RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/an_out_of_control_administrative_state_turns_a_parking_lot_into_a_mine.html

Between the law and the nitty-gritty of its implementation stands the diabolical bureaucracy — without constitutional authority but with seemingly unquestionable powers to frame rules and regulations.  Sometimes, bureaucratic decisions are downright absurd — such as, most recently, designating a parking lot a coal mine!

But before we get to how the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) wrested jurisdiction over a parking lot and ludicrously holds on despite legal reversals, let us run through some examples of arbitrary administrative overreach, an enduring problem over the last few decades:

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) attempted to expand the definition of “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act to include wetlands on residential property. As a result, a landowner in Idaho was prevented from building a modest home on his property for 17 years until the Supreme Court ruled in his favor last year (Sackett v. EPA).
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) randomly decided that fishing operators should transport, house, and pay the salaries of federal inspectors who accompany them on trips to monitor compliance with fishing rules.  Previously, the NMFS itself bore those costs, as would be reasonable.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) weaponized the Antiquities Act to increase the regulatory burden on ranchers and farmers, hinder normal agricultural operations, and seize land.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) overstepped its bounds by arbitrarily banning a popular tourist activity — swimming with dolphins — citing disturbances to dolphins and their habitats.

The latest victim to raise a voice against such administrative overreach is KC Transport, Inc., a family-owned company based in Virginia and West Virginia.  The company parks, maintains, and repairs trucks; some occasionally haul coal.

In 2019, an MSHA inspector visited the company’s facility in Emmett, West Virginia, and cited the company for repairing two trucks without using blocks to secure the wheels. The inspector claimed that the company’s sporadic coal hauling brought it under MSHA’s jurisdiction and declared that the trucks and the parking lot constituted a coal mine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for more than three hours of live questions by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The day before the hearing, on Sunday, the New York Post broke our latest “follow the money” investigation into NIH third-party royalties.

Our auditors found that during the pandemic, $710 million in secret third-party royalties enriched the National Institutes of Health – with 97-percent of the payments flowing into Fauci’s institute, National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/01/after-the-republic-redux/

In the wake of Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts related to the effort to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign, the former president’s supporters lamented what they saw as “the end of the republic.” The United States, as we have always known, is over, they insisted. The formerly fairest and most envied justice system in the world has been irredeemably corrupted. What Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” is “finished,” they said, likely never to recover. Tucker Carlson, the unofficial spokesman of the MAGA movement, took to Twitter/X to intone: “Import the Third World, become the Third World. That’s what we just saw…. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”

While one might sympathize with their frustration and concur with their infuriation at the political nature of Trump’s trial and the conviction, objectively, most of this lamentation is wildly misdirected. The trial and conviction of Donald Trump by an overzealous and partisan prosecutor is NOT the “watershed moment” in American history that many on social media claimed. It does NOT mark the end of the nation as we knew it. It does NOT signify that the American republic is over and done with.

ALL of that happened almost an entire decade ago.

Whether one likes Donald Trump or not, the truth of the matter is that he has been the target of the American “regime” ever since he first announced his candidacy for the presidency. Trump may be all of the nasty, horrible, and grotesque things his detractors say he is—or he may not be. I’m here neither to defend nor condemn him. I am here, rather, to point out that whatever one thinks of him, his treatment at the hands of institutions that were constructed specifically to prevent such treatment is both egregious and, disturbingly, precedent-setting.