Enter new media, uncorking the bottle of opinion.

No wonder the Establishment is scared.

We shouldn’t let them regulate political content on the Internet. Demand, instead, the opposite: a complete repeal of the regulation of business management — and non-criminal content regulation — of all media platforms

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Popular Regulating Protest U.S. Constitution

Force Over Persuasion

free speech, BLM, Black Lives Matter, tolerance, censorship

Today’s campus radicals assert that free speech is bad because it “gives voice” to people with hateful, dangerous views.

Does that argument seem at all familiar? It is the old RightThink rationale for censorship.

A recent Spiked “Unsafe Spaces” event at Rutgers (“Identity Politics: the New Racialism”) was interrupted by now-too-famiar shouts and out-of-turn questions and invective. Kmele Foster, one of the panelists, had been explaining how important free speech rights were to the civil rights protesters in the 1960s, and to Martin Luther King in particular.

At “that precise moment,” as Reason’s Matt Welch puts it, the shouts of “Black lives matter!” began. And continued.

But more interesting than this bullying? Some of the more coherent theses articulated by the interrupters. One woman, CampusReform relates,

yelled in response to the panelists that she doesn’t “need statistics,” later complaining that “the system” controls facts.

“It’s the system. It’s the institution,” she said. “Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.”

Well, the moment you prove immune to any fact is the exact point in time that you’ve given up on rationality, free inquiry, and maybe even civilization itself.

It’s so 1984-ish.

And it demonstrates the old idea that, when you can no longer reason or allow others to express different opinions . . . or even discuss the factuality of this or that contention, you have only one other option: force.

Become bully.

Or tyrant.

Civilization is the triumph of persuasion over force. Being against free speech is to reverse that.

The acme of barbarism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
folly ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers U.S. Constitution

O That Wacky Gerrymandering

HIllary Clinton, Right Wing Conspiracy, gerrymander, states convention, lies

Hillary Clinton: always wrong.

Oh, I’m sure that when she tells the maid “We need milk,” she’s accurate enough. Otherwise — forget it.

Her latest howlers pertain to the movement to convene a Convention of States. If two thirds of the states call for the convention, it “will be” convened, per the U.S. Constitution. If 38 states approve a convention-proposed amendment, it will be added to the Constitution.

Different pro-convention groups support different amendments, on everything from a balanced budget to spending limits to term limits. U.S. Term Limits is promoting a Term Limits Convention to propose an amendment for congressional term limits. 

A great idea.

Clinton, though, sees calamity: “The right wing, aided and funded by the Mercers, Koch brothers, etc. [sic], is very serious about calling a constitutional convention,” she warned recently.

“Part of their gerrymandering is to control state legislatures, elect Republican governors, and to call a constitutional convention [no, a convention of states] and,” the author of What Happened elaborates, “if you really get deep into what they are advocating, limits on the First Amendment, no limits on the Second Amendment, limits on criminal justice . . . [A] very insidious right-wing agenda.”

Gee, the old multiple-fallacies-and-vague-ominous-assertions-per-second trick!

First, how to “gerrymander” statewide gubernatorial elections?

Or “gerrymander” the enthusiasm of millions for restraints on government?

Or apply the districting concept to the Founders’ constitutional provision for end-running Congress?

As for the political issues she blunderingly raises, Clinton seems to regard any political disagreement whatever with herself as proof of billionaire-funded “right-wing conspiracy.”

Well, left-wing conspirators always say such things.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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