Category Archives: Law

Business, Economics, History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Don’t Stop With Paris

9 Comments

Andy McCarthy says it’s time to return to constitutional government.

What a concept.

[Update a few minutes later]

I hadn’t realized that Nixon had signed that abominable “Treaty on Treaties”:

President Trump is taking a significant step in removing the United States from the Paris agreement. But the step should not be significant, or politically fraught, at all. President Obama’s eleventh-hour consent to the agreement’s terms should have been nothing more consequential than symbolic pom-pom waving at his fellow climate alarmists. It should have had no legal ramifications.

Think, moreover, of how badly the treaty on treaties betrays our constitutional system, which is based on representative government that is accountable to the people. The Constitution’s treaty process is designed to be a presumption against international entanglements. Unless two-thirds of senators are convinced than an agreement between or among countries is truly in the national interests of the United States — not of some “progressive” conception of global stability, but of our people’s interests — the agreement will not be ratified, and therefore should be deemed null and void.

He was a terrible president, though not as bad as Humphrey or McGovern would have been.

[Late-afternoon update]

The outrage over Trump’s decision to withdraw is like Groundhog Day.

[Friday-morning update]

Why the Paris Agreement is useless, in one graph.

[Update mid-morning]

Trump blocks the first of Obama’s three authoritarianisms. It’s going to be a lot harder to undo the Iran disaster.

[Update a few minutes later]

The sound and fury of Trump’s Paris pull out:

this wasn’t about measurable change, it was about optics, pure and simple.

Domestically, Trump just fulfilled a campaign promise and mollified many in his base who might have been concerned about his steadfast commitment to scuttling ‘globalist’ international treaties. He stuck it to the Left, and simultaneously dismantled the last important piece of Obama’s green legacy. (At this point, President Obama has precious few lasting environmental policy successes to point to from his time in office. That’s an inherent problem with governing by the executive action, as Obama chose to do. Of course, there’s a bright side to that fact for greens: Trump is also unlikely to make a large impact on environmental policy through Congress, so his legacy on that front should have a similarly short shelf life.)

Internationally, Trump has flipped the bird to world. Developing countries will be gnashing their teeth at the thought of America backing out its financial commitments. Don’t be surprised to see a kind of domino effect, with leaders in the developing world jumping ship now that the cash flow promised them through the GCF could be drying up. As for the richer countries, they will see it as something akin to green treason.

China may try to exploit the opening, and talk a big game about joining the EU in taking on a climate leadership role. If this comes to pass, understand that it will be nothing more than posturing. China is far and away the global leader in greenhouse gas emissions, and for all of the EU’s stern tone and finger wagging on climate change, the bloc’s latest data show that its emissions actually increased 0.5 percent in 2015. Contrast that with the United States, which saw emissions drop a whopping 3 percent last year as a result of the continuing (shale-enabled) transition from coal to natural gas.

And that gets us to the heart of the issue. One’s opinion of the new climate course Trump just charted for America will ultimately depend on how much faith one puts in climate diplomacy as the holy grail for addressing climate change. The truth is, climate diplomacy has always been about preening, posturing, and moralizing—about optics above all else. What happened today was also all about optics (intentionally so) and that’s why greens committed to finding “diplomatic” solutions are pulling their hair out today.

But let’s not forget that Paris was a next-to-worthless agreement, and U.S. climate policy is going to look very much the same without it as it would have if Trump had announced a decision to stick to the deal. America’s real climate impacts will be determined by how quickly we can transition to a more energy efficient information economy and, more importantly, by our ability to develop and adopt new technologies (the pairing of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling being the most important example of the past decade). Paris had nothing to do with any of that.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Violent Left

4 Comments

They’re shocked that we’re starting to hate them back:

Cue the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism whose obsolete members were shocked to find themselves left behind by the masses to whom these geeks’ sinecures were not the most important objective of the movement. This is where they sniff, “We’re better than that,” and one has to ask ,“Who’s we?” Because, by nature, people are not better than that. They are not designed to sit back and take it while they are abused, condescended to, and told by a classless ruling class that there are now two sets of rules and – guess what? –the old rules are only going to be enforced against them.

We don’t like the new rules – I’d sure prefer a society where no one was getting attacked, having walked through the ruins of a country that took that path – but we normals didn’t choose the new rules. The left did. It gave us Ferguson, Middlebury College, Berkeley, and “Punch a Nazi” – which, conveniently for the left, translates as “punch normals.” And many of us have had personal experiences with this New Hate – jobs lost, hassles, and worse. Some scumbags at an anti-Trump rally attacked my friend and horribly injured his dog. His freaking dog.

So when we start to adopt their rules, they’re shocked? Have they ever met human beings before? It’s not a surprise. It’s inevitable.

It won’t end well for them if they continue down this road, because we have the guns.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Biggest Anti-Trump Concern

19 Comments

What if there’s no scandal?

I have to say, though, that Trump hasn’t been helping himself in making it appear that’s the case.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The case for dumping Trump lies with his supporters.

Yup. There are many Republicans on the Hill who would love to replace Trump with Pence, but they won’t do so until they have some sense that it wouldn’t result in riots from his die-hard fans. His approval will have to get a lot lower to make it possible. Impeachment is not a legal, but political act.

[Update a while later]

It’s like waiting for Godot: When does the evidence for collusion arrive?

[Late-morning update]

Comey’s actions don’t show any evidence of Trump “obstruction.” And Kurt Schichter writes that is a coup against our right to govern ourselves.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Trump And Russia

15 Comments

Why it’s not Watergate redux.

The overreaction to this, from people like Larry Tribe, has been hyperbolic. I’ve been having some arguments on Twitter with people, including Bob Zubrin (who is the Never Trumper’s Never Trumper), on the roles and responsibilities of the branches of government and of the federal workforce. Bob thinks that someone should disobey (or even countermand) a presidential order that they consider illegal, and somehow still keep their job. My position is that while no one is required to break the law or violate the Constitution, they are not the law unto themselves. Employees of the executive branch report ultimately to the president, and are accountable to him or her. The president is accountable either to the states in an election, or to the Congress, who can impeach and remove him. There is nothing in the Constitution about insubordination to the White House being a check on executive power, and to allow it would be to remove the unelected employees of the executive branch from any accountability to any one at all, giving us a tyranny of the bureaucracy. I don’t think that Bob has fully thought this through. I’m sure that Madison et al would never have intended this.

[Afternoon update]

I agree with Ben Sasse:

Sasse also emphasized the importance of three separate, co-equal branches of government, including ensuring the Justice Department is “very, very insulated from partisan politics.”

“We have three branches of government, not one, not 17, right? And so you need to have investigative and prosecutorial functions be in the Article II branch of government. They need to be in the executive branch, but there should be lots of insulation from the career civil servants and the leadership of the Justice Department from political decision-making at the White House,” he said.

It would help if we had an educational system that actually taught about the Constitution. And a president who had read it.