Posts Tagged → capricious
The yaw in America’s orbit
Politically speaking, for a very long time, at least since 1865, America has had a pretty stable orbit. We circle a very dense, heavy, socially generous capitalistic economic core encased in a semi-plastic Constitution, and sometimes we swing out into the darkness of one far end of the solar system or another. But America has always returned back to the middle after those elliptical soirees, very often pulled back in by the power of the US Supreme Court. Because the US Supreme Court has always always always been the guardians of order and individual rights vs. a power-hungry government.
For all of its flaws and mistakes and legislating from the bench over the years, the US Supreme Court has always been kind of the center of America’s political system. A sort of brake sometimes, or a set of loose then taut reins other times, but always gently steering and operating with the deep respect of the governed. If the US Supreme Court said so, then it must have been concluded with the greatest of careful pondering, most Americans have always thought. However, with two decisions out of the Court this week, the Court’s central stabilizing arrangement is now at an open and notorious end.
The Court is yet one more government organ to now force-feed Americans their new role as subjects being ruled from the top down, no longer free citizens being governed by people we trust and approve of with the citizenry’s consent.
Our US Supreme Court is exerting great yaw upon the nation’s orbit. Which is to say the Court is not spinning or moving in a smooth track, and is therefore exerting destabilizing forces upon the body politic. Its latest decisions indicate a great deal of turmoil inside the Court and out. And the Court’s two recent decisions demonstrate that turmoil emanates from the Court purposefully engaging in overtly political acts, not based on wisdom and due process, but on purely short-term political desires.
The one decision is to dismiss the two main lawsuits from the stolen election of 2020, one from Pennsylvania and one from Texas. Back in December, the Court said that the US President or his assigns\ representatives did not have standing to make these cases before the Court. In other words, the sitting US President was not important enough to argue his case before the Court, which is a ridiculous position on its face. And now the Court has said the two cases are moot because the question has passed with the January 20th swearing in of corrupt fraud Joe Biden. In other words, The People can’t win either way with this Court. In no way was the Court going to hear these critically important cases, because the evidence of wrongdoing to steal the 2020 election is overwhelming. The Court wants to keep a lid on all that, Constitutional procedure and government credibility be damned.
The second decision is to grant New York politicians access to President Trump’s tax returns. This is something that has never happened before to any president or ex-president, and it is part of an ongoing public effort by the political establishment to utterly destroy President Donald Trump, both in and out of office, and his supporters. Like all of the other political decisions made in recent months, the precedent this decision sets can and will swing both ways. As I write this, some enterprising DA in East Succotash America is looking at ways to get Barack Hussein Obama’s tax returns, and Joe Biden’s, too, and to use them to pursue these two criminals to the ends of the earth.
Oh, the precedents that are being set!
One can picture in the mind’s eye the formerly off-stage narrator suddenly forcefully step forth onto the stage and address the audience directly for dramatic effect:
“But the blade cuts both ways! But such is the single-minded hatred for anti-establishment Trump held by the political establishment that they are blinded by what self-destructive forces their decisions are setting in motion. America’s orbit yaws this way and that, piloted as it is by blind hatred and ambition…”
No nation run on the concept of self-rule like America can withstand such open and notorious purposefully arbitrary and capricious decision making as we are witnessing from the US Supreme Court. Their decisions are disconnected from every law, custom, norm, and Constitutional principle that anchors American government to the nation’s people. Arbitrary and capricious decision making do not jibe with democratic self-rule; one must prevail over the other. One was created to stop the other. They are mutually exclusive, and yet the Court demands that we accept arbitrary and capricious as the new norm.
The US Supreme Court is willfully throwing its integrity and credibility overboard, and becoming yet another failed American institution seeking to simply rule the masses with brute force.
Despite housing the supposed greatest American political historians, the Court seems to intentionally kick sand in the face of The People. Even as The People are gathering their pitchforks and torches, these blind political elites deliberately mis-steer a path of self-government that yaws this way and that, moving America off course by design, throwing it off of its Constitutional orbit, deviating from the straight and just trajectory America has been on for 244 years. As an object yaws in its orbit, it becomes destabilized and eventually thrown off course forever. In nautical and aeronautical terms, America is now beginning to spin out of control, going off its rocker, going off course.
These dramatic moments are the powerful stuff of dramatic plays, told to Western audiences for at least three thousand years to teach pointed lessons from past mistakes, for a reason. And so one must ask, Whose skull will Hamlet II hold in the eventually inevitable tragic play that will be done years hence to describe the obviously avoidable downfall of the first American republic?
[Yaw: To swerve off course momentarily or temporarily; to move unsteadily; weave; to deviate temporarily from a straight course. If a ship or plane yaws too much, its deviations will become permanent and fatal to its enterprise]
SB 619 captures tug of war between big government and the citizenry
SB 619 is PA state senator Gene Yaw’s fix to a problem that should not even exist. And yet, this bill is being greeted by so-called environmental advocates as some sort of “attack” on environmental quality and environmental protection.
Senate Bill 619 is about one simple thing: Making Pennsylvania state government regulators spell out exactly what is, and what is not, an environmental spill that is so bad that it contaminates waterways and is a violation of our state “clean streams” law.
You would think that in late 2019, 243 years after the founding of America, all state governments would be run by responsible adults who are committed to the wellbeing of their fellow citizens first and foremost. A commitment like that would first and foremost be to the rule of law and the due process rights that undergird and frame everything that is American representative government. Simply put, the government cannot willy nilly decide for itself, based on ambiguous, general, opaque, undefined, arbitrary standards, what is an environmental contamination, and what is not an environmental contamination.
In representative government, We, The People are entitled to know our boundaries, where the borders are to our behavior, and where the government gets to step in and correct us. This understanding keeps us from making decisions in good faith that end up getting us entangled with government enforcers who hit us with fines and penalties for making an incorrect decision.
Presently, and unbelievably, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has no clearly defined standards for what qualifies as a reportable spill and contamination into a waterway. PA DEP’s entire standard is, get this, for real: “We will know it when we see it.”
Folks, I am not exaggerating, I am not making this up. This is how much infinite latitude the state government has now and wants to maintain. This means that literally every time something – a cup of coffee, a can of paint, a bucket of mine sludge, or any miniscule part thereof – falls from its original container into the environment, and into or next to a waterway, it must be reported to PA DEP. And PA DEP reserves the right to fine whoever is responsible, irrespective of whether or not that spill involved anything dangerous, toxic, or at such a small dilution that it is de minimus in its effect.
In practice, this means that PA DEP both chases its tail going after ridiculously unimportant “spills” that pose no threat to anything, which underserves the citizenry who underwrite PA DEP’s budget, and that the agency also holds a huge arbitrary hammer over the head of every single citizen, contractor, and industrial or commercial operator in or passing through the Commonwealth. While being arbitrary is bad enough, reports from the field – you know, the little people who actually work outside getting stuff done for the rest of us consumers – is that plenty of PA DEP staff use that arbitrary standard in capricious ways. These PA DEP staff are, simply put, empowered to be vindictive and petty little tyrants whenever they want to be.
To their shame, the opponents of SB 619 are acting as if the bill is some sort of assault on environmental quality, when it is not, not even close. The PA Fish & Boat Commission is actually on record opposing SB 619 because it allows for “interpretation” in the law. This is embarrassingly bad government to say things like this. Needless to say, the private sector opponents of SB 619 say even worse and less accurate things than the PFBC has written.
Can you imagine something so horrid as there being two sides to a story, some “interpretation” about what happened, and not having just one omnipotent government agency position, take it or take it, because you can’t leave it, because the government agency has 100% of the say in what happened, and you can’t figure it out until some government employee tells you? Is it really so terrible to rein in our government agencies and require them to live by defined standards like the rest of us have to live? Like our Federal and State Constitutions require? Like a whole bunch of other states already have?
SB 619 simply asks PA DEP to establish criteria and standards so that the citizenry and the industries they work in can know when they are following the law, and when they are not. It asks government employees to live by the rules everyone else must live by. It asks government to not engage in arbitrary and capricious behavior, which undermines everything our Republic and our Commonwealth are about. You know, that liberty and freedom stuff that seems so insignificant to the self-appointed guardians of environmental quality. One thing is clear: My fellow environmental professionals may care about the environment, but they do not care about democracy or good government.
This bill is not about environmental quality, it is about democracy, the role of government, good government, government transparency and accountability, and limits on government power. It represents the tug of war going on nationwide between people who want unfettered big government power, and those of us who want government to live within the Constitutional boundaries everyone else lives in.
SB 619 needs to be implemented now.
(c) 2006 Bonnie Jacobs