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The law and its enforcement rightly (and inevitably) has some flexibility, but that only puts the responsibility on the citizenry to put up resistance.
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial applauded the work of the Trump administration in its “great rules rollback”:
The results have been impressive. Ms. [Neomi] Rao [of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs] reported this month that through Sept. 30 the Trump Administration had taken 67 deregulatory actions but only three new significant regulatory actions. That’s a 22 to 1 ratio. She also reported that since fall 2016 more than 1,500 planned regulatory actions have been withdrawn or delayed. For fiscal 2018, the current agenda includes 448 deregulatory actions and 131 regulatory actions, a better than 3 to 1 ratio.
One reason for success is forcing agencies to abide by the Administrative Procedure Act, which outlines a public comment period for proper rule-making and which the Obama Administration routinely ignored.
Imagine government following its own rules! After eight years of Obama, that feels new and refreshing — as if we have the rule of law and the consent of the governed (or are moving back toward it).
In recent weeks, I’ve been noticing a number of Trump skeptics come around (which is to say, people more skeptical than I was, which was pretty skeptical). The reevaluation is justified, and minds ought to be changing across the political spectrum, not the least for reasons like this:
… the far larger impact is lifting the pall of government hassle and arbitrary enforcement from business. In the Obama era, CEOs never knew when or how a federal agency might strike for political reasons, no matter the law. Simply lifting that constant fear has had a liberating effect on risk-taking and investment.
Predicted this on the John Loughlin Show @wpro. AG is supposed to enforce the law – Congress's job to make new ones. https://t.co/BkBGUdt1Vb
— LoughlinRI1 (@LoughlinRI1) January 4, 2018
One problem with President Donald Trump is that he’s like a flashy object in a pile of stuff. Other things may be more significant, but he draws attention. On PowerLine, John Hinderaker connects some dots for one of those things:
So it appears that what happened here is that Democratic Party activists in the Department of Homeland Security either created a bogus document or dug up a poorly-researched draft document that had never been issued, and fed it to Democratic Party activists at the Associated Press. The Democratic Party activists at the AP published a story based on the anonymous document, which two Democratic Party activists on the [judiciary] bench used as a pretext for orders enjoining the president’s travel order.
This is how an ideological and partisan group constructs narratives, with a one-two-three from insider bureaucrats to judges who overstep their offices to undermine the elected president. This stuff is inimical to a free society and the rule of law no matter which political side does it.
Andrew McCarthy has been taking the lead in noting the basic principle behind some of President Trump’s immigration policy:
On Tuesday, John Kelly, President Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, published a six-page, single-spaced memorandum detailing new guidance on immigration enforcement. Thereupon, I spent about 1,500 words summarizing the guidance in a column at National Review. Brevity being the soul of wit, both the memo and my description of it could have been reduced to a single, easy-to-remember sentence:
Henceforth, the United States shall be governed by the laws of the United States.
That it was necessary for Secretary Kelly to say more than this — and, sadly, that such alarm has greeted a memo that merely announces the return of the rule of law in immigration enforcement — owes to the Obama administration abuses of three legal doctrines: prosecutorial discretion, preemption, and separation of powers (specifically, the executive usurpation of legislative power).
The erosion of the rule of law in the United States (and, of course, in Rhode Island) is a topic on which I’ve written a great deal in recent years. Note the political dynamic, though: The Left (encompassing the mainstream media, universities, various supposed good-government groups, and others) is willing to look the other way when the rule of law erodes in ways they like under progressive government, but then they’ll howl if the Right reaffirms the rules and scream if they can so much as insinuate that conservatives are promoting some similar erosion that doesn’t serve the progressive ideology.
Let’s hope the eternal record of the Internet (1) stays free and (2) gives the people an edge against the ideologues by helping us remember what has been said and done in the past.
It sure does seem that Hillary Clinton has been almost daring the federal bureaucracy to uphold the rule of law, and the Obama Administration has casually refused to take the bait. From CNN:
Early this year as the investigation into Clinton’s private email server was in full swing, several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, according to a law enforcement official. At the time, DOJ declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to open a case.
This sure looks like a cover-up. Wouldn’t it behoove the federal government to be absolutely thorough and transparent in putting to rest any suspicions — particularly considering that the suspicions originated through “several FBI field offices,” not the vast right-wing conspiracy that Clinton has long offered her supporters as an excuse to ignore reality? After all, this is a person likely to be the President of the United States, and it can’t be good for the country to have open questions about uninvestigated suspicions.
We can only fear what sort of damage a Clinton presidency would do to the rule of law should she win the office, just as we can only fear what sort of damage an unpredictable and apparently ignorant Donald Trump would do in the same position. The more important conclusion, though, is that the federal government is already illegitimately exercising power because it is acting outside the bounds of the rule of law, which the citizenry should consider to be a violation of the contract that binds us to following the law ourselves.
As I’ve written before, our country has reached the point that we should follow the law to avoid prison or other consequences — and insofar as the law happens to correspond with moral principles — but should feel no moral responsibility to obey an illegitimate government.
Judges and a ruling class who discard the Constitution in order to impose their decrees force the people to consider whether the peaceable civic process ought to be discarded, too.
In his latest “Afterburner” video, Bill Whittle gets it exactly right, at least in describing the sense that a sizable portion of the American public gets about how our system of government really works after seven years of Barack Obama as president, noting that one of the penalties for Hillary Clinton’s withholding official records from her time as Secretary of State would be a lifetime bar on her holding political office:
So, let’s just come out and state what we all know to be true: Hillary Clinton will either walk Scott free for treasonous graft or criminal incompetence or she will be indicted and lose the nomination solely on the personal whim of Barack Hussein Obama and the merits of the deal that the Clintons can cut with his majesty in order to save her skin. Everybody knows this is true. Everybody knows that justice in the absence of a press corp is now at the whim of this president, and the only reason she’s being prosecuted in the first place is because it pleases Barack Obama to do so.
Whittle refers to the report that Hillary Clinton went to Obama and told him to call off his attack dogs, emphasizing the erstwhile truism that federal agents aren’t supposed to be the president’s attack dogs at all, but rather objective enforcers of the law.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer sounded a similar note on a Fox News panel, talking about the story that the American people are going to be handed from Clinton’s Benghazi-related testimony, yesterday:
We’re not going to get the contradictions, we’re not going to get the facts, we’re not going to get the real story underlying it. We’re living in an age where what you say and its relation with the facts is completely irrelevant as we see in the presidential campaign. And it’s carrying over into the hearings.
The system of society and governance that defined the United States is dead. It can be revived, but until that happens, it’s gone. An ideologically homogenized academia, superficial and silly arts and cultural institutions, and a partisan news media have all decided that the American people can’t be trusted with the sharp object of reality, so their fantasy is what we get… at least until reality snarls so meanly that even Hollywood special effects can’t cover it up.
The specific controversy of the Kentucky county clerk who is refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses will come and go, but David French gets at the more important point:
… what we’re watching unfold in Kentucky isn’t so much the “rule of law” as the raw exercise of power. Judicial revolutionaries simply wield more power than Kentucky county clerks — partly because the judges enjoy the popular support of millions of Americans (including public officials), partly because their lifetime tenure almost entirely insulates them from accountability, and partly because even the most vigorous dissenters understand that answering one revolution with another will upend the entire system, a price they’re not willing to pay. At least not yet.
In fact, the rule of law has increasingly become a mere talking point, a weapon wielded by the Courts and the Obama administration when it likes a given legal outcome, but disregarded when pesky things like “democracy” and “procedure” interfere with the demands of social justice. For the Obama administration, even proper regulatory rulemaking can be too burdensome. Rule by executive order or even departmental letter replaces constitutional process, with the social-justice Left cheering every step of the way.
We’ve allowed so much authority to bubble up to the highest level of government that it’s increasingly impossible for people who disagree with the elite to find a place in which to live under the policies that they would prefer. We’re also allowing deterioration of the sense that the law applies to everybody equally — and means what it says in all cases. That makes control over the federal government an absolute necessity (including circumventing a body of elected representatives from around the country if they impede that control).
Some see the surprisingly successful campaign of Donald Trump as primarily an expression of frustration that the system appears to be rigged to allow no real choices at the highest level. Unless we give Americans tangible evidence that participation in the political process really does make a difference, even at the federal level, and unless we return to toleration for substantially different government at the local and state levels from one place to the next, and unless our broader civic system (expanded to include news media and social institutions) is more overtly fair and even-handed, we’re guaranteeing tyranny from the powerful and revolutionary unrest from those who have been shut out.
Battles over the annual budget in Woonsocket could open up another corrupting problem with the inadvisable and poorly written law granting the state the power to take dictatorial control over struggling local governments.
It’s one thing to read about riots in a distant city. It’s another thing to see ripples of the same disregard for law and order closer to home, as in Ethan Shorey’s Valley Breeze article:
Police in Pawtucket say a crowd of young people pelted them with bottles and rocks following a Memorial Day fireworks display at McCoy Stadium Monday night.
Police responded to the area of Jenks Junior High School shortly after 9:30 p.m. for several reports of groups fighting. Officers were confronted with large groups totaling about 75 to 100 people. As they tried to disperse the groups, they were hit with bottles and rocks.
A resident who was in the area of the skate park outside Jenks said that teens made reference to the Baltimore riots as police hit them with pepper spray, at least one shouting, “this ain’t Baltimore.”
I wonder if stories like this are popping up in local newspapers across the country. And if they are, is this a destructive fad or a crack in our civilization?
The other day, I noted Dinesh D’Souza’s suggestion that freedom is a mechanism to guarantee justice. Admittedly, the text of the post drifted a bit from the intention for which I crafted the title. The bottom-line point that might have gotten lost was that a free nation, in which the government’s role is constrained, limits the opportunity of the government to manipulate the public. (It also limits the incentive, since gaining control of government doesn’t gain one as much.) It’s furthermore incompatible with a free nation for the government to be spying on its people or for the chief executive’s campaign to be setting up secretive organizations to manipulate the electorate.
Kevin Williamson brings in a consideration that is interwoven with the topic. Writing about the Supreme Court’s Halbig decision, “that the law says what the law says” when it comes to ObamaCare subsidies, Williamson goes on:
The Hammurabic Code, along with its presumptive predecessors, represented something radical and new in human history. With the law written down — with the law fixed — a man who had committed no transgression no longer had reason to tremble before princes and potentates. If the driver of oxen had been paid his statutory wage, if a man’s contractual obligations had been satisfied, and if his life was unsullied by violations of the law, handily carved upon slabs of igneous rock for all to see and ingest, then that man was, within the limits of his law, free. …
… We write laws down in order that citizens may know what is permissible under the generally promulgated rules of the polity. The writing down of laws was the first step on the road from subject to citizen, and to reverse that is to do violence to more than grammatical propriety …
As I noted imperfectly the other day, freedom from tyranny is a guarantor of justice, and we cannot have freedom if the tyrant is able to change the rules and laws on a whim. If the ground might dissolve beneath you once you’ve stepped off the tyrant’s path, you aren’t actually free to step from the path. In other words, the rule of law is a guarantor of freedom and a prerequisite if freedom is to guarantee justice.
That’s why Americans must insist on the rules, and that the language of the law means what it says. Rhode Island is an excellent example of the insider-dominated wasteland to which a failure to do so inevitably leads, and even we in the Ocean State have much farther to fall.
During testimony before the Rhode Island House of Representatives Oversight Committee last night advocating for full payment of the 38 Studios moral obligation bonds, John Simmons of the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council repeatedly made the point that the bond market will not recognize any difference between non-payment of moral obligation versus non-payment of general obligation debt. They will both be considered “default” by the state of Rhode Island.
Simmons stated that, based upon the bonding agreement, there was “fully an obligation of the state of Rhode Island to make the payments if the underlying transaction went under”. Representatives Spencer Dickinson and Mike Chippendale both challenged this.
Rep. Dickinson paraphrased an Economic Development Corporation bond prospectus, referring to a statement that “there’s no possible way that the state or any municipality is intended to obligate itself in the case of these bonds” (on page 35, according to the Rep). Mr. Simmons responded that he had seen similar language in other prospectuses “30, 40, 50 maybe a lot more times”. Pressed by Dickinson as to why this did not establish a clear difference between moral and general obligation bonds, Mr. Simmons read from a ratings agency statement, and said that the agency “is saying to you that it doesn’t make a difference to them if it’s GO, moral obligation or appropriation debt. If you do not pay it is default on debt. They’re giving an equal weight, in the sense of how they approach it”.
Rep. Chippendale quoted from the law that authorized the bonds…
I’m just going to read it. “The 2010 bonds and the interest thereon do not constitute a debt, liability or obligation of the state or any political subdivision thereof, and neither the faith or credit nor the taking or taxing power of the state or any political subdivision thereof is pledged to the payment of the bonds, or the interest thereon. That’s a fairly clear statement. Of course, you did address that and you said that’s fairly boilerplate…
Mr. Simmons’ reply was that…
What you have in the language is fairly standard boilerplate language on this type of debt, constant debt, this is a fairly large amount.
But a blithe dismissal of some very clear language in the bond authorization is a blithe assertion that everyone — legislators, citizens and investors — should know that the rules that the financial industry makes up for itself (and for its own benefit, by the way) can automatically override the plain text of a law. Finance industry decrees are the real final law of the land; the law made by legislatures, on the other hand, is only real to the degree that it does not conflict with the limits that financiers lay down.
This kind of system, where the people are expected to accept that there are privileged classes who can ignore the plain meaning of actual laws made by the government chosen by the representatives of the people, cannot be reconciled with the rule of law. If the best argument that John Simmons can muster about there being no difference between moral obligation and general obligation bonds is that bondholder and ratings agency decrees can override what the law says, his opinion on this aspect of repayment deserves summary dismissal.
More to come on this topic…
Jonathan Skrmetti, the Republican attorney general of Tennessee, has pledged that he will sue the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden if it finalizes a rule forcing gender ideology on foster parents. Skrmetti laid out the legal arguments against the rule in a conversation Wednesday with “The Daily Signal Podcast.” “This […]
This is the third in a three-part series on the movement for religious freedom in the U.S. legal system today. Check out the first part about how Christians who refuse to take a COVID-19 vaccine face “medical death row” here and the second part about the “rise of global censorship” here. NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Mike Farris, general […]
Watch now as parents, students, experts, and everyday citizens hold our state government and the RI Department of Health accountable for their indefensible actions during the pandemic.
This is the second in a three-part series on the movement for religious freedom in the U.S. legal system today. Check out the first part about how Christians who refuse to take a COVID-19 vaccine face “medical death row” here. NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Ryan Bangert, senior vice president at the religious freedom law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, […]
This is the first in a three-part series on the movement for religious freedom in the U.S. legal system today. Stay tuned for the next two installments. NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, represents Americans in religious freedom cases who have been turned away from hospitals because they refuse to take a […]
Originally published by the Providence Journal, March 10. 2024 as: Time for RI to drop use of California’s unattainable emissions mandate by Mike Stenhouse Guest columnist Ocean State lawmakers should follow the lead of the Biden administration and Connecticut and reconsider Rhode Island’s commitment to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and its costly and […]
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Christian employees can raise religious freedom complaints against mandated diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings if those DEI trainings force an ideology on them or make them less able to live out their faith, a prominent religious liberty lawyer tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.” “There’s a lot of push for diversity initiatives and things like […]
Editor’s note: This is the third podcast interview in a series on transgender phenomena, science, and the potential for medical malpractice lawsuits. Check out the first interview on rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the second interview on how mental health professionals divide parents and kids. Medical malpractice lawsuits on behalf of detransitioners harmed by experimental treatments […]
California Chamber of Commerce sues to block state laws mandating emissions reporting and climate risk disclosures, citing First Amendment violations. The lawsuit challenges SB 261 and SB 253 for compelling inaccurate statements and imposing disproportionate burdens on businesses, raising concerns over potential impacts on small enterprises.
As follow-up to the December 12 settlement terms that were agreed to by all parties in the judge’s chambers, an official “Dismissal Stipulation” was filed today in Rhode Island’s Superior Court in the Southwell-vs-McKee case, with requisite signatures from all parties.
On Tuesday, over three dozen parent plaintiffs celebrated a rare judicial victory against Covid-19 pandemic tyranny in their historic school mask mandate lawsuit against the State of RI and the RI Department of Health (RIDOH). In a private conference in the judge’s chambers, all parties agreed to a settlement that will have near- and long-term […]
President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at restricting U.S. investment in certain Chinese high-tech, including artificial intelligence, microelectronics and semiconductors, and quantum information technologies. Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., however, thinks “it’s a little late.” “China has been stealing our technology for decades,” says Green, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. […]
A proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule that “would limit tailpipe emissions so that in order to comply, auto companies would have to sell 60% of new vehicles as electric by 2030” would adversely affect the safety of cars. So says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment. (The Daily […]
Projections for the regulation say that it would put more than half of American drivers out of gas cars and into electric vehicles.
An estimated 13,000 illegal aliens are expected to cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day beginning Thursday. That’s more than double the daily average in March. This expected spike in the number of migrants crossing the border illegally is the direct result of the end of Title 42, a public health measure set in place under […]
A settlement based on suggested guidelines put forth by Judge Jeffrey Lanphear of the Rhode Island Superior Court was rejected this morning by the State of Rhode Island after a behind-closed-doors meeting in chambers at the state courthouse. The plaintiffs were willing to accept the settlement, which would have effectively ended the Southwell v. McKee […]
The clock is ticking on America’s debt. “You cannot spend yourself into oblivion like this country’s been doing,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., says, adding that Republicans are “going to tackle it head-on.” America has reached its current debt ceiling of $31.4 trillion, and Treasury’s extraordinary measures will likely be able to extend current federal spending […]