RUTHFULLY YOURS

When President Obama stages a photo op to publicize signing a measure he claims will “help” American workers, you can be almost certain that “unintended consequences” will outweigh ay intended benefits. Lacking even an elementary understanding of how a market economy works, he only makes things worse.

In an effort to avoid the Obamacare mandate, many companies reduced workers to fewer than 30 hours per week. This reduction of employees to part-time status continues to cause endless difficulties. Employees have fewer hours and less income than they want, and employers have a harder time staffing their companies. But the Obama administration continues to expand its grip on all aspects of American life.

In 2014, the Labor Department proposed that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, about five million U.S. workers [would be] newly eligible for overtime pay by more than doubling the salary threshold. This change is already being felt by many companies and now it will extend to colleges and universities.

How do businesses react? In some cases, “employers may attempt to convert these workers to an hourly wage, lowering their pay in the process so that their total weekly compensation, including overtime, remains constant. Other workers, whose salaries are just under the exemption threshold (expected to be $970/week in 2016), might see a small bump in their weekly pay to raise them above the new threshold.”

Some employers are apt to restrict workers to 40 hours per week in order to reduce overtime costs. Since the cost of compensation for regular (non-overtime) work should not change significantly as a result of these rules, employers would have an incentive to hire more part-time or full-time employees to make up for the lost overtime hours. Furthermore, because of the “duties test” managers may “be robbed of their flexibility” to assist with non-managerial parts of a job, thus impacting business operations.

I am certain that the headline for my article has you wondering if I may have lost my mind or am so determined to attract attention that I went “over the top.”

I can assure you that I am neither insane nor am I attempting to sensationalize my description of the events surrounding the alleged interaction between ICE agents and managers at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) in which the ICE agents were blocked from entering the USCIS facilities and denied access to the relevant immigration files.

USCIS is charged with providing a wide array of immigration benefits through the adjudications process, to aliens present in the United States. This includes providing aliens with political asylum, conferring lawful immigrant status upon aliens, and providing aliens with United States citizenship through the naturalization process.

In a manner of speaking, USCIS is the locksmith to America’s front door. An alien who has been granted lawful immigrant status and issued an Alien Registration Receipt Card (Green Card) or has become a United States citizen, may travel in and out of the United States at will.

Before we go any further, I want you to make an indelible note in your mind: USCIS currently adjudicates more than 6 million applications each and every year and would be charged with providing unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status should any sort of “immigration reform” program be enacted.

The 9/11 Commission made it clear that immigration benefits were the key to the 9/11 terrorist attack and, indeed, as I have noted in previous articles, terrorists such as Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square Bomber,” was naturalized roughly a year before he attempted to detonate a bomb concealed in an SUV parked at Times Square. The terrorist Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the murderous rampage at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, had been granted political asylum along with other family member and become lawful immigrants. In fact, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who, having been found guilty of committing numerous terror-related crimes and now sits on death row, became a naturalized America shortly before he participated in that savage attack.

Radical left-wingers want to free half the nation’s prisoners –including many violent offenders– a move that would cause an upsurge in crime rates for decades to come.

To many of today’s leftists criminality itself is an illegitimate concept. The mindless chanting of the slogan “no one is illegal” at open-borders rallies is part of the same school of thought.

Spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and bankrolled by radical speculator George Soros, the “end mass incarceration” movement wants to reduce the U.S. prison population by 50 percent within the next 10 to 15 years.

This specific push is called the “Cut50” project.

“We have the largest incarcerated population in the world despite the fact that we’re a democracy and that we value individual freedoms,” Alison Holcomb, national director of the ACLU Campaign to End Mass Incarceration told public radio station KUOW in Puget Sound, Wash.

“The overuse of our criminal justice system has resulted in expanding a caste, a second class of citizens that lose their right to vote, that won’t be able to get loans to go to school, that will probably have difficulty renting an apartment and that is not healthy for our society and it’s actually compromising our safety.”

Like Black Lives Matter supporter and Baltimore riot organizer DeRay Mckesson, Holcomb doesn’t care about property rights.

She doesn’t want thieves and robbers jailed even briefly. If someone steals property, “why is the response to put that person in a cage?” she said.

Holcomb’s comrades want to unleash more than a million inmates –including violent offenders– on American society.

This week’s Congressional hearings have shown that a series of government errors—local, state and federal—caused Flint’s lead-contaminated water. The state is fessing up, but the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to pretend it had nothing to do with it.

“Looking back on Flint, from day one, the state provided our regional office with confusing, incomplete and incorrect information,” EPA chief Gina McCarthy told Congress on Thursday. “As a result, EPA staff were unable to understand the potential scope of the lead problem until a year after the switch.” Far from being an innocent bystander in Flint, the EPA obfuscated and played down the scope of the lead problem.

As Ms. McCarthy noted, federal law gives states primary responsibility for enforcing drinking water rules, “but the EPA has oversight authority,” which includes setting maximum limits on contaminants and monitoring compliance. After a change in Washington, D.C.’s water treatment in 2001 resulted in dangerously high lead levels, Congress keelhauled the EPA for lax oversight.

In 2006 the Government Accountability Office concluded that “EPA’s data on water systems’ violations of testing and treatment requirements are questionable” and flagged “weaknesses in the regulatory framework” for the 1991 Lead and Copper Rule. Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards told Congress on Tuesday that the EPA for a decade has ignored recommendations to revise its lead rule to reflect best scientific practices.

The EPA also ignored warnings from its own staff. On Feb. 25, 2015—about 10 months after the city switched its water source to the corrosive Flint River—a parent called EPA Region 5 complaining about high lead levels. On March 19, an EPA official called the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality “expressing concern.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Merrick Garland, the appellate judge whom President Barack Obama has nominated to the Supreme Court, is a “moderate.” Of that we are assured by all the best people writing in all the usual venues: USA Today, Politico, the Los Angeles Times.

A moderate what?

The question may be in this instance a purely intellectual one. Garland could be the second coming of Solomon, and Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues would be looking to leave him locked up in the Senate basement until after the presidential elections, after which President Cruz might choose a better candidate; President Clinton, a much worse one (which would probably result in the lame-duck Senate working to confirm Garland); or President Trump, the devil knows what. The immediate case against advancing Garland’s nomination has nothing to do with Garland and everything to do with the Senate rousing itself to do its constitutional duty and check President Obama’s executive imperialism with such tools as it has at its disposal.

Carrie Severino and others have argued here that Garland is no judicial moderate, that he is a quiet left-wing activist well disposed to political efforts to undermine the Second Amendment. On that question, I defer judgment to our experts. But there is another question we ought to consider, which is whether there is any such thing as a judicial moderate.

If the expanse of your political imagination is roughly the dimensions of the New York Times, that may seem an absurd question. We hear all the time about “moderates” and “extremists” in the nation’s courts. A great deal of huffing and puffing, which no doubt dishevels the pages of a nearby copy of The Economist, insists upon the virtue and the needfulness of such moderation.

But the fundamental question that we must ask about Supreme Court nominees — all nominees to all benches, in fact — is not one of degree, which is the sort of question that the criterion of “moderateness” would apply. Instead, it is an either/or question: Does the law say what it means and mean what it says, or are judges empowered to graft private notions of justice from their own souls onto the law and the Constitution?

The late Kathryn Steinle, an innocent young woman who was gunned down and killed on a San Francisco street by an illegal alien with seven felonies and five deportations already on his resumé, is just one of many Americans who are lying in their graves today as a direct result of the “sanctuary” policies that have turned hundreds of U.S. cities into safe havens not only for lone-wolf sociopaths, but also for organized members of Latin American drug cartels, violent criminal gangs, and Islamic terrorist cells. Moreover, countless additional victims have had their psyches forever scarred, their bodies permanently damaged, and their lives all but destroyed for precisely the same senseless reason. The numbers are ugly: Of the 9,295 deportable aliens who were released after their arrest by sanctuary jurisdictions during the first eight months of 2014 alone, some 2,320 were subsequently re-arrested, on new criminal charges, soon thereafter. And before their initial release, 58% of those 9,295 aliens already had felony charges or convictions on their records, while another 37% had serious prior misdemeanor charges.

Sanctuary policies bar police and other public-sector employees in many U.S. cities from notifying the federal government about the presence of illegal aliens residing in their communities. As such, these policies defiantly give the proverbial middle finger to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA ) that Congress passed twenty years ago to require that local governments cooperate with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). More than 200 cities nationwide currently observe formal sanctuary policies that are written as resolutions, ordinances, or executive orders. Numerous other cities, meanwhile, have implemented similar policies on an informal basis, meaning that they are unwritten but nevertheless authorized by local government leaders and obeyed by city workers. All told, approximately 340 U.S. cities administer either formal or informal sanctuary policies today.

President Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland, who currently serves as Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The White House’s strategy was to pick someone whom they believe will be politically difficult for Republican senators to simply ignore – a stealth leftist recast as a “centrist.” The White House even created a new Twitter handle, @SCOTUSnom, to rev up activists seeking to pressure Senate Republicans into giving President Obama’s nominee, in Obama’s words, “a fair hearing and an up-or-down vote.”

The Democratic Party has lost no time making Obama’s nomination a highly charged partisan issue. All the Republicans want to do is to let the voters have their say this fall in choosing the next president before a lifetime position on the Supreme Court is filled. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, insists that lame duck Obama must have his way and change the entire ideological balance of the Supreme Court for possibly decades to come. “Frankly, I’ve grown a little sick of Republicans in Congress and their antics that have ranged from simply unproductive to downright offensive,” she complained in a letter to Democrats. Somehow, in Wasserman Schultz’s fevered imagination, it is “offensive” and “obstructionism” to defer to the will of the voters in a presidential election year before making such a consequential decision.

The left’s propaganda machine will argue that Judge Garland is a centrist whom all fair-minded senators should support. The New York Times is already quoting Utah Senator Orin Hatch, who said back in 2010, when Judge Garland was being considered to fill another Supreme Court vacancy, “I know Merrick Garland very well. He would be very well supported by all sides.”

However, Senator Hatch made that statement when President Obama was looking to replace Justice John Paul Stevens’ seat. President Obama refused to take Senator Hatch’s “advice” and rejected Judge Garland. He nominated the more left-wing Justice Elena Kagan instead, whom the Senate confirmed. The ideological balance of the Supreme Court was not in jeopardy with Elena Kagan’s confirmation because she was replacing one of the more left-wing justices at that time. Judge Garland today, by contrast, would be replacing the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court’s more conservative members.

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, chief judge on the federal DC circuit court of appeals, as a U.S. Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

Few would describe Garland a flaming liberal, in the mold of current Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, or former Justice John Paul Stevens. More likely a less flamboyant liberal, but liberal just the same, as his mentor Justice William Brennan, for whom Garland clerked in 1978-79.

Brennan was a champion of the First Amendment, perhaps Garland will follow suit.

Yet Brennan was both the ghostwriter for Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v Wade, and as at least one commentator asserts, the author of the three worst liberal SCOTUS opinions ever.

The most notorious was Plyler v Doe in 1982, ruling that children of illegal immigrants have a right to free public education. It is hard not to see Garland’s alignment here to Brennan.

On his own, Garland has gold-plated his liberal credentials by denying the 2nd Amendment, most egregiously voting to rehear a case in which a DC ban on handguns for personal protection was overturned.

President Obama on Wednesday formally nominated Merrick Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the U.S. Supreme Court. After studying his extensive record, the National Federation of Independent Business believes that Judge Garland would be a strong ally of the regulatory bureaucracy, big labor and trial lawyers. On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of members we represent, the NFIB opposes Judge Garland’s confirmation.

In NAHB v. EPA, Judge Garland in 2011 refused to consider a Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) claim by the National Association of Home Builders against the Environmental Protection Agency despite the law’s clear language. The RFA is one of the few federal statutes that explicitly require certain agencies to take into account the effect of their actions on small employers. Consider that the federal government itself estimates that the typical small business must spend $12,000 per worker annually just to be compliant with federal regulations. With Judge Garland on the Supreme Court, the EPA and other regulators would have a freer hand to impose even more costs on small businesses.

In another case, Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton, in 2003, Judge Garland argued that the Commerce Clause, which regulates economic activity between the states, applies to an animal species found in only one state and which has no economic value. In doing so he foreshadowed the creative reasoning that the Obama administration used to defend the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius. We fear that as a pivotal justice on the Supreme Court, Judge Garland could apply his elastic view of the Commerce Clause to almost anything else.

In two other cases involving the National Labor Relations Board, Judge Garland didn’t just side with the government—he argued that business owners should be personally liable for labor violations. In other words, their personal assets, including their homes and their savings, would be exposed to government penalties. What worries us is that Judge Garland has been consistently wrong on labor law. In fact, in 16 major labor decisions of Judge Garland’s that we examined, he ruled 16-0 in favor of the NLRB.

With more than 320,000 members, our organization is the country’s largest advocate for small-business owners. When we asked members on Wednesday whether they wanted to fight the Garland confirmation, the response was overwhelming. More than 90% urged us to take action. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court is meant to put Senate Republicans on the spot by elevating a well-qualified 63-year-old judge not known as a progressive firebrand. Republicans aren’t likely to fall into this trap, and Judge Garland’s jurisprudence suggests they’re right—with a caveat we’ll get to later.

The common wisdom is that Judge Garland’s nomination presents Republicans with the most moderate option they’ll get from a Democratic President. Maybe, maybe not. But we can’t think of a single issue that has divided the Court on which Mr. Garland would reliably vote differently from the four liberal Justices already on the bench.
Judge Garland’s 19-year tenure on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrates a reliable vote for progressive causes, with the arguable exception of criminal law. Two issues in particular make the point: the Second Amendment and deference to the growing power of the administrative state.

In 2007 Judge Garland voted for a rehearing en banc after a three-judge panel invalidated Washington D.C’s handgun ban. In 2000 Judge Garland was part of a three-judge panel that allowed the FBI to temporarily keep files with information from gun purchase background checks. In his dissent, Judge David Sentelle wrote that the Attorney General was not only making “an unauthorized power grab, but is taking action expressly forbidden by Congress.”

Judge Garland has also shown a pattern of over-deference to administrative agencies including the EPA. Scotusblog’s Tom Goldstein points out that Mr. Garland has strong views on agency deference and “in a dozen close cases in which the court divided, he sided with the agency every time.”

In an especially notable case, Judge Garland dissented when the D.C. Circuit struck down the EPA’s egregious regional haze rules (American Corn Growers v. EPA, 2002). Excessive judicial deference to regulators is especially dangerous now given the Obama Administration’s unrestrained use of executive power to rewrite statutes and dare Congress to stop it. CONTINUE AT SITE