The Powers of a King

Conservative Review points out that yesterday was supposed to be the end of the DACA program, except that the courts have so far said that the President isn't allowed to end a program created purely by the action of the previous President.

Yet thanks to a political system that has crowned district judges the kings of our society, the very underpinnings of the self-governing nation established in the Declaration of Independence have now been abandoned. We have district judges who can unilaterally make denizens of aliens – the power of a king, according to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #69.

The relevant section of Federalist 69 is about why a president is preferable to a king.

The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for FOUR years; the king of Great Britain is a perpetual and HEREDITARY prince. The one would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace; the person of the other is sacred and inviolable. The one would have a QUALIFIED negative upon the acts of the legislative body; the other has an ABSOLUTE negative. The one would have a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other, in addition to this right, possesses that of DECLARING war, and of RAISING and REGULATING fleets and armies by his own authority. The one would have a concurrent power with a branch of the legislature in the formation of treaties; the other is the SOLE POSSESSOR of the power of making treaties. The one would have a like concurrent authority in appointing to offices; the other is the sole author of all appointments. The one can confer no privileges whatever; the other can make denizens of aliens, noblemen of commoners; can erect corporations with all the rights incident to corporate bodies. The one can prescribe no rules concerning the commerce or currency of the nation; the other is in several respects the arbiter of commerce, and in this capacity can establish markets and fairs, can regulate weights and measures, can lay embargoes for a limited time, can coin money, can authorize or prohibit the circulation of foreign coin. The one has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction; the other is the supreme head and governor of the national church! What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be given to those who tell us that a government, the whole power of which would be in the hands of the elective and periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism.

I've highlighted three areas in which we've gone astray.

1) The Iran Deal was a treaty governing nuclear weapons that was effected without any input from the legislature -- the Corker-Cardin bill set up a means for Congress to express disapproval, but Democrats in the Senate filibustered a vote, so no vote was ever taken on approval or disapproval. The 2/3rds majority consent, required by the language of the Constitution, wasn't seriously considered as a standard the Obama administration would attempt to meet.

2) The 'denizens of aliens' was the intent of DACA. The courts are merely affirming Obama's right to rule as king, such that his successor by democratic election may not undo his fiat.

3) At this point most of the regulations on commerce originate in the executive. At some point the legislature consented to the delegation of its authority to the executive, and now most things affecting commerce that have the force of law are created undemocratically by the executive bureaucracy.

Serious problems, all, and it's just one paragraph of one of the Federalist papers.

UPDATE:

Oh, and as for the power of declaring war, Obama's actions in Libya never once passed any sort of 'by your leave' by Congress.

Mill Your Own

Reason has an interview with a guy who can help you make your own 1911s at the house.

Yankees With Guns

A good piece in the NYT, by a native of New Jersey, on why she bought a gun.

Happy National Grammar Day!

AEI econ blogger Mark J. Perry cares a lot more about this day than I do, apparently.

Some Appropriate Music for Leaving DC

Or, music for expressing one's feelings towards the governing class after a week of examining their exploits. It puts a man in a mood.



Language warning.

I'm back in the true South now, headed for home.

Jimmy Buffett Sings a Cowboy Song

And with a cowboy ...

Great Big Sea

Trekking Through DC

I'm away north for a bit, trying to wrestle with some of the things I can affect within our national government. I'll be back in a while, perhaps by the weekend.

The weird hormone argument

USA Today follows a trend I'm seeing more often in recent years, to explain human failings in terms of testosterone.  When the father is absent from the home, we're told, young men can't channel their innately destructive male hormones.  Now it seems, however, that even young women don't do well in fatherless homes, and we can hardly blame their unchanneled testosterone for that.  Nor does it make much sense to blame the testosterone of the absent father, which presumably isn't polluting the home from his new location across town or a couple of states away.

What does this leave?  The mother, who is still present?  Does she have toxic hormones?

Such a lot of silliness to avoid the idea that having both a mother and father present is a pretty good idea whenever you can pull it off, and not because of their complex chemical interactions.

Not a bad argument

The problem with twisting legal arguments into a pretzel is that that loose may come back around and kick you in the butt:

A coalition of 20 states has filed a lawsuit alleging ObamaCare is unconstitutional.

They’re claiming that since the GOP eliminated the tax penalty associated with the individual mandate, that ObamaCare itself is no longer constitutional. …

The GOP tax law “eliminated the tax penalty of the ACA, without eliminating the mandate itself. What remains, then, is the individual mandate, without any accompanying exercise of Congress’s taxing power, which the Supreme Court already held that Congress has no authority to enact,” the complaint states.

“Not only is the individual mandate now unlawful, but this core provision is not severable from the rest of the ACA—as four Justices of the Supreme Court already concluded.”

What's a guy gotta do to get arrested in Broward County?

“We’ve accomplished reducing the arrests. Now it’s ‘how do we keep that up without making the schools a more dangerous place.’"

The thing that goes down

Once again we face the spectacle of legislators writing bills about weapons they know nothing of. They may as well outlaw weapons that are scary or icky.

The problem with public-sector unions in a nutshell

From HotAir, better today than it's been lately:

The authors are correct in citing the cost of these retirement packages as a problem. It’s the primary driver which has nearly sunk New Jersey’s state government and embroiled Chris Christie throughout his entire tenure as governor. So one way to look at this (if you happen to be a liberal) is to say, as the authors do, that strong unions are able to push back against cuts to benefits.

Well, that’s a dandy solution if you happen to be one of the people receiving those benefits or planning your retirement around them. But it doesn’t do anything for the tens of millions of people in the private sector who have little chance of landing a job that offers anywhere near that level of retirement stability. It also does nothing to magically make more money appear in state and municipal budgets to cover these skyrocketing expenses. The authors attempt to claim that such expensive pension plans are justified because “many public-sector jobs offer lower salaries than their private-sector counterparts. As a result, public employees tend to have far more stable and secure retirements than similarly situated private-sector workers."

No citation is offered for this incredible claim. If you look long and hard, you can probably find a handful of cases where it’s true, but for the most part and in nearly all cases, public sector workers earn more than their private-sector counterparts. And I did offer a linked citation for that. Perhaps even more embarrassingly, it’s from… The Washington Post.

What they should have been asking was why there was never anyone at the table arguing on behalf of the taxpayers when these labor agreements were originally crafted.

"Not according to this kid . . . aaaaaaaand I trust this kid"

Deputy Scott Peterson's counsel is floating the theory that he had a good reason not to go inside the Florida school building. It's not easy to square, however, with the eye-witness testimony of a horrified student.

Note the sequence of events described by senior Brandon Huff. He told reporters that Peterson didn’t move even while other teachers were running into the building, including Aaron Feis, who lost his life shielding his students.

Now you tell us

Senate Democrats are shocked, shocked to learn that politicizing the Supreme Court may not have been an ideal strategy.

“If stare decisis means anything, it must mean that a precedent should not be overturned simply because a differently composed court emerges,” the senators wrote. “Decision-making begins to look like prize-taking when precedents are reversed as Court majorities shift.” …

Jonathan Haidt Talks about Three Hopeful Signs at Universities for 2018

Col. Schlichter and the New Rules

I like Kurt Schlichter's stuff, generally speaking. Right now he is pushing government regulation of businesses going against conservatives:

The liberal elite is using its social and cultural ties to those at the helm of big companies to essentially blacklist the NRA, and thereby the tens of millions of Americans who support gun rights. But oppression is oppression whether it’s done by a government bureaucrat or a corporate one, and our principle of non-interference in business assumes business stays out of politics. But now National, Hertz, and others are cutting ties to the NRA, and liberals are advocating banks do the same. Their intent is clear – what they can't do in politics they will simply do by not allowing the representatives of people whose politics they don't like access to the infrastructure of society. And we're not supposed to do anything about it because, you know, free enterprise and stuff.  You know, our principles.

I think he has more of a point with companies like Google. Not giving a discount to a particular group isn't the same thing as denying its members "access to the infrastructure of society." On the other hand, an algorithm that keeps traffic away from a site because Google doesn't approve of its politics kinda does, to a point. Then again, there's always Duck Duck Go.

No. They are exercising political power. We have our own political power, and we need to exercise it - ruthlessly. ... 

Ouch

"As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."

Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagel, Ya'll.

If I have had one standing criticism of the government of the Great State of Georgia, it has been the degree to which it has bent over backwards to give away the rights of citizens in favor of corporate interests. On gun rights, on religious liberty, as on many other issues, once you knew what side Coca-Cola and Delta wanted to win, you knew what the Republican government would do -- no matter what their voters wanted, and no matter which constitutional right was being undermined by the action.

Not today.

Casey Cagel for Governor.