America's 'Brexit': Taking back power from the administrative state

On Jan. 31, more than three years after the people of the United Kingdom had voted for it, Britain left the European Union in a move nicknamed "Brexit." The reasons for this are complex, but the clearest motive was outlined by Boris Johnson, a leader of the movement who is now the country’s prime minister.

In a speech during the Brexit campaign, Johnson noted that 60% of the laws passing through the British Parliament and becoming the law of the U.K. came from decisions made by the EU in Brussels.

"We are currently unable to exercise democratic control over such basic economic matters as our tax rates," said Johnson. "We cannot control the EU budget … nor can we protect the U.K. taxpayer from the demands of the Eurozone countries for bailout funds … It is time to take back control and speak for freedom in Britain."

Here, as in so many other areas, British politics seems to foreshadow what happens in the United States. Obviously, we are not subject to foreign control through a supranational organization such as the EU. But there are serious questions about the degree to which the American people are currently able to control the rules and regulations made by unelected officials in federal agencies — agencies which, because of their remarkable power and apparent immunity from popular control, are called the administrative state.

Without question, the representative republic set up by the framers of our Constitution offered protection against the loss of popular control. The Constitution vests all law-making power in Congress, a Senate and House of Representatives elected by and theoretically subject to the will and priorities of the American people.

But since the New Deal, and increasingly in recent years, this system does not appear to be working as designed. Instead of making the difficult political decisions for society, who is benefited by and who pays the price for new legislation, Congress has been enacting laws that simply set goals for the agencies of the administrative state. This delegates unlimited authority to these agencies, but it insulates members of Congress from accountability for the political costs of making these controversial decisions.

In addition, under a key 1984 Supreme Court ruling, Chevron v. U.S., lower federal courts were directed to defer to the interpretations of administrative state agencies themselves about the authorities they were granted by Congress.

When broadly worded delegations of statutory authority are combined with court deference to agency views of their rule-making power, it should be no surprise that the agencies of the administrative state can expand their jurisdictions to matters Congress never contemplated. Executive agencies, then, rather than Congress, have been able to make the rules under which everyone must live.

In other words, the people are in very much the same position in relation to their government as the people of Britain were before they voted for and achieved a separation from the EU. As in Britain, people bound by the rules flowing from remote bureaucracies have little ability to affect the scope of these rules. As in Britain, this will eventually give rise to dangerous questions about the legitimacy of the rules.

Of course, the remedy in our constitutional system must be entirely different from what the British did, but there is a remedy. It’s a return to the original constitutional structure in which Congress — when it provides authority to the agencies of the executive branch — places limits on the scope of these powers. At the same time, the courts must be the key interpreters of what powers Congress intended to confer and should not be required to defer to agencies’ views of how much authority they have been given.

There is a way to bring this about. It’s called the nondelegation doctrine. This constitutional approach has not been invoked by the Supreme Court since 1935, but with five members of the Court now avowing that they favor the original meaning of the Constitution, it is a reasonable prospect.

Under this approach, the judiciary would strike down as unconstitutional any law that delegates excessive or unlimited authority to an executive agency. This would require Congress, in performing its legislative function, to place limits on the scope of the statutory authority it is granting. The judiciary, in turn, rather than deferring to the agencies’ views, will independently test whether executive agencies are remaining within these limits.

There will certainly be strong opposition to this approach from those who favor the expansive government powers currently exercised by administrative state agencies. But without a change in its current direction, the U.S. government is headed toward a structure not very different in overall effect from what the British people overturned with their Brexit votes.

It’s time either to start that process or resign ourselves to living in a governmental system the framers would not recognize.

SOURCE 






A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office

Anyone who wants to take away your rights can also put a rock through your window.

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours.

There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it.

When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office.

The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

And in an atmosphere of rising radical violence, maybe this story wouldn’t be so extraordinary.

But this wasn’t the first time that this happened to the Humboldt GOP HQ. It was the sixth time.

Not in a decade, but in only two years.

The small hole in the wall office on 5th Street in Eureka, unprepossessing tan walls, blue framed windows and single door, could just as easily be the bar next door or the burger place across the street. Aside from its narrow “Republican Headquarters” sign, it could just as easily be mistaken for a small business.

The 300 block of 5th Street with a Starbucks and Wells Fargo, adjacent to two motels and an AV shop, seems like an unlikely place for a pitched battle between radical leftism and the national norms. But that’s exactly what the extended campaign against the modest storefront with its “Republicans Register Here” notice and Trump signage on a street in this small 27,000 population city represents.

The small office with its American flag fan banners, a few tables and a bookcase is on the front line of a new war between radical leftist extremists and remaining conservatives in a formerly conservative area.

The windows of the office had been previously smashed in April of last year, before the release of the Mueller report. Like this latest attack, that assault had happened late at night over the weekend. After smashing through the windows with rocks, the “Make America Great Again” sticker was replaced with a “Keep America Green” sticker from the Sierra Club. Nothing says environmentalism like vandalism.

Eureka lefties justified the attack because the office has large cardboard cutouts of Reagan and Trump.

In March 2019, a window had been smashed. In August of 2018, the office was vandalized again, leaving behind signs reading, “Fake President Impeach + Indite”, “45 = Lies House of Lies”, and “Guantanamo and Torture x 20 Years 45 and all supporters." A “Make America Great Again” sign had been crossed out and the elephant on the “Republican Headquarters” sign had been defaced.

A month earlier, President Trump had nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The windows of the Humboldt Republican Headquarters have been broken three times in two years. They’ve been covered with plywood so often that it’s become a familiar sight. And while this latest incident was the most severe, previous episodes of vandalism had marred the windows, defaced signs, and tried to cause as much damage as possible with whatever the leftist vandals had at hand.

This latest attack is expected to cost thousands of dollars in repairs. Previous acts of leftist vandalism had cost in the $700 range.

And despite the leftist signs, the Eureka Police Department dismissed it as “random vandalism”.

"The local police say, ‘Oh, it’s random vandalism,’ except it’s happened five times to us and nobody else,” Humboldt County GOP Chairman John Schutt said.

"This is the 5th time in two years and on prior occasions I have been told these are random acts of vandalism. Interesting the Democrat Office has not had any 'random acts of vandalism'", the Humboldt GOP noted last year.

There’s nothing random about 6 attacks on a Republican office either carried out by identifiable lefties, leaving behind leftist signage, or specifically defacing Republican signage. That’s as deliberate as it gets.

But Humboldt County, once a Republican area, had swung leftward. And the HQ has become a symbol of everything that the new radical population hates. During the Kavanaugh debate, lefty protesters had gathered outside the small office with signs like, “Party of the Predators” and “Stop Rapeublicans”.

The lefty protesters targeted the office even though it had nothing to do with Kavanaugh and had already been vandalized two months earlier.

When local lefties can’t get to D.C. marches, they target the Humboldt County HQ. That’s where opponents of the Bill of Rights appear toting signs like "Massacre Mitch" and "Republicans: Shame on you!"

Reagan was the last Republican to win Humboldt County which has passed its own sanctuary measure. And Eureka, with its large homeless population and regular anti-Trump protests, leans lefty.

The Humboldt County Republican headquarters has faced a uniquely sustained assault on its existence. It is not the only Republican office to be targeted for vandalism and harassment, but the persistence of the attacks and the general disregard of the authorities, is unique and revelatory. This is the first time an arrest has been made despite the presence of surveillance equipment and attackers who leave handwriting samples. And the one man arrested for this latest incident is already back on the street.

“This is about your friends and neighbors and coworkers and people you live with here. It’s just sad that we can’t exercise our First Amendment rights in peace,” Schutt noted back in 2018. “There is not one member of my party here that would go down and do this down the street at the Democrat office.”

The Humboldt County Democrats enjoy an all-glass office on 4th Street. If there were a random violence problem, somebody would have taken a rock to it by now. That’s because there’s nothing random here.

The sustained assault on the Humboldt County Republican headquarters is not the work of one man, but of a culture of intolerance and hatred. It can be summed up by the Bernie sticker on the bike that the vandal threw at law enforcement as he was trying to make his getaway from the scene of the crime.

In 2017, James Hodgkinson, another Bernie Sanders supporter, came to a Republican charity baseball game with a list of the names of Freedom Caucus members and opened fire. The FBI coverup of that attack, which falsely claimed that it was a spontaneous act with no motive, has yet to be investigated.

Like the “random vandalism” in Eureka, the assassination of Republicans was also treated as random.

Civil wars begin in small ways. They’re born out of intolerance. A refusal to coexist. A failure to enforce the law. To punish violence against people different than the ones who hold political power.

In recent weeks, Project Veritas Action has released videos of Sanders staffers threatening violence before and after a possible victory. The media has maintained a tight ban on covering these videos.

In Jacksonville, Florida, earlier this month, Gregory Timm drove a truck into a Republican voter registration tent to take a stand against President Trump. It is no coincidence that the attacks on the Humboldt County Republican headquarters are linked to Trump’s victory. Or that they’ve been excused by some local lefties because the GOP HQ dared to have Trump material on the premises.

There is nothing random or isolated about the reality that the Democrats have become radicalized.

Radicalism doesn’t just mean the embrace of increasingly extreme policies from denying basic biology to taking away everyone’s health insurance to demanding open borders and suppressing free speech.

There is no meaningful separation between extreme policies and extreme tactics. Anyone willing to take away your rights is also willing to put a rock through your window. That’s what we’re seeing in Eureka.

And across America.

SOURCE 







Court Ruling Protects a Transgender Child More Than Other Kids

A federal appeals court has issued a ruling that not only portends a firestorm on transgender policies in public schools but raises fundamental questions about language, biology, and the law’s role in extricating truth from obscurity when political correctness is prevalent.

In its ruling in Parents for Privacy v. Barr, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s decision and found that an Oregon school district did not violate federal law or constitutional rights with a policy allowing a transgender boy (a biological girl who lives as a boy) to use restrooms, locker rooms, and showers set aside for boys.

A portion of the Feb. 12 ruling reads:

In summary, we hold that [Oregon’s] Dallas School District No. 2’s carefully-crafted Student Safety Plan seeks to avoid discrimination and ensure the safety and well-being of transgender students; it does not violate Title IX or any of Plaintiffs’ cognizable constitutional rights. A policy that allows transgender students to use school bathroom and locker facilities that match their self-identified gender in the same manner that cisgender students utilize those facilities does not infringe Fourteenth Amendment privacy or parental rights or First Amendment free exercise rights, nor does it create actionable sex harassment under Title IX.

The ruling is frustrating on legal grounds: Even though the panel of judges suggests the 14th Amendment doesn’t grant a child privacy rights, it states that the same amendment gives a transgender child the “right” to use a restroom matching their gender identity—which is essentially a different kind of privacy right.

How can that be?

According to the 9th Circuit panel’s ruling, the transgender child’s right to use a bathroom that matches how the child feels that day usurps another child’s right to privacy, and thus the transgender child isn’t simply as protected as other kids, but more protected.

Just as disturbing, if not more so, is the court’s insistence on making such a blanket ruling—denying the privacy rights of kids on so many legal grounds—after the judges clearly have accepted the premise of the transgender debate, which is hardly on solid ground at all.

For example, the ruling reads: “The panel held that there is no Fourteenth Amendment fundamental privacy right to avoid all risk of intimate exposure to or by a transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth.”

A transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth. What does that mean?

What does it mean to be “assigned” sex at birth, eschew that, live as the opposite sex, and demand to be legally recognized as that gender with protections under the law?

Perhaps the 14th Amendment does not offer protection for privacy or bathroom rights for children in public schools. But the 9th Circuit’s ruling is based on a premise that relies more on political correctness than scientific fact.

Without questioning science, biology, psychology, or ethics to be sure that a “transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth” should be using the bathroom of that person’s choosing, judges accept as reality what might be, in fact, a pleasant but distorted fiction.

The last significant time a court did this was the Supreme Court, on the issue of abortion. Even though multiple disciplines—religion, science, philosophy, and bioethics—all offered counter arguments against legalizing the murder of an unborn baby, justices accepted without question the premise that a fetus wasn’t really a baby with separate rights.

Although this false premise made the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade somewhat easier, it never has made logical sense—as the late Justice Antonin Scalia often alluded to—and the juxtaposition has made abortion sacrosanct to progressives.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this is happening with transgender issues and why it happened similarly with abortion.

Perhaps the existence of a large and vocal lobby behind the cause—particularly when groupthink is prevalent and political correctness already has begun to be the ruling order of the day—aids in helping a court to co-opt logic, reason, and cynicism, and to accept a premise that’s as confusing as it is strange.

In other controversial areas—gun rights, free speech, and especially religion—the judiciary analyzes almost to an extreme the language, details, and motives of the case at hand to ensure the constitutionality of the decision holds.

A simple review of the oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission would prove this point.

That Supreme Court case in 2017 included a robust debate over whether designing and baking custom cakes was protected speech—and specifically making such cakes at the request of customers with a certain intention or message, such as to celebrate a same-sex marriage or an occult being.

If courts continue to accept the transgender debate on its surface, as one of privacy rights versus bathroom rights as opposed to extricating the root of the issue—while promoting a progressive, politically correct agenda—these rulings will be as legally and culturally harmful as abortion turned out to be.

SOURCE 






Desperate white South African farmers who rushed for protection visas in Australia have their claims rejected

It's a lot easier if you are an Afghan or an Iranian

A surge of South Africans seeking protection in Australia have been disappointed as no visas have yet been approved.

Rejection letters to the families applying for protection and humanitarian visas have said they are not refugees because the violence in South Africa is widespread, random and opportunistic.

'The risk of murder and serious physical/sexual assaults is one faced by the population of the country generally and not by the applicants personally,' said the letter, quoted in The Australian newspaper.

South Africa's minority white farmers say there has been a concerted campaign to drive them off their land, and violent murders - some involving horrific rape and torture - have been forcing them to leave.

Liberal National Party member Savanna Labuschagne, herself a migrant from South Africa, said some people had their skin ironed off and holes drilled through their knee caps.

'An elderly couple had boiling water poured down their throats. I could go on for days. How do we help our people?' she told The Australian.

Ms Labuschagne said both blacks and whites had suffered from the South African government's 'corruption'.

She also shared some of the racial hatred that has been directed at the white minority by black South Africans on Facebook.

One black South African man had posted to social media that it was his duty and the duty of others to 'eliminate every white person in South Africa'. 

'The only way to end racism and the oppression of my people is to destroy the white race. This must be done as quickly as possible,' his post read.

Ms Labuschagne along with fellow LNP member Patti Maher, also a South African migrant, said they were feeling frustrated as South Africans were prevented from receiving assistance by the bureaucracy.  

South Africa has been divided by deep racial grievances since the apartheid system of racial segregation ended in 1994, and this has been worsened by an economic gulf between rich and poor.

White people, who are less than 9 percent of the population, own most of the farmland in South Africa.

They are vastly outnumbered by black people who make up 80 per cent of the country's 57.7 million population, but who have the least amount of land ownership.

South Africa's ruling party the African National Congress, led by Cyril Ramaphosa, plans to take land without compensation from minority white farmers, who own most of the farmland, and redistribute it to black South Africans.

South Africa's parliament voted in 2018 to amend the constitution to allow land seizures, and has issued a proposed land expropriation bill on which the public comment period is open until 29 February, Business Tech reported.

In March 2018, Mr Dutton suggested white farmers were being persecuted and deserved special attention under Australia's humanitarian program.

He instructed his department to consider claims from persecuted South African farmers, alongside people from Asia, the Middle East and other African countries.

Liberal politicians pushed for up to 10,000 South Africans to come to Australia.

South Africans responded with a surge of 220 claims for humanitarian visas made in the last two years, almost triple the previous rate.

South Africans had previously made just 350 applications for humanitarian visas from 2008 to 2010, an average of 35 per year. 

However most of the visa applications have so far been denied leaving South Africans disappointed.

Of the 570 humanitarian visa applications since 2008, only 41 were granted and 340 are still to be finalised, The Australian reported.

Protection visa applications have also failed with 97 rejected in the past three months.

Of 33 protection visa applications lodged since November, none have been approved.

A Home Affairs spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Monday that anyone who makes a claim for protection will be considered under the humanitarian program, and that there are many other visas available to South Africans such as the skilled, temporary and family visas.

'Almost 80,000 visas have been granted to South Africans since July 2018, allowing them to come to Australia,' the spokesperson said.

'South Africa is the 9th largest source country of permanent migrants in Australia.'

To be considered a refugee, a person must have a well-founded fear they will be seriously harmed because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a social group, the Home Affairs Department says on its website.

The serious harm can be to their life and liberty, or the denial of a capacity to earn a livelihood to survive.

Australia's Refugee Review Tribunal wrote in 2011 that despite concerns among white South Africans that they were being targeted for race, most evidence pointed to other motivations such as financial gain.

Crime is widespread in South Africa where 14 million people live in extreme poverty, and farmers are isolated and thus can be seen as easy targets.

In 2018, South Africa suffered almost 20,000 murders with most of the victims being black victims of black violence, while only 62 were farm murders - not all of them white, according to government figures quoted by investigative journalist James Pogue writing in Harper's Magazine. 

Mr Pogue wrote that the brutality of the torture inflicted on some of the white victims does indicate a level of racial vitriol in the attacks.

In May last year, South African activist Annette Kennealy, 51, who spoke out against attacks on white farmers was found stabbed and beaten to death on her own farm in Limpopo province.

Kennealy was a public supporter of the white Afrikaner community and in her last Facebook post, she shared a link alleging that 10 farm attacks, including one murder, had been reported in just four days in 2019.

She also routinely shared links and stories relating to politics in South Africa, and the government's plans to start expropriating farms from white land-owners.

The South African Human Rights Commission has said black farmers have given evidence that farm safety isn't the preserve of any one racial group, although it does not dispute that there are attacks motivated by racial hatred.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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