RUTHFULLY YOURS

Chief Justice John Roberts may have salvaged ObamaCare, but lower courts are proving to be more skeptical of executive overreach. On Friday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Water Rule on grounds that it probably exceeds the agency’s legal authority.

The EPA rule, issued in May, extends federal jurisdiction over tens of millions of acres of private land that had been regulated by the states. In August a federal judge in North Dakota issued a preliminary injunction in 13 of the 31 states that have sued to block the rule, and the Sixth Circuit has now echoed that legal reasoning by enjoining the rule nationwide.

Ohio, Michigan and 16 other states challenged the rule, and a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit ruled two to one that the “petitioners have demonstrated a substantial possibility of success on the merits of their claims” and that a stay is needed to silence “the whirlwind of confusion that springs from the uncertainty” about the rule’s requirements.

http://www.openthebooks.com/.

Our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report is 40 pages and contains the hard facts of agency spending since 2000. Here’s a selection of findings…

ANSWERING FIVE QUESTIONS

1. If the EPA was one of the fifty states, where would it rank on annual budget? Last year, EPA would rank 42nd of the fifty states. In the last four years, EPA would rank as high as 38th.

2. If the EPA were a private law firm, where would it rank nationally? Last year, the 1,020 lawyers would rank EPA 14th largest in the country. In the last four years, it would rank as high as 11th.

3. If the EPA were a private foundation, where would it rank nationally? Ranked #1 – just since the year 2000, EPA has engaged in grant-making of over $72 billion. That’s twice as large as the total assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and 20X the distributed grants!

4. What percentage of EPA employees received a performance bonus last year? Nearly 80% of all EPA employees received a bonus in FY2014. Furthermore, 70% of the workforce makes over $100,000 per year.

5. Why are the EPA “Special Agents” equipped with military-style weapons? The EPA checkbook discloses purchases of millions of dollars spent on “guns and ammunition up to 300MM,” “camouflage and other deceptive equipment,” “night vision,” “unmanned aircraft,” “radar,” “body armor,” “surveillance equipment,” “mobile GPS monitors,” and “joint projects with Home Land Security,” and much more…

Keep Minimum Sentencing, to Discourage Criminals
‘I know you lied in your testimony, but I understand why you believed you had to do it.”

If there was an audible sound in the courtroom after these words left the lips of the sentencing judge, it was my jaw caroming off the floor. I was a young prosecutor and it was the mid Eighties, before federal sentencing reforms substituted the public’s sensibilities for the judges’ in the matter of serious crime.

The defendant had been convicted of selling cocaine, an offense he compounded by perjuring himself in testimony so absurd that even my novice cross-examiner’s skills were enough to expose it. The judge was a notoriously defendant-friendly sentencer, but even jurists of that bent of mind do not like having their intelligence insulted: When a serious felony was complemented by blatant lying under oath, a serious jail sentence was in order.

But not this time. To my dismay, the judge shrugged his shoulders and did what lots of judges did in those days, and what Washington’s bipartisan political class seems to want them to start doing again: He walked the defendant out the door.

Elizabeth Warren recently drove out a think-tank scholar for having the nerve to report that a new federal regulation could cost billions, but the progressive censor movement is broad and growing. Advocates of climate regulation are urging the Obama Administration to investigate people who don’t share their views.

Last month George Mason Professor Jagadish Shukla and 19 others signed a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House science adviser John Holdren urging punishment for climate dissenters. “One additional tool—recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse—is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change,” they wrote.

In other words, they want the feds to use a law created to prosecute the mafia against lawful businesses and scientists. In a May op-ed in the Washington Post, Mr. Whitehouse specifically cited Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has published politically inconvenient research on changes in solar radiation.

Rioting at this weekend’s Washington, D.C. gripe-fest celebrating the 20th anniversary of the endlessly hyped, misnamed Million Man March, seems like a definite possibility.

Just this week 12 people were arrested in Hartford, Conn., for disorderly conduct after blocking traffic and access to the University of Hartford as they chanted “Black Lives Matter!” After demonstrators refused to stop sitting and standing in the road, they were arrested.

While protest-related arrests aren’t necessarily cause for much concern, they are just the tip of the iceberg. As Breitbart News reports

Like many Democrat-run cities across the country, Hartford experienced a spike in murders this past summer following the “uprisings” in Ferguson [Missouri] and Baltimore [Maryland] and attacks of police officers by Black Lives Matter activists. As of August, Hartford had the highest homicide rate of any New England city.

Rep. Murphy is a a psychologist in the Navy Reserve Medical Service Corps. And just for the record, he rates a minus 3 from the Arab American Institute for his strong support for Israel….rsk
The federal bureaucracy is anti-patient, anti-family and anti-medical care. Reform is essential.

These past few months have brimmed with tragedy. Americans are struggling to make sense of horrific acts of mass violence like the August shooting on live television in Roanoke, Va., and last week’s college campus shooting in Roseburg, Ore.

We all know how this plays out in Congress: a moment of silence on the House floor and a fraternal feeling of melancholy when the flag over the Capitol is lowered to half-staff. But that moment of silence will not heal the hearts of those who lost a loved one, and it will not stop the next tragedy. Here and now we need action; we need real change.

That’s why I’ve authored the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. The bill focuses resources and reform where they are most needed: to foster evidence-based care, fix the shortage of psychiatric hospital beds, empower patients and caregivers under HIPAA privacy laws, and help patients get treatment well before their illness spirals into crisis.

Kevin McCarthy unexpectedly withdrew from the House speaker’s race on Thursday, a casualty of a fractured Republican conference. The Californian didn’t do much to inspire confidence last week when he suggested that the House Benghazi committee had been designed to attack Hillary Clinton.

One pity of the McCarthy comments is that they tainted the committee’s work with politics. The bigger pity is that they are dead wrong. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy is 18 months into the committee that the House purpose-built to investigate the 2012 terrorist assault in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. His Benghazi investigation has been a model of seriousness, professionalism and discreetness.

The statistics alone bear this out. The committee has so far reviewed 50,000 new pages of documents. Less than 5% have anything to do with Mrs. Clinton’s work as secretary of state. It has interviewed 51 witnesses. Forty-one of those were brand-new—no committee had bothered to speak with them before, though seven were eyewitnesses to the attack.

Are you embarrassed by the reasons why we have the right to keep and bear firearms? Democrats think you are and, in this, they could not be more right.

That is why last week’s mass-murder shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College has led to the same tired political act we witness each time a gun tragedy or atrocity occurs: The shooting is politicized by the Left to advance gun restrictions; the timely and false suggestion is made that gun crime is on the rise (it has actually decreased dramatically in the last generation); regulatory proposals are advanced that would have had little or no chance of preventing the just-occurred shootings; gun-rights advocates point out the flaws in both the proposals and the premise that guns cause more violence than they create; and we have a stalemate in the gun policy debate while ignoring mental illness (the wayward policies on which contribute more to mass-shootings than does the availability of firearms).

Or, as Rahm Emanuel famously or notoriously said when he was in the Obama administration: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” (Winston Churchill is alleged to have said it first, however, when discussing how modern governments create their own crises to expand power, and also about how one can personally face a crisis and be strengthened by the experience – quite the opposite of what Emanuel meant.)

Now, I wouldn’t know an Assyrian if I stood next to him in a supermarket checkout line. If he were speaking a foreign tongue with his companion, I wouldn’t necessarily know that it was in Farsi or Iraqi or ancient Assyrian or Catalon. Frankly, I know little or nothing about Ancient Assyria or Assyrian culture. I know that Obama’s grand plan for populating the U.S. with “refugees” basically hostile to individual rights and the U.S. Constitution does not include admitting swarms of individuals who are true refugees from tyranny and poverty who seek the security of a civilized country governed by the rule of law and not of men. He prefers to bring in Muslims who come here as part of a “Grand Jihad” to conquer the country by settling in it. It’s a strategy discussed in at least two of my recent Rule of Reason columns, “Just Do It, Parts One and Two.” See Europe for the dire and wholly predictable consequences of the Muslim invasion of a Western country.